A federal takeover of New York’s public housing is still a very real possibility, federal housing chief Ben Carson told the Daily News during an unannounced tour through the Queensbridge Houses on Tuesday.
For the first time since taking the helm of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Carson walked the nation’s largest public housing complex and told The News that placing NYCHA into federal receivership is an option — even though Mayor de Blasio has made it clear that’s not his preference.
On Friday Carson sent NYCHA a letter requiring that the authority produce a detailed plan by Jan. 31 with milestones and metrics spelling out how they intend to fix what’s long been broken.
“There’s a host of things that are going to be required that I think are reasonable, and that can be accomplished,” Carson told The News after his brief stop at Queensbridge. “If it can be accomplished without a receivership, great. If it requires some type of receivership, it requires some type of receivership.”
Carson’s unannounced visit came a month after a federal judge shot down a carefully crafted agreement between the city, NYCHA, HUD and the Manhattan U.S. attorney to bring in a federal monitor.
Manhattan Federal Judge William Pauley declared that a monitor who would have no say over NYCHA’s day-to-day operations wasn’t tough enough to truly fix the authority’s long history of mismanagement and failures to address lead paint, toxic mold and broken elevators. Twice the judge has brought up the notion of a receiver who could hire and fire management, void labor agreements and bring in contractors.
The U.S. attorney supports some form of receivership while de Blasio opposes it. Until Tuesday Carson had not spoken publicly about his feelings on the question. In an interview with The News after touring Queensbridge, Carson spelled it out.
HUD Secretary Ben Carson tours the Queensbridge Houses apartment of longtime resident Geraldine Harvey. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News)
Asked if he was opposed to either HUD taking over NYCHA or a judicial receiver stepping in, Carson replied, “I’m not opposed to any kind of receivership. It’s one of the tools in our box — but I would like to move in a way that we have excellent oversight, but that we have city and NYCHA responsible to the tenants and the people of the city.”
He dubbed receivership “a last-ditch effort. Obviously, I’d like to see local control, local responsibility. That’s going to be the best issue because the people right there controlling it are right their responsible to the people in their environment.”
“You know what’s been going on here for decades and it’s time to fix it,” he said. “It’s a huge enterprise. It’s very complex. But I’ve dealt with complex things before.”
His remarks followed an unusual off-the-radar visit to Queensbridge, located just north of where Amazon plans to open its Long Island City campus in the coming year.
Opened in the 1940s, Queensbridge has most recently been the site of a multimillion-dollar de Blasio-funded effort to patch leaky roofs but also a series of heat and cooking gas outages. One building two blocks from where Carson dropped in was without gas from August until last week.
Escorted by NYCHA General Manager Vito Mustaciuolo and Lynne Patton, administrator of HUD’s New York-New Jersey office, Carson was brought to a Queensbridge boiler room where three giant green boilers hummed away, registering temperatures of 320 degrees to heat four buildings.
Mustaciuolo let Carson know about a recent boiler failure caused by a water pipe rupture that knocked out heat for much of the development three weeks ago. NYCHA was roundly criticized last winter for a run of boiler breakdowns that left 300,000 tenants without heat or hot water, sometimes for days at a time.
Carson heads toward boiler room at Queensbridge Houses. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News)
Carson then dropped in on the immaculate two-bedroom apartment of longtime tenant Geraldine Harvey, 73, which was brightly decorated for the holidays with a forest of poinsettias and a smart table-top Christmas tree strung with gold lights. He and Harvey — who raised two daughters there who are now grown up — worked their way across a wall of family photos.
He asked her if she felt NYCHA managers addressed her apartment concerns, to which she replied they were “fairly responsive.” He posed for photos and then was ushered out the door and down the sidewalk past a gaggle of reporters.
Later Tuesday, he met in Patton’s lower Manhattan office with de Blasio. After the mayor declined to discuss Carson’s position on receivership, implied all parties want to avoid it if possible.
“Of course the topic came up, and I think there was abroad agreement that we’re going to do all together to avert it, that both HUD and the City of New York believe there is a better way, and that better way is to come to a settlement,” the mayor said.
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