Thanks for Helping to Keep the City & State Running, Residents…Don’t Let the Wrecking Ball Hit You in the Behind!

Demolition is Housing Brutality: working class NYCHA residents are fighting back against the privatization and destruction of their homes—who’s aiding them? Photo/Caitlin Cahill

By Steve Wishnia

The best time for housing in New York was the post-World War II period, says Renee Keitt, head of the tenant association at the Elliott-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan. It was the era when more than two-thirds of the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) 180,000 apartments were constructed, the state’s Mitchell-Lama program built another 140,000 units designated for working and middle-class residents, and union-backed developments added thousands more.

But now, with their buildings aging, the residents of three such developments, whose 8,000 apartments are home to an estimated 30,000 people, are facing either massive cost increases or demolition and relocation. At Rochdale Village, a Mitchell-Lama complex in South Jamaica, Queens, residents are trying to stop the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) from setting increases of as much as 57% in their monthly maintenance payments. At the Elliott-Chelsea Houses and the Fulton Houses in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, NYCHA is planning to demolish all 17 residential buildings over the next 16 years and replace them with a mix of Section 8, market-rate luxury, and what Keitt calls “unaffordable affordable” apartments.

Rochdale Village

Rochdale Village, a 20-building, 5,860-unit complex that opened in 1963, was the second-largest development built under Mitchell-Lama, after Co-op City in the northeast Bronx. It’s a limited-equity co-op, where residents own their apartments but can’t sell them for a profit. According to its website, apartments cost $10,800 to $23,400, plus $717 to $1,720 a month in maintenance.

Facing a deficit of $11.4 million, the co-op’s board in January approved increases totaling 26.8% over the next two years. DHCR came back with 44%, and raised that to 57% when it said it hadn’t included debts, such as a $17.7 million unpaid water bill, in its calculations, John Ferretti, cofounder of Keep Rochdale Village Affordable, told Work-Bites.

“This is just unaffordable for our residents,” says Ferretti, a subway conductor. “We’re too important to fail. We’re the people who keep the city and state running.”

Many Rochdale residents are public-sector, building-services, and health-care workers, he explains, members of unions such as District Council 37, 32BJ, 1199SEIU, and Transport Workers Union Local 100.

Ferretti blames many of the complex’s financial problems on a $195 million loan it took from Wells Fargo in 2019. As it is only paying interest for the first 10 years, the debt has increased to $225 million. “We want a forensic audit,” he says.

A May 25 letter Keep Rochdale Village Affordable sent to 18 elected officials called that loan “predatory.” It urged Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature to halt the carrying-charge increases, refinance Rochdale Village’s debt through “a public, transparent process,” and provide long-term state investment.

This year’s state budget appropriated $750 million to aid the remaining Mitchell-Lama developments with capital improvements and $110 million for operating expenses.

Ferretti says state aid is essential: “I don’t see how you’re going to expand Mitchell-Lama or affordable housing anywhere if we lose gains like this.”

NYCHA: Privatization-demolition plan

The Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses are about six blocks apart. Fulton contains 10 residential buildings with 944 apartments, while Elliott-Chelsea has seven buildings with 1,112 apartments.

NYCHA’s plan, in collaboration with the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, is to turn the two projects over to private management under the Rental Assistance Demonstration and Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (RAD/PACT) programs. It would lease the land under them to the Related Companies, Hudson Yards’ developer. Related would then, over the next 16 years, gradually demolish all the buildings. It would replace them with six 39-story towers, three in each project, to rehouse the current tenants, and add nine or ten new buildings of mixed-income housing—30% “affordable” and 70% market rate.

The draft environmental-impact statement for the project estimates current market-rate rents in Chelsea at $6,000 a month. Rents for the “affordable” apartments would vary, but would average about $2,270 for a studio and $2,916 to $3,240 for a two-bedroom apartment. About 120 households would have to be relocated temporarily until the first new buildings are completed.

NYCHA and HUD plan are considering three options. If the area is not rezoned to allow larger buildings, Related would build a total of 536 “affordable” and 1,247 market-rate units, and the proportion of below-market units could go down to 20%.

If the area is rezoned, there would be 1,038 new below-market units and 2,416 market-rate, with the bulkiest buildings either on Ninth or Tenth avenues or in the middle of the blocks between them.

They say construction would be completed in 2041. Urban planner George Janes told a neighborhood forum in April that the 15 new buildings would take roughly three years each.

Keitt says it’s “highly unlikely” they will be completed on schedule. “Some people may not be alive to see the so-called affordable housing.”

Demolition opponents have demanded that the two projects be renovated, possibly with some infill housing added, instead of demolished. NYCHA’s draft environmental-impact statement says that “would not create enough market-rate housing to financially support the PACT and affordable housing components of the project.” The authority estimated in 2023 that repairs on the two, such as fixing the elevators, would cost $927 million over the next 20 years.

Overall, it estimated that making necessary repairs in all of its 335 developments would cost $78 billion—almost $440,000 per apartment—over the next 20 years. Critics call that figure exaggerated, as it was 70% above the 2018 projection. Even so, says Chelsea Democratic district leader Layla Law-Gisiko, the cost would work out to $4 billion a year, manageable if there’s the political will.

NYCHA has not yet submitted its final application for the demolition plan, says Keitt, and “they have not gotten the go-ahead from HUD.” Still, says Law-Gisiko, “it’s far from a done deal, but it is certainly moving forward.”

Section 8 conversion

The privatization plan would also take the two developments out of Section 9, the part of federal housing law that covers publicly owned housing, and put the tenants’ new apartments in Section 8, the Housing Choice Voucher program. Section 8 tenants generally pay 30% of their income for rent, and the federal government pays the difference between that and what the landlord is charging.

Law-Gisiko calls that “very risky.” Section 8 contracts last for only 20 years, and renewing them is optional, she says. “They can cut the cord.”

The Trump budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year, released May 30, would cut HUD’s rental-assistance programs, including Section 8 and public housing, by 43%, or $26.7 billion. It would combine them all into one finite block grant to states, and cut off aid for “able-bodied adults” after two years.

Section 8 has long been unable to aid all renters who are eligible. NYCHA, which administers vouchers for 85,000 households, stopped accepting applications from 2009 until June 2024. When it resumed for one week, more than 630,000 people applied. About 200,000 made it onto the waiting list.

Decades of cuts

Funds for public housing have been cut for more than 40 years—in the 1980s by the federal government under Ronald Reagan, and in the 1990s and 2000s by the state under Gov. George Pataki, and the city under Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. The Faircloth Amendment in 1998 prohibited local governments from building more public housing than they already had.

NYCHA’s partial-privatization strategy attempts to compensate for the lack of funds by using market-rate housing to “cross-subsidize” repairs and maintenance. Keitt calls it “a model where they can get the most market rate” and a “strategy of attrition on housing as a whole.”

Local elected officials have given “no support whatsoever” to tenants’ calls for “more renovation, no demolition,” says Keitt. “They believe they know what’s best for us.”

As rents escalated over the past 40 years, the main method of funding “affordable housing” In New York City has been trickle-down from luxury development, of having up to 30% of the apartments in a new building be below market rate. Under Bill de Blasio’s administration it was mandatory; under Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” plan, it’s voluntary, a reward for constructing larger buildings. Under fairly common circumstances, a $4,300-a-month two-bedroom apartment can qualify as “affordable”; one that rents for under $1,500 needs significant subsidies.

That method “has not worked—it has not worked,” says Keitt. “We have to house people. We have to have housing.”