Restoring Public Housing: Does A Bronx Success Story Have Legs?
Baychester Houses [a Bronx public housing development, pictured above] has been physically transformed, thanks to a financing approach that enables housing authorities to call on private funding and property management.
Specifically, the Rental Assistance Demonstration program – deployed at more than 600 aging projects across the country – relies on a technical change in the status of tenants: as recipients of housing vouchers. The stream of guaranteed federal funds that become tied to the tenants, not the housing authority, becomes revenue against which private developer/managers can borrow, using the funds to renovate public housing projects.
This financial instrument will allow a private developer to be assured of reliable funding, in contrast to the vagaries of direct federal “operating assistance” for housing authorities that developed once it became clear that tenant rents could not sustain a housing project….
“Rebirth in the South Bronx” is how a New York Times architecture writer described the change at Baychester, a complex of 11 buildings and 441 apartments. The Times described the before and after:
“Built more than half a century ago, Baychester was never properly waterproofed, its buildings enduring a history of cracked and spalled masonry and deteriorated mortar joints. [One resident] would complain to housing officials about mold sickening neighbors. They suggested tenants try bleach, she said. A few years ago, NYCHA [the New York City Housing Authority] shut down its on-site management office, forcing residents, many of them seniors, to pony up for transportation to meet the people supposedly in charge of the property. Security was half a dozen cameras, frequently broken, sporadically manned. ‘Tenants used to throw garbage anywhere during NYCHA times,’ said Sandra Gross [president of the Baychester tenants’ association]. ‘NYCHA didn’t care, so residents didn’t care.’”
Today the campus looks spotless, with refurbished playgrounds, fresh plantings, and a new basketball court. The buildings have been reclad with a waterproof material and faux-wood paneling. The renovation is not Architecture with a capital A. But it is dignified and better than some market rate housing. Glassed-in entrances have replaced the old carceral doorways. There are new lobbies, new light fixtures in the hallways, new recycling rooms and compactors in the basements. Apartments have been outfitted with new bathroom fixtures, windows, and kitchen appliances. The new managers, after consulting with tenants about their desires, brought in a GrowNYC farmers’ market. Staff now patrols the grounds 24/7, with hundreds of security cameras replacing the broken ones.
The renovation was led by a group of developer/managers who have made RAD-style conversions a specialty and, at the time of my own 2023 visit to Baychester, were planning a similar renovation on a much larger scale: that of the Edenwald Houses, which adjoins Baychester but is far larger, comprising 40 towers and some 2,000 apartments. (Ironically, the task of renovating Edenwald, one of the largest public housing projects in the US, is complicated by the fact that it has been designated as a historic landmark; its dangerous brick façades must be preserved at significant cost, rather than being waterproofed by being “reclad,” enveloped in a sort of exterior raincoat.)
But beneath its well-kept surface, the complexities of the projects persist. “The daily operations are very technically challenging,” says Joseph Ramlall, the head property manager at Baychester. … Ramlall regularly leads tours at Baychester and is proud of the physical change he helped lead, taking me through a “model unit,” comparable to any private apartment, with up-to-date appliances and spiffy kitchen countertops. But he is candid, as is the tenant representative Sandy Gross, in saying that there are times that he feels that his role as property manager is akin to “law enforcement.” He and Gross underscore the fact that the New York City Housing Authority continues to own Baychester—and to choose its tenants. A lumbering bureaucracy can leave up to 30 units vacant, as new tenancies await approval.
Even more problematic is the question of possible evictions. Ramlall tells the story of a tenant plagued by mental illness who would “call 911 every five minutes. The police would respond to what he said was an emergency and break down doors.” There are enough tenants with such problems that Ramlall’s management firm contracts with a private social service provider; he understands himself to be in social work, as well as in the housing business, in other words. He is plagued, as well, by teenage tenants who keep back doors to the building open so that friends from elsewhere can freely enter, rather than going through the up-to-date lobby intercom systems ….
One must wonder, moreover, whether the type of deeply committed management staff overseeing Baychester will be followed by others who are as motivated. There is no doubt that, as this is written, the new Baychester is better than the old or that a renovated Edenwald Houses will be better, as well. But no elected official, whether Franklin Roosevelt or New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, ever cut a ribbon or switched on the lights at a public housing project with the expectation that it would deteriorate to the point of needing costly, subsidized repairs.
The Baychester renovation cost some $100,000 per apartment, notes [architectural firm] L+M Partners co-founder Ron Moelis, in a conversation we had as we toured Baychester; he expects a similar renovation at another New York project, the Harlem River Houses, to cost $250,000 per unit—for apartments of just 600 square feet. This at a time when the median home value in New York was $411,000 for homes of a median size of 1,556 square feet. In other words, the cost of renovating a Harlem River House apartment is higher, on a per square foot basis ($416), than the cost of buying a home ($273). …
Apart from initial cost, there remains the question of upkeep. Moelis notes the key: there must be enough revenue to provide for capital repairs as they inevitably become needed. Should revenue lag for any reason, the same downward trajectory that has plagued public housing for decades will be repeated; tenant rents are, by definition, inadequate.
The essential idea of the projects is to provide tenants a “better” home than their incomes permit them to afford. If the point is to save any individual project, at least for a time, Baychester and others like it must be deemed to be successes. But the projects, of course, were meant to be slum substitutes, not to become slums themselves that demanded their own replacement. Saving them has become an end in itself.
Howard A. Husock is Senior Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of The Projects: A New History of Public Housing, published by New York University Press.This excerpt appears with the permission of the author and publisher.
Photo by: Andy Foster/L+M Development Partners.