Bart Schwartz, the federal monitor overseeing the City Housing Authority under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s deal with the feds, stopped by for a sitdown this week. He convinced us he’s determined to be part of the solution — but left us still convinced that NYCHA is doomed without radical change.
That includes far better management as well as drastically improved work rules in its contracts with its unions. Absent that, even a fresh flood of cash won’t be enough.
Schwartz’s goal is deceptively simple: “For residents to have pride in where they live.”
To be fair, that’s already true for tenants in a handful of projects that happen to be well-run. (He mentioned one Staten Island development whose boiler dates to 1952, and still runs great, because its engineers go above and beyond to maintain it.)
But NYCHA’s central culture must change, as Schwartz puts, to move it from “management by crisis” to a “culture of long-term planning, transparency and accountability.” Happily, he reads new NYCHA chief Gregory Russ as sharing that goal — and also praises Deputy Mayor Vicki Been, de Blasio’s pointwoman for the agency.
Making it happen is another matter. As Nolan Hicks reported in Wednesday’s Post, newly public data show nearly 60,000 outstanding NYCHA work orders for water leaks and toxic mold.
And while the agency says its workers closed 40,859 work orders from May 1 to July 31, Schwartz noted in July that NYCHA’s definition of a “closed” work order often doesn’t mean a job is finished: One worker may fix a leak, but the hole in the wall can sit indefinitely awaiting a carpenter to repair it.
And Hicks reported that “NYCHA staffers canceled or closed another 28 percent of work orders without any work being done” in that three-month period.
The simple fact is that the agency still routinely announces goals and plans it has no possible way of fulfilling on time, and has no institutional way to accurately track even basic information. And, yes, it’s terrible at communicating honestly with tenants.
Schwartz hopes to help NYCHA deliver some tangible improvements soon — to give residents cause for hope, and workers reason to take more pride in their jobs.
It’s a sign of how bad things are that that’s an ambitious goal.