NEW YORK (AP) — After years of neglect and a winter of heating failures, New York City’s massive public housing system is finally getting attention from politicians, who are simultaneously promising a fix and using the crisis to blame and bludgeon their rivals in an election year.
What’s not clear is whether the new attention will translate into better conditions for tenants of the system, which holds more people than the cities of St. Louis or Cleveland.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency last week at the New York City Housing Authority, saying its 400,000 tenants have had to endure gaps in basic maintenance that have left some units barely fit for habitation.
“It is disgusting,” he told a business group Thursday.
In a series of visits to apartments with peeling paint and crumbling plaster, the Democrat, a former U.S. housing secretary under President Bill Clinton, also assailed the authority as grossly mismanaged.
Cuomo said he was appointing a monitor to oversee repairs, saying simply giving the city-run system money to fix up buildings would be “like throwing it out the window.”
Some tenant groups, which have filed lawsuits over heating breakdowns, missed lead paint inspections and other issues, applauded.
But Cuomo’s actions were also widely seen as a swipe at New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fellow Democrat who has been locked in an intensely personal and seemingly intractable political feud with the governor for years.
U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, a Republican, also jumped into the fray, saying he would require the Housing Authority to get prior federal approval before expenditure out of its capital fund.
“We don’t want to do it that way, but they forced us into doing it that way until they become more responsible,” Carson told The Wall Street Journal.
“Sex and the City” actress Cynthia Nixon, who recently launched a campaign to unseat Cuomo as governor, weighed in. She toured a Brooklyn public housing complex for one of her first campaign events.
