The Evolution (Or Lack Thereof) of New York City’s Public Housing System: How The Projects Came To Be

For all of us in New York and around the country, we are living in a time when change is in high demand. But change can not happen without knowledge and reflection. The first step towards enacting change in areas like public housing is by understanding how the problems came to be in the first place.

In New York City, the public housing system-- colloquially known as “the projects” -- is notoriously known for housing many of the Big Apple’s poorest and most vulnerable in inadequate units that are barely livable. The projects are often overcrowded and underfunded. Maintenance is often overlooked, leaving many residents of the projects without basic amenities, such as heating during the winter. Elevators break down regularly and can take up to 20 minutes to travel even when they are working. Water leaks, unstable plumbing, peeling paint, the list goes on and on.

But the New York public housing system wasn’t always like this. In fact, for most of its existence, the projects were well-kept, spacious, and even desirable apartments.

The New York City Housing Authority, better known as “NYCHA,” was established in 1934 by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia as part of the government’s response to the Great Depression, which left millions of Americans out of work and on the streets. There had been various other government measures to create affordable housing in the past to supplement the otherwise-privately-owned housing developments, but NYCHA was the first major step in what would become a system of almost entirely government-run housing.

At its inception, public housing was a huge success. According to Professor Nicholas D. Bloom, the author of “Public Housing That Worked,” the first housing projects “were relatively low-rise walk-ups built to extraordinarily high-quality standards. Basically, as good or better as middle-class housing.”

As nice as the units were, however, the system wasn’t exactly as equitable as it was designed to be. “[The apartments] were built for a very carefully-selected tenancy, mostly working families that even during the Depression had no social service background or history,” Bloom added. Throughout the 1930’s and 40’s, only about 5-8% of residents were on welfare and all of the residents were white.

It wasn’t until the 1950’s that pockets of African-American and Latinx families were allowed to move into public housing. Just a few years later, the number of minority residents greatly outnumbered the number of white residents of the roughly 500,000 individuals living in the projects.

As for the selection of tenants, NYCHA soon came under heavy criticism for its lack of attention to NYC’s most vulnerable and shockingly, for having housing that was “too desirable” to be low-income housing. This prompted NYCHA to begin a huge expansion of housing projects. According to City Lab, “By 1959, NYCHA had commissioned a total of 148,583 affordable housing units.” Unfortunately, with the increase in the number of housing units came the decrease in living standards and efficiency. The maintenance staff was less responsive, the residents were less respectful of one another, and the crime rate in the apartment buildings increased, as did the presence of drugs (especially due to the “crack wave” of the 1970’s). These were just the beginnings of what would become the modern-day projects.

What’s more, when the projects became more low-income-oriented, the middle class of the Big Apple soon became relatively left behind. It wasn’t until waves of middle class families began to move to the suburbs in search of cheaper housing that the government finally took notice. The creation of programs like Mitchell-Lama came as a result and began building projects such as Highbridge House exclusively for middle-income families, as seen in this excerpt from a 1965 advertisement: “‘Highbridge House gives city living back to the people in the middle...the families who have been caught between ‘project housing’ for which they couldn’t qualify, and private housing which they couldn’t afford.’ (Courtesy Real Estate Brochure Collection, Columbia University).”

One saving grace was that NYCHA housing projects started to have somewhat of a positive effect in the surrounding neighborhoods. According to a working paper on the history of public housing, written by NYU’s Furman Center For Real Estate and Public Policy, “[An] analysis of approximate costs and benefits suggests that New York City’s housing investments delivered a tax benefit to the city that exceeded the cost of the city’s subsidies and offset some 75 percent of total public expenditures, which includes both state and federal dollars.” Crime rates also decreased in surrounding neighborhoods.

On the other hand, however, as the crime rate decreased in the surrounding neighborhoods, the crime rate increased in public housing. It was at this time, in the early 1980s, that an ammateur police force was established to maintain a degree of law and order in the tenant buildings. The volunteer security team dealt with issues such as frequent noise complaints, fights between residents, checking people in and out of the buildings in the lobbies, and property damage.

This increase in crime and disorder came hand-in-hand with the government’s sudden disinvestment in NYCHA’s projects. Renovations and maintenance became almost non-existent and as the flood of new tenants-- many of them immigrants-- searched for places to live, the projects weren’t expanding to accommodate them. NYC’s low-and-middle-income residents were basically left to fend for themselves.

Flash-forward to 2020 and not much has changed. While the government is taking some steps to reinvest in new housing projects, the current buildings are still overrun with low-and- middle-income families living in inadequate conditions and struggling to pay the rising rent rates that are disproportionate to their level of income. What’s worse, NYCHA has come under a lot of heat in the past few years for apparently lying to federal courts about proper inspections.

There is no right answer for how to improve the projects to the level of prosperity that they had in the 1930s. Changing a system that has gotten increasingly more damaged over the past half century is going to be slow and difficult. But understanding the evolution of the public housing system and how these conditions came about is a good first step. As we have learned time and time again, the best way to avoid repeating history is to learn from our mistakes.

Citations

Anzilotti, Eillie. “The Long, Complicated History of Affordable Housing in New York.”

CityLab, Bloomberg, 29 Feb. 2016, www.citylab.com/equity/2016/02/the-long-complicated-history-of-affordable-housing-in-new-york/471096/.

Ferré-Sadurní, Luis. “The Rise and Fall of New York Public Housing: An Oral History.” The

New York Times, The New York Times, 26 June 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/25/nyregion/new-york-city-public-housing-history.html.

“Housing Policy in New York City: A History.” Furmancenter.org, New York University's

Furman Center For Real Estate and Public Policy, www.furmancenter.org/files/publications/AHistoryofHousingPolicycombined0601_000.pdf.