NYCHA Chair Olatoye, the author, at a NextGen meeting (via NYCHA on flickr)
Public housing has been an integral feature of New York City life since Fiorello La Guardia opened the doors of First Houses eighty years ago, and roughly five percent of the city's population lives in public housing today. As a landlord, NYCHA manages buildings, but our real service is to people— the 615,000 residents who live in our developments and our Section 8 voucher holders.
We are doing everything we can to ensure the long-term survival and health of public housing in New York City. This includes new, creative solutions to major challenges.
We face immense financial obstacles as NYCHA struggles to repair and maintain our buildings and grounds. We can no longer delay making difficult, critical choices about how we operate, how we are financed, and how we rebuild and rehabilitate our 328 developments. To avoid the fate of other housing authorities across the country, NYCHA must find innovative solutions to maintain and improve our properties.
Due in part to federal and state disinvestment, the city is investing more than ever to craft solutions that bring about real change. We are doing this because we recognize the simple truth that we have an ethical responsibility to provide and sustain affordable housing for our city's low-income populations.
Today, just 18 percent of the land on NYCHA's 328 developments is used to house residents. Using some of that land to develop new mixed-income housing can generate significant funds benefiting local and citywide NYCHA residents, as well as those in the surrounding community. We call these developments NextGen Neighborhoods because they provide the funding we need to create the safe, clean, connected communities that we envision in our ten-year strategic plan, NextGeneration NYCHA.
This isn't the first time NYCHA has proposed developing market-rate housing on our properties, but it is the first time resident engagement has been made integral to the process. And the first time an administration has pledged to ensure that just as many units of affordable housing are built as market rate housing.
This 50/50 model will ensure a significant percentage of the proceeds from the affordable and market-rate buildings will be provided to each development for residents to invest back into building new kitchens, fixing the root causes of leakage, and other priorities. The remaining funds will be funneled by NYCHA into making improvements across NYCHA's portfolio.
Our strategic plan aims to preserve this precious resource of public housing for the next generation of New Yorkers. NextGen Neighborhoods is just one of the fifteen initiatives we outlined in the plan to rebuild and repair our properties and sustain NYCHA for the long term.
[Related: Another Way of Looking at NYCHA Infill Development]
The funds we generate through NextGen Neighborhoods will be added to those generated from other strategies— such as our parking initiative, our commercial initiative, and our preservation initiative. None of these strategies work in a vacuum, they all work together as a comprehensive plan to get NYCHA's financial health in order, create more affordable housing, and invest in the Housing Authority and in the future of our city.
I've been clear that upon moving into this position, Mayor de Blasio charged me with the task of resetting the Authority's relationship with residents. We cannot do business as usual with our city's public housing, and expect to see substantive and lasting change.
Our new plan is not the infill proposal put forth by the previous administration— this is NYCHA working together with residents, with community members and advocates, and with elected officials to support the creation of mixed-income affordable housing on NYCHA property.
This is not privatization, but aggressive preservation— a strategy that is smart for residents and surrounding communities as well as NYCHA. We can generate money to repair and upgrade our developments while adding to the city's affordable housing stock, attracting new stores and services to neighborhoods, and producing income that can help NYCHA residents in other parts of New York. NYCHA will not compromise the rights of public housing tenants, unfairly evict tenants, or convert public housing units to market rate housing. We're in the business of housing people.
This is NYCHA moving forward, instead of maintaining the status quo. There is no better way to serve our residents.
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Shola Olatoye is Chair of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), landlord to over 600,000 residents of traditional public housing and Section 8 programs. She is on Twitter at @SholaOlatoye.
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(photo: @PTNY)
What do Manhattan's Riverbank State Park track, the playgrounds of P.S. 40, 100, 140, and 192, Clay Pit Ponds State Park, the Rockaway and Coney Island Boardwalks, and Battery Park all have in common?
All were established or built through funding from the national Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). Nearly all New Yorkers have benefitted in some way from the LWCF's innovative conservation projects.
For over 50 years, the LWCF has protected, renovated, updated, and improved New York's parks and greenspaces for the benefit of New Yorkers. This conservation fund is much more than a rural land purchasing program. The LWCF has funded approximately $44 million worth of projects in New York City alone over the past half century.
Despite the undeniable success of the LWCF, the fund will expire on September 30 if Congress does not pass legislation to reauthorize it. Over its entire history, the LWCF has never once lapsed in authorization. The 114th Congress should not allow a lapse in the LWCF to be a part of its legacy.
Established under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the LWCF began as an innovative way to acquire or develop recreational resources for a growing American population. Upon signing the bill (the same day he signed the Wilderness Act into law), President Johnson called the LWCF a responsible way to "acquire on a pay-as-you-go basis the outdoor recreation lands that tomorrow's Americans will require."
The LWCF has given New Yorkers city and school playgrounds, pools, park roads and restrooms, ballfields, and bandstands in all five boroughs. The LWCF's redevelopment of park and playground facilities maintains recreation infrastructure to ensure it is safe for all of New York's children.
LWCF funding has also allowed for the acquisition of new greenspaces – a significant challenge in a city as dense as New York. LWCF moneys funded the purchase of land that is now Roberto Clemente State Park in the Bronx, as well as the small but important floodplains of Udall's Cove and Ravine in Queens.
New parkland acquisitions like these ensure that New York City has green infrastructure that improves resiliency in the face of severe storms, floods, and rising sea levels.
The LWCF is rightly characterized as America's most important conservation program. The LWCF is unique in its flexibility and results, but more important it is unique in structure and purpose: it uses no taxpayer funds, but rather is funded through a small percentage of revenue from oil and gas leases that allow drilling of publicly-owned resources on the Outer Continental Shelf. The LWCF is a grand bargain between resource extraction and resource protection, struck on behalf of the American people, and one that they overwhelmingly support.
Reauthorizing the LWCF is a no-brainer for New Yorkers, since it costs them nothing. Continuing to fund the LWCF is a bipartisan issue that all New Yorkers can get behind. We can continue to fund our playgrounds, ballfields, and green infrastructure without reinventing the wheel legislatively. Congress simply needs to reauthorize the LWCF and allow it to begin a new half century of conservation success.
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by Robin Dropkin, Executive Director, Parks & Trails New York. On Twitter @PTNY.
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Commissioner Bratton (photo: @NYPDnews)
James Blake's treatment by NYPD officer James Frascatore was appalling, and only reinforces the need for substantive reforms that have yet to be acted on by Mayor de Blasio, Commissioner Bratton, and the New York City Council.
While the incident may have been shocking to some, it was unsurprising to those of us living in black and Latino neighborhoods throughout our city. And if it hadn't happened to a tennis celebrity with a Harvard pedigree, it may have never come to public light, with Officer Frascatore spared the same scrutiny.
For those of us working towards constructive changes that eliminate police abuse and brutality, James Blake was sadly just the latest incident of police brutality.
The reality is that some officers too often abuse the power they wield in communities. Whether it's excessive use of force, violation of basic rights, or disrespectful conduct, these transgressions occur on a regular basis.
Yet, the mayor and police commissioner have balked at addressing the issue of abusive policing head on with action, while paying some rhetorical service redirecting public attention from real accountability.
Neither their vague neighborhood-policing plan – without comprehensive community engagement – nor their commitment to provide new training to officers will address this systemic problem. Commissioner Bratton's latest announcement about enforcement of the NYPD's minor rules on officers also won't impact the failure to hold them accountable for violating their primary oath to protect and serve.
Until departmental policy and the fundamental nature of police-civilian encounters are changed, abuses will continue unchecked.
Beyond the New Yorkers, such as Eric Garner, who have been killed by police in an unjust or questionable manner during the two years of the de Blasio administration, many other troubling non-fatal incidents have come to light: the police officer who punched a teenager unconscious in Clinton Hill, the NYPD officer who shoved two women, one of whom was five-months pregnant, and the most recent piling on and punching of a man in a Brooklyn Target.
That's just a small sample of incidents known to the public.
The fact that Officer Frascatore is the subject of four lawsuits for excessive force during false arrests and five Civilian Complaint Review Board complaints in only four years in the department demonstrates that the problem isn't training or neighborhood policing; it's the lack of accountability for officers who conduct themselves in this way. Paid suspensions or moving someone around within the department is not enough.
Officer Daniel Pantaleo – who placed Eric Garner in a chokehold – similarly had provoked multiple lawsuits. As long as officers see no real consequence for conduct like this, we will not see change.
The problem is historic and systemic, which is why we called for Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bratton to implement zero tolerance for police brutality in our end of 2013 transition report, Safety & Civil Rights for All New Yorkers: The Mayor's First 100 Days. That would mean that there is no place in the NYPD for officers who brutalize civilians.
The fact that neither Frascatore nor any of the officers on the scene identified themselves as police or showed their badges speaks to a chronic problem that New Yorkers face when interacting with officers.
As Mr. Blake so aptly explained, had he actually defended himself from someone in plain clothes who never identified as law enforcement seemingly assaulting him, the incident could have escalated and he could have ended up seriously injured or worse.
There are solutions to these systemic problems. De Blasio and Bratton must get serious about police brutality by enacting a strict policy that removes officers who brutalize civilians from the department. The New York City Council must also pass the Right to Know Act, which would require officers to identify themselves to civilians and to explain the reason for law enforcement activity.
If Officer Frascatore had taken these simple steps, the whole despicable incident might have been avoided. And if these simple steps, or real consequences for not taking them, become law, other incidents like this can be avoided as well.
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Winston-Griffith is the executive director of Brooklyn Movement Center, which is a member of Communities United for Police Reform.
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