To the Editor:
Thank you for your reporting on Councilmember Chris Banks’s warning that the new direction for NYCHA amounts to privatization by another name. Your coverage did what the citywide outlets too often miss. It took a local leader’s alarm seriously and located it where residents feel it, in the radiators, the elevators, and the repair tickets of East New York.
I want to add one point to the record. The most useful version of this debate is not “public good, private bad.” It is accountability. Under PACT and the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration, a development converts from Section 9 to project-based Section 8, and a private manager takes over. The trouble is not simply that a private company is involved. It is that when that company fails, tenants have no equivalent of a hearing, a councilmember, or an election to turn to.
That vacuum is what turns ordinary disrepair into genuine danger. The January fire at Boston Secor Houses, a converted development still managed by a firm with a documented history of violations, is the cost of that vacuum, not an aberration. Chair Banks is right to call for a pause. But a pause alone protects only the buildings not yet handed over. It does nothing for the tens of thousands of families already living under private management with no enforceable recourse.
The clearest live example of what oversight with teeth actually looks like is right here in the city. Since the January 2019 HUD, SDNY, and City agreement, NYCHA has operated under an independent federal monitor with real benchmarks including lead, mold, heat, elevators, pests, waste, and inspections, public quarterly reports, and actual repair timelines. Here is the part I think is the real story. The minute a development converts to PACT or RAD, it drops out of the monitor’s reach. That is well documented, and Human Rights Watch made the same point in its 2022 report “The Tenant Never Wins,” calling for an independent body to watch PACT sites. The Community Service Society’s citywide survey found the same thing from the tenant side. The oversight and data that exist for NYCHA-managed buildings basically vanish once a private manager takes over.
The remedy is oversight with teeth. Independent monitoring, binding repair timelines with real penalties, public reporting building by building, and a way for residents themselves to trigger a management review. Whoever signs the checks, someone must be legally required to answer when the ceiling comes down.