From the New York Daily News:
It’s become fashionable over the last decade or so for city and state politicians to bemoan the pitiful financial state and ever-deteriorating physical condition of the New York City Housing Authority, where arcane bureaucracy and decades of federal disinvestment have left 175,000 apartments and the 400,000 people in them at the mercy of leaks, lead, mold, vermin, broken boilers, broken elevators and broken entry doors. But the solution most politicians propose is that someday the feds will ride to New York’s rescue, presumably on white steeds, and deliver the $25 billion NYCHA needs to cover its eye-popping $40 billion of capital needs.
So it’s refreshing to see an innovative, actionable idea from NYCHA’s chair, Greg Russ, who last summer published a smart reorganization blueprint calling for the Legislature to authorize creation of a Public Housing Preservation Trust, a small public entity that would operate more like a normal property management company. The Trust would access tenant protection vouchers, a more lucrative federal funding stream than NYCHA’s current federal revenue source, pool those vouchers together, then leverage the pooled funds to raise capital to cover costs for NYCHA’s pricey capital repair program.
Read the New York Daily News' op-ed "NYCHA’s last hope: A public housing trust is the best chance to save New York’s beleaguered authority."