The settlement meant Mayor Bill de Blasio avoided the embarrassment of a complete management takeover of the city’s housing authority, the nation’s largest and oldest public housing system, home to more than 400,000 low-income New Yorkers.
But as part of the deal, the mayor accepted the appointment of a powerful federal monitor and committed the city to spending $2.2 billion over the next decade to repair the authority’s dilapidated buildings.
The agreement also will lead to the replacement of the authority’s interim chairman, Stanley Brezenoff, whom the mayor brought in last year to steer NYCHA after a lead paint scandal and the departure of the authority’s chairwoman.
De Blasio will now have to contend with the monitor for the remainder of his last term as he seeks to fulfill his promise to improve the lives of NYCHA residents. And for years going forward, the monitor, yet to be named, can hold the mayor and the city responsible for its failures to do so.
Ben Carson, the Housing and Urban Development secretary, traveled to New York on Thursday to announce the deal, which the parties were still scrambling to finalize minutes before a news conference.
Carson said the monitor, who will be paid by the city, would be named in a couple of weeks. One candidate said to be under consideration is Bart M. Schwartz, a former senior prosecutor under Rudy Giuliani when he was the U.S. attorney. Schwartz is now chairman of Guidepost Solutions, a security firm. He declined to comment.
Shortly after signing the agreement, de Blasio said, “Real changes are happening at NYCHA, and this plan will help them to happen faster.” He added that the negotiated settlement had “a whole host of tangible goals, on heat, vermin, lead, you name it.”
The deal marks a turning point on a thorny issue for de Blasio, who has overseen the housing authority for the past five years, and has made addressing affordable housing a central theme of his administration.
Under de Blasio, NYCHA became the subject of a federal investigation and came under fierce criticism for several controversies, including mishandled lead paint inspections and widespread heat outages.
The settlement was reached after intense and harried negotiations involving the de Blasio administration, NCYHA, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The deal comes two months after a judge overturned an earlier settlement and consent decree that was reached last year.
In rejecting that deal in November, Judge William H. Pauley III of U.S. District Court in Manhattan deplored the “breathtaking scope” of the squalid living conditions in the city’s public housing. The judge not only criticized the city for its mismanagement of the agency but said the federal government had abdicated its responsibilities.
As part of the new deal, the city would agree to invest an additional $1 billion in the authority’s dilapidated housing stock over the next four years and $200 million per year after that, the same commitment it had made in the earlier settlement that was rejected, the officials said.
Under the deal, Carson did not commit to provide additional money for NYCHA, which relies heavily on federal funds. Since 2001, NYCHA has seen its federal funding cut by more than $2.7 billion.
The deal establishes deadlines for NCYHA to remediate five hazards detailed in the government’s lawsuit last year — lead paint, mold, pest infestations, heating failures and inadequate elevators.
Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement Thursday that the new agreement goes beyond the previous settlement that the judge rejected because it provides “strict, enforceable standards that NYCHA must meet by particular deadlines for the five critical living conditions” his office had identified.
The agreement calls for the immediate remediation of lead paint in apartments with children under 6 years old and, over two decades, the complete abatement of all lead paint in NYCHA developments.
Since 2012, a total of 1,160 children under 18 living in public housing have been found to have elevated lead levels in their blood.
“NYCHA’s failure to provide decent, safe and sanitary housing is simply unacceptable and illegal,” Berman said.
Berman’s office said the agreement, which takes effect immediately and does not require court approval, resolves the government’s claims in its 2018 lawsuit against NCYHA, which will now be dismissed.
In the lawsuit, federal prosecutors had accused NYCHA of training its staff on how to mislead federal inspectors and of presenting false reports to the government about its compliance with lead-paint regulations.
The new agreement requires NYCHA to develop internal controls to prevent deceptive practices, like covering up hazardous conditions and performing substandard repairs.
Carson had given the city until Thursday to negotiate a new oversight plan. If the city failed to meet the deadline, Carson had threatened to declare the agency in “substantial default,” which could have paved the way for HUD to intervene. De Blasio repeatedly vowed to keep the agency under city control.
Recently, Brezenoff, the interim chairman of the authority who has been a public servant in city government since the Koch administration, has been looking to end his time at NYCHA. “I’ve been trying to get out of this job for months,” he said Thursday. He added that prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office “never liked me anyway.”
For decades, NYCHA was considered one of the best managed public housing agencies in the nation. It survived even as public housing projects in other cities were demolished or succumbed to crime, drugs and neglect in the ‘90s.
But federal funding cuts, mismanagement and an aging housing stock caused its decline. Now, the agency needs about $32 billion to make urgently needed repairs.
Had the federal government completely taken over, New York City would have joined a list of large cities, including Chicago and Philadelphia, whose public housing authorities were taken over by the federal government at some point in time.
HUD could have also placed the agency under the control of a court-appointed receiver, typically an individual or entity, that would have had the sweeping authority to demolish buildings, fire employees and rip apart NYCHA’s existing contracts.
But an intervention in New York City posed unique challenges: its mammoth housing stock of 176,000 apartments is bigger than the next 11 largest public housing systems combined.
On Thursday, around 50 people — activists, labor unions, and elected officials — gathered at the NYCHA headquarters in downtown Manhattan to rally against a HUD takeover.
“Moving forward, we need to make sure NYCHA is funded,” said Donald Nesbit, who grew up in public housing and runs District Council 37, New York City’s largest public employee union, which represents many NYCHA workers.
“A federal monitor is fine, but they have to actually understand what is going on in public housing,” he said. “And nobody knows better how to improve NYCHA than residents. They can’t monitor from D.C.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.