According to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), 6,290 individuals live in the Red Hook Houses, Brooklyn’s largest public housing development. This number accounts for every tenant whose name appears on one of the leases tied to the development’s 2,891 units.
On the other hand, the most recent census data, which comes from the 2013-2017 American Community Survey (ACS), shows that the Red Hook Houses – which constitute their own census tract – have 7,559 inhabitants. In comparison to NYCHA’s count, this figure represents a jump of 1,269.
In all likelihood, however, the ACS also lowballs the real population, as censuses routinely undercount black and Hispanic Americans, poor people, and renters. In 2012, the US Census Bureau estimated that the 2010 Census had omitted 2.1 percent of the nation’s black population, 1.5 percent of the Hispanic population, and 1.1 percent of renters.
For decades in New York, rent increases have significantly outpaced income growth, making life especially difficult for the city’s poorest residents, who, facing evictions and a dearth of affordable options for relocation, may move in with friends or relatives. NYCHA has not constructed new units since 1997.
“According to NYCHA, its developments have an overall population of about 400,000 residents. The Department of Sanitation estimates the number closer to 600,000, and other estimates go even higher,” NYCHA’s federal monitor, Bart Schwartz, wrote in a July report. In February, HUD regional administrator Lynne Patton drew skepticism when she insisted that, in fact, one million New Yorkers live in the city’s public housing, but NYCHA has long acknowledged a somewhat less extreme discrepancy between reality and the official tally.
In other words, some of NYCHA’s apartments are overcrowded, but as the agency struggles to sustain basic services like heat and gas, that may be the least of its problems. Besides, if the city’s landlord of last resort removed its unauthorized residents, where would they go, if not (in many cases) to the Department of Homeless Services?
Thanks to Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), a federal program that seeks to shift public housing to private management (and sometimes private ownership) in order to fund repairs without rent hikes, New York may soon begin to find out the answer to that question. RAD – operating locally under the name Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) – has so far effected six conversions of public housing campuses in New York City, with more nearing completion. In the longer term, NYCHA has committed 62,000 units – one third of its housing stock – to partial privatization.
The National Housing Law Project has reported that RAD has resulted in evictions owing to illegal rescreenings of authorized residents based on income and credit history. These unlawful evictions represent failures of government oversight, and NYCHA has vowed to protect its RAD tenants in accordance with program regulations.
It would not be unlawful, however, for RAD’s private developers to evict unauthorized residents (and the authorized residents who illegally harbor them) from converted NYCHA campuses. Indeed, it looks as though NYCHA may assist them in doing so.
The RAD conversion for Williamsburg’s Berry Street-South 9th Street development will take place before the end of the year. On November 20, two developers (Omni New York and Dabar Development Partners, who together will own 50 percent of the campus under RAD), two property management companies (Reliant Realty Services and Progressive Management of NY), and NYCHA held a meeting for Berry Street residents at the Williams Plaza Community Center.
No evictions, except for all the evictions
Robert Tesoriero, Director of Inspections and Central Office Operations in NYCHA’s Leased Housing Department, sought to allay the concerns of residents who had heard that RAD could lead to evictions, based on reports pertaining to NYCHA’s first RAD project at the Ocean Bay Apartments in Far Rockaway. While some media focused on the development’s significant capital improvements (in this case funded in large part by Hurricane Sandy recovery money from FEMA), other journalists soon noticed a spike in evictions, including Harry DiPrinzio of City Limits, who found 80 over a 26-month period: twice as many as the next highest NYCHA development on the list.
“They reported there were like 50 evictions,” Tesoriero said. “Those evictions – the majority, I’d say a good 90 percent – were because there were unauthorized household members or squatters or licensees or whatever you want to call it, or deceased tenants where there was no next of kin.”
Tesoriero urged Berry Street households with multiple family members to scrutinize their existing leases before the RAD conversion. “At each closing, we’re finding that families have unauthorized occupants in the households. Some of them are legit – they thought they added somebody, they thought management approved it – yet there’s no record showing that. So what I’m asking is to make sure you check with property management that everyone who’s supposed to be on your lease is on your lease. You want property management to confirm that, yes, I have three people on my lease, because when we convert, those records are coming over.”
RAD terminates NYCHA tenants’ Section 9 public housing leases, requiring them to enter into new contracts with the agency’s Section 8 project-based voucher program. The process functions as an audit of sorts. During the hand-off, the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development inspects each unit, while residents resubmit the annual income certifications that determine their rents and confirm the identities of all household members – even providing birth certificates if NYCHA has none on record. If an apartment turns out to have more inhabitants than it should, “we’re going to have questions for you,” Tesoriero warned. “If you don’t report it, it gets messy.”
Tesoriero acknowledged that, while NYCHA’s underfunded Section 9 program may not have the resources to hunt down unauthorized tenants, its more robust Section 8 program can and will. “Under Section 8 housing, my department, Leased Housing, has a fraud unit, and the fraud unit does do research on data. We have the means, with HUD, of going through various databases, so if we don’t know now, we’ll eventually find out.”
If Leased Housing fails to track down all of Section 8’s unauthorized tenants, RAD’s rightsizing process may serve to evict some of them by default. Following a RAD conversion, tenants who occupy apartments too big for their needs – for example, a single mom whose adult children have moved out of her three-bedroom home – will be transferred (whether they like it or not) to more appropriate units. In some cases, their overlarge apartments may house unauthorized residents who will lose their bedrooms as a result.
NYCHA’s bureaucracy can create hurdles for tenants who would like to add additional family members to their leases. According to Tesoriero, Section 8 will honor any earnest attempt that Section 9 – if it’d had enough time to process the application – would ultimately have approved. Other tenants, however, deliberately omit household members so that the additional income doesn’t count toward their rent, and they may face trouble under Section 8.
Who’s allowed to live at NYCHA?
But these aren’t the only reasons for unauthorized residents in NYCHA. For instance, parents have seen their children removed from their leases on account of criminal offenses, including marijuana-related misdemeanors.
NYCHA’s official policy of Permanent Exclusion applies not only to “major crimes such as murder, sex offenses, robbery, assault, drug dealing, and guns. Other than the limited federal requirements relating to convictions for sex offenses and the production of methamphetamine on public housing grounds, NYCHA is not governed by rigid rules that require it to pursue eviction or exclusion based on the type or level of criminal charge or any specific conduct; rather, NYCHA examines each case individually, including the nature and seriousness of the conduct, the extent of the individuals’ involvement, the danger the individual poses to the NYCHA community, whether there are any serious prior convictions, and whether there is any mitigating evidence.”
Permanent Exclusion does not require a criminal conviction or even an arrest. It relies on NYCHA administrators’ judgment. After a certain period of time or following participation in a rehabilitative program, banned tenants can apply to have their Permanent Exclusion rescinded.
Many illicit NYCHA residents, however, were never eligible for authorized tenancy on a permanent basis in the first place. This is true of all who move in with friends or distant family members.
NYCHA tenants in good standing can secure permanent occupancy rights – contingent on background checks – for their spouses, domestic partners, children, stepchildren, parents, stepparents, grandparents, grandchildren, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, mothers-in-law, and fathers-in-law, as long as doing so wouldn’t bring their household total to more than double the number of bedrooms in their unit. They cannot secure permanent occupancy rights for cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, or foster children. NYCHA does not guarantee succession rights to all authorized permanent occupants.
Louis Flores founded Fight for NYCHA, an anti-RAD group. “There are a lot of people who are seniors and retirees who live at NYCHA, and a lot of people have medical difficulties. They may have a relative or a friend living with them to provide them with care, so if people are being found to have an extra roommate, it could be because they’re actually a caregiver,” he said. “So if NYCHA is auditing people and their fraud unit is moving to evict people just because they have ‘unauthorized occupants,’ it seems to me unjust because there may be medical reasons or financial reasons why people have to double up or triple up.”
Flores shared an example: “We know of a case in Queens where there was a man who had severe medical problems, so much so that he couldn’t take care of himself, so his sister had to move in. Even though she tried to get on the lease, NYCHA refused to let her get on the lease, and when her brother died, NYCHA moved to evict her.”
The activist hopes to persuade NYCHA tenants of the dangers of RAD. “NYCHA comes and says, ‘We’re going to make these changes, and don’t worry.’ And then once all the damage is done, you find out that people were placed in danger because of the evictions that eventually come about as a result of the changes that NYCHA says people don’t have to worry about.”
