The agreement calls for the appointment of a powerful monitor and would lead to the eventual replacement of the authority’s interim chairman, who was appointed last year by Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Ben Carson, the HUD secretary, who had traveled to New York on Thursday to announce the deal, said, “I’m very excited about what we have agreed to here, because I think it sets a great precedent for what could be done around the country.”
Shortly after signing the agreement, de Blasio said, “Real changes are happening at NYCHA, and this plan will help them happen faster.” He added that the negotiated settlement had “a whole host of tangible goals, for heat, lead, vermin, you name it.”
The Trump administration stopped short of a full takeover, but 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 intense criticism for several controversies, including mishandled lead paint inspections and widespread heat outages.
The tentative settlement was reached after intense and harried negotiations involving the de Blasio administration, NYCHA, 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 federal judge overturned an earlier settlement and consent decree that was reached last year.
As part of the new deal, the city would also 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 voided, the officials said.
The deal would also establish deadlines by which NCYHA must remediate many of the hazards identified by the U.S. attorney’s office, which sued the authority last year and reached the original consent decree.
Federal prosecutors accused the agency of systemic misconduct, outright lies and cover-ups in its mismanagement of the complexes. The prosecutor’s office and city officials declined to comment Thursday.
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 and criticized the city for its mismanagement of the agency and the federal government for abdicating its responsibilities.
By striking a deal with Carson, de Blasio avoided the potential federal takeover of the nation’s largest and oldest public housing system, home to more than 400,000 low-income New Yorkers.
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, a Democrat who has made affordable housing a cornerstone of his platform, repeatedly vowed to keep the agency under city control.
NYCHA’s interim chairman, Stanley Brezenoff, a career public servant in city government since the Koch administration, had been de Blasio’s go-to fixer for troubled agencies throughout his tenure. In the last four years, he has served as chairman of the Board of Correction, which monitors city jails, and interim head of the city’s sprawling hospital system.
In April, de Blasio again turned to Brezenoff, 81, to steer NYCHA after a lead paint scandal and the departure of the authority’s chairwoman, Shola Olatoye. Brezenoff treated the job as temporary, but de Blasio insisted that he would stay as long as needed.
Brezenoff criticized the consent decree in the fall, saying he regretted signing it.
“I have concerns what could be a creeping monitorship that’s more in the operational mode as opposed to a monitor who monitors,” he said in October.
Recently, Brezenoff 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.”
On Wednesday evening, Lynne Patton, the Trump administration’s appointed HUD official in New York, said on Twitter that the announcement would be “great news” for residents of NYCHA. In a dig at de Blasio she added, “However, whether or not this announcement will be great news for the @NYCMayor remains to be seen …”
At stake throughout it all was the future of NYCHA, which for decades 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 calamity caught up to it: Federal funding cuts, well-documented mismanagement and an aging housing stock riddled with mold, leaks and pests ultimately led to NYCHA’s demise. Now, the agency is trying to scrape together a daunting $32 billion to make urgently needed repairs.
Had the federal government completely taken over the reins, 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 in downtown Manhattan to stand united 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.