All posts by Bettye
COVID 19 UPDATE #3 DE NYCHA
********* COVID 19 UPDATE #3 DE NYCHA ********
Estimado Líder Residente,
Los esfuerzos diarios de limpieza de NYCHA se concentran en áreas de alto tráfico, incluyendo manijas de puertas, puertas de tolva, buzones y controles de elevadores, en nuestros 2,200 edificios, 3,843 vestíbulos, 3,140 ascensores y 25,805 pisos.
Continuamos haciendo que la información de COVID-19 esté disponible a través del alcance directo a los residentes a través de llamadas automáticas, correos electrónicos, carteles multilingües, la aplicación MyNYCHA, publicaciones diarias en las redes sociales y publicaciones en sitios web de residentes, empleados y públicos.
Les pedimos a los residentes que utilicen nuestros sistemas automatizados y en línea, incluida mi aplicación NYCHA, el portal de autoservicio, nuestros quioscos, para completar sus transacciones.
Alentamos a los residentes a llamar al CCC al 718-707-7771 para informar emergencias y programar reparaciones de mantenimiento de rutina en sus apartamentos y desarrollos. Los representantes capacitados están en espera las 24 horas del día, los 7 días de la semana para atender emergencias y programar reparaciones de mantenimiento de rutina de lunes a viernes de 6 a.m. a medianoche.
Cierres y suspensiones:
Con vigencia inmediata, hemos suspendido todos los cortes planeados hasta nuevo aviso.
Estamos deteniendo los desalojos de residentes mientras la Ciudad se encuentre en estado de emergencia.
Estamos alentando a los hogares que experimentan pérdida de ingresos a acceder a nuestro programa de dificultades de alquiler.
La Oficina de Audiencias Administrativas de NYCHA está posponiendo todos los casos por dos semanas, momento en el cual volveremos a evaluar el calendario de audiencias para determinar si la postergación debe extenderse.
Estamos posponiendo reuniones y eventos públicos en persona en las oficinas y desarrollos de NYCHA durante 30 días.
Estamos cerrando los Centros de Atención al Cliente de Brooklyn y Bronx al público, a partir del lunes 3/16.
Recomendamos que los líderes de la Asociación de Resident
es pospongan las reuniones de grupos grandes, incluidas las elecciones de residentes.
El equipo de compromiso de los residentes pospone todos los programas y reuniones de residentes.
Puede encontrar más información sobre COVID-19 aquí: Departamento de Salud e Higiene Mental de la Ciudad de Nueva York
Continuaremos manteniéndolo actualizado.
En asociación,
Departamento de Compromiso Residente, NYCHA
COVID 19 Update #3 from NYCHA
*****COVID 19 Update #3 from NYCHA********
Dear Resident Leader,
The health and safety of our residents and employees is our top priority. We are working with DOHMH, NYCEM and other City, State and Federal partners to closely monitor the current situation related to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) in New York City. NYCHA leadership has been working closely with our government partners to ensure our approach and plans are thorough and responsive to a changing environment. We wanted to send an update on our efforts to date:
NYCHA has hired a contractor to clean senior buildings with a two-step treatment plan that includes cleaning and applying a deep-cleaning agent and a bio-ecofriendly protective coating that kills germs before it attaches to the surface. The deep-cleaner and protective coating are applied at the same time and typically lasts for 90 days but we are going to a 30-day cycle as a precautionary measure, and basic cleaning is recommended two times a week after application. Non-senior residences are being cleaned daily by a combination of in-house staff and caretakers and additional cleaning service companies. Our approximately 3,200 caretakers are also responsible for grounds maintenance, sweeping floors, checking roofs and waste removal. NYCHA’s daily cleaning efforts are concentrated in high-traffic areas – including door handles, hopper doors, mailboxes and elevator controls – in our 2,200 buildings, 3,843 lobbies, 3,140 elevators and 25,805 floors.
We continue to make COVID-19 information available through direct outreach to residents through robocalls, emails, multilingual posters, the MyNYCHA App, daily social media posts, and posting on resident, employee and public websites. We are asking residents to utilize our automated and online systems including my NYCHA App, the self-service portal, our Kiosks, to complete their transactions. We are encouraging residents to call the CCC at 718-707-7771 to report emergencies and schedule routine maintenance repairs in their apartments and developments. Trained representatives are on standby 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to handle emergencies and to schedule routine maintenance repairs for Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to midnight.
Closures and Suspensions:
Effective immediately, we have suspended all planned outages until further notice. We are halting resident evictions for as long as the City is under a state of emergency. We are encouraging households experiencing loss of income to access our rental hardship program. NYCHA’s Administrative Hearing Office is postponing all cases for two weeks, at which time we will reevaluate the hearing schedule to determine if the postponement should be extended. We are postponing in-person public meetings and events at NYCHA offices and developments for 30 days. We are closing the Brooklyn and Bronx Customer Contact Walk-in Centers to the public, effective Monday, 3/16. We recommend Resident Association leaders postpone large group meetings, including resident elections. Resident engagement team is postponing all resident programs and meetings.
We will continue to keep you updated.
In Partnership,
Resident Engagement Department , NYCHA
Community Development and the Future of NYCHA – A Panel Discussion 4/24/2019
Under the RADar: Community Development and the Future…
Community Development and the Future of NYCHA – A Panel Discussion
Hunter College, Department of Urban Policy & Planning
Wednesday, April 24, 2019 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM (EDT)
Free Event
At:
Hunter College School of Social Work Auditorium
2180 3rd Avenue
New York, NY 10035
Wednesday, April 24, 2019 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM (EDT)
Event Details:
The future of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) remains in a precarious state, with a growing $32 billion backlog of capital needs. Under HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program, Mayor de Blasio has committed to transferring ownership of 62,000 units (nearly one third of NYCHA’s housing stock) to private developers, who will leverage private financing sources in order to make much-needed repairs. While the RAD program offers potential to improve quality of life for residents, it also raises concerns around the preservation of New York City’s biggest resource of deeply affordable housing. This panel brings together advocates, tenant leaders, policy experts, and community development professionals to discuss the impending RAD conversions, implications for public housing residents, and the potential role of community development organizations in protecting long term affordability.
The panel will be moderated by Hunter College Master’s student Eliot Hetterly.
The panelists will include:
Matthew Washington, Deputy Borough President, Manhattan Borough President’s Office
Victor Bach, Senior Housing Policy Analyst, Community Service Society
Diana Blackwell, President of Fred Samuel Resident Association, NYCHA
Roberta Semer, Manhattan Community Board 7 Chair
Frank Lang, Director of Housing, St. Nick’s Alliance
Emily Kurtz, Vice President of Housing, RiseBoro Community Partnership
Ed Braxton, Program Officer, Enterprise Community Partners
Have questions about Under the RADar: Community Development and the Future of NYCHA? Contact Hunter College, Department of Urban Policy & Planning
NYCHA shakes up federally-mandated compliance office
By Anna Sanders | New York Daily News | Apr 17, 2019 | 3:51 PM
NYCHA replaced the official responsible for ensuring it complies with health and safety rules after criticism that Mayor de Blasio gave the important job to a political patronage hire.
Vilma Huertas-Cymbrowitz, named chief compliance officer last July, was replaced on Monday with three officials who will be responsible for overseeing NYCHA’s conformity with the same crucial regulations it’s flouted for years.
The scandal-scarred authority restructured the federally-mandated compliance office this week by adding a “quality assurance unit” and an environmental health and safety department, officials announced on Wednesday.
Daniel Greene, a former Cuomo administration official, was appointed acting chief compliance officer. Patrick O’Hagan was named acting environmental health and safety officer and Cathy Pennington was appointed acting quality assurance officer and senior vice president for information technology.
Restructuring of the compliance office – and choosing a new chief compliance officer – were specified in an agreement reached by de Blasio and the feds in January to settle a bombshell complaint alleging years of mismanagement at NYCHA.
Huertas-Cymbrowitz was made a special advisor to the NYCHA chair as part of the staffing shuffle.
The head of the City Council’s investigations committee blasted her as “patently unqualified” when she was made chief compliance officer last year. Bronx Councilman Ritchie Torres also said at the time that putting her in the job violated the intent of a federal consent decree, which NYCHA denied.
“I feel vindicated,” Torres said. “I was the first to expose NYCHA’s ploy to reduce the Chief Compliance Officer to little more than a patronage position. The CCO can and should be a catalyst for reform, rather than a creature of a failed bureaucracy.”
De Blasio and the authority entered into that consent decree after federal prosecutors sued City Hall in June 2018 alleging NYCHA officials for years lied and covered up their failure to address health and safety concerns in their developments, including toxic lead paint, mold contamination, heating outages and faulty elevators.
A federal judge shot down the consent decree last fall for being insufficient. In January de Blasio agreed to a settlement that includes a federal monitor and $2.2 billion in city funding for NYCHA over the next decade. NYCHA consulted with the monitor on the compliance office changes.
NYCHA fails repeatedly and continuously
“Today, NYCHA named leaders – working in consultation with our Monitor – to the three new and restructured departments called for in the Agreement,” interim NYCHA chair Kathryn Garcia said in a statement. “The appointments reinforce NYCHA’s commitment to accountability, compliance and quality assurance, and most importantly improving quality of life for our residents.”
The city has until mid-May to name a permanent NYCHA chair after missing an April deadline. As part of the settlement, the chair must be picked from a shortlist OK’d by U.S. attorney for Southern District of New York and the federal department of Housing and Urban Development.
CCOP Letter in Opposition to Consent Decree
Please click on the link below to view letter dated 6/12/2018 to the US District Court. Letter in Opposition to Consent Decree – United States of America versus NYCHA:
Group Assisting NYCHA Tenant Leaders has a New Name but a Long History
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Most of the players in the public-housing drama of the past few months are well known. There’s the mayor, and, of course, the governor as well as the City Council and NYCHA itself. The Citywide Council of Presidents or CCOP—the coordinating body for public-housing tenant leaders—is familiar to anyone who knows public housing. Jim Walden, the lawyer suing the housing authority on behalf of the CCOP, has also been around for a while, and was the subject of a New York Times profile back in April.
But At-Risk Community Services, the nonprofit that is advising the CCOP in its negotiations with the mayor and City Council, is a new name to most ears. In fact, it’s a new name, period: The organization incorporated only in November and registered its website a few weeks later.
Within a matter of months, the organization was playing a key role. At-Risk figured in the visits Andrew Cuomo made to NYCHA developments in March, where the governor attacked the mayor’s handling of public housing. It’s a party to Walden’s sweeping lawsuit, which would scrap NYCHA’s labor agreements, revamp the way the authority makes decisions for its 400,000 residents and impose an independent monitor. And it is heavily involved in talks with the mayor and Council about appointing an emergency manager for NYCHA—although it appears very little actual talking is happening.
Two members of the nine-member CCOP who spoke with City Limits said they knew little about At-Risk Community Services, which they say came on the scene early in 2018 when Danny Barber, the longtime tenant association head at Andrew Jackson Houses in the Bronx, became CCOP chairman. Aixa Torres, another prominent tenant association leader who hails from the Smith Houses in Manhattan, says she’d never dealt with them. A leading Brooklyn social-justice organization that has worked with NYCHA tenants for decades said it also has never heard of At-Risk.
But the two CCOP members stressed that, even if it is a newcomer, At-Risk has had a welcome impact.
“We just met them through Danny Barber,” says Lilithe Lozano, the CCOP member for Bronx North and a longtime tenant leader at Parkside Houses in the Bronx. “They’ve been a great resource to us because we’re finally getting some things done and having NYCHA respect us.” Raymond Ballard, the CCOP member from Brooklyn East, says he’s never worked with At-Risk. But, he is quick to say, “I see one thing they have done: They got the governor on board to help with the situation.” (Both Ballard and Lozano said they had long had separate legal counsel for their respective CCOP districts.)
A previous LIFE
In an interview with City Limits, Barber says At-Risk began working in his neighborhood six years ago. “At-Risk are a group of volunteer lawyers and accountants” who offered tenants help “dealing with NYCHA” and “helping residents to get healthcare.” (While Barber is listed on At-Risk’s website as part of “Our Team,” he is not an employee.)
Until recently, the organization Barber dealt with was not called At Risk Community Services but rather Labor and Industry for Education, Inc. At-Risk is a spinoff of LIFE, which is based in Cedarhurst, Long Island, and was founded in the mid-1980s.
According to administrative director Elie Hecht, who has been with LIFE since 2008, the organization operated at a relatively low altitude for many years, its main work being the administration of a HeadStart program in New York City. That began to change in the last decade. Revenue jumped from $700,000in 2011 to $9.3 million in 2014, mainly because LIFE took over two childcare programs, one in Williamsburg and the other in Coney Island. Federal and state funding increased, as did city money: From 2012 to 2013, city spending on LIFE rose from $480,000 to $5.7 million. It’s averaged $3 million a year ever since.
Besides pre-K and EarlyLearn, the organization now does foreclosure prevention and provides respite services and Medicaid service coordination for families with disabled children. It also operates one of the largest Medicaid pooled trusts in the state—a mechanism that allows low-income people with health needs to qualify for Medicaid even if they would otherwise narrowly miss the eligibility cutoff. LIFE’s earnings off fees for the pooled trust have increased from $109,000 in 2012 to $962,000 in 2016.
It was the expansion of LIFE’s early childhood services in 2012 or so that first put it in touch with NYCHA tenants, according to Hecht—because those programs were based in NYCHA buildings. Hecht and his colleagues began to see the problems NYCHA tenants faced, not to mention the steep odds NYCHA tenant leaders were up against.
“NYCHA had approximately 70 in-house attorneys,” Hecht recalls. “CCOP isn’t even funded. It has no staff. It has nobody representing their interests. We decided to create At-Risk specifically to deal with NYCHA issues. We tried to balance the playing field.”
At-Risk has applied to the Internal Revenue Service for nonprofit tax status. Asked whether the clients of At-Risk’s NYCHA work might also become a customer base for the pooled trust, Hecht says, “We’d like it to be one day, but we haven’t focused on it really at all.”
“The vision is that one day, the residents’ lives can be improved in many different ways: education programs, healthy food, services that they are entitled to that they’re just not educated about – those are wish-list things,” he says. “But right now, NYCHA is in crisis mode.”
LIFE is not funding At-Risk directly, Hecht says. Instead, the Jacob and Anita Penzer Foundation is underwriting the operation. The new organization’s staff are all LIFE employees, however, including Hecht and executive director Jackie Rogoff. Eventually, At-Risk will have its own board, Hecht says.
For its part, LIFE’s board has the feel of a family affair. Hecht’s wife Lisa was listed on its most recent annual filing as LIFE’s board president. The board secretary is Richard Penzer, husband of Rogoff and brother to staff member Michael Penzer. Rogoff and Richard Penzer loaned the organization $160,000 last year, and Penzer’s family foundation is funding At-Risk.
Richard Penzer is a developer who played a prominent role in reshaping downtown Pittsburgh from the 1990s on. His life has been touched by tragedy and danger: His sister died in the 1996 TWA Flight 800 disaster, after which he became a leading spokesperson for victims’ families. In 1992, according to accounts he has given, Penzer was threatened at his home by three “goons” seeking to collect a debt claimed by a former investor in one of his Pittsburgh buildings; that investor later figured in the corruption scandals that sent former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to prison.
Neither of those storylines had anything to do with LIFE, but the organization has had its own share of friction. In 2005, a state judge ordered LIFE to fork over $55,000 it allegedly owed a fundraising agency that had helped it get government grants. Ten years later, a former executive director of LIFE, Rabbi Simcha Lefkowitz, sued LIFE claiming that he’d been improperly fired by a board of trustees that had usurped the authority of the real board. LIFE strongly contested those claims, and a judge at one point slammed Lefkowitz (who did not return a call seeking comment) for his “many inconsistencies.” In 2016, the parties settled. LIFE agreed to pay Lefkowitz $350,000 and all sides signed a non-disparagement agreement. The agreement was supposed to be confidential but is available via the online state court database.
More recently, the organization got negative press around its founding of a Montessori school in Bushwick that charged up to $21,000-a-year tuition. The vision was always to provide financing to lower-income families so they could attend, too, according to Hecht. Those hopes haven’t materialized, however, and the school is closing this month after just one year of operation.
Aim to boost tenant power?
The lawsuit CCOP filed against NYCHA calls for, among other things, imposing an independent monitor over the agency. Asked if At-Risk might become that monitor, Hecht says, “I doubt it. Right now our job is to be counsel for CCOP. We are certainly not asking to be a monitor.”
At-Risk is also representing CCOP in the talks with the mayor and Council about appointing an emergency manager over NYCHA. The state law creating the emergency manager gave those three entities the joint authority to pick a manager. But with a deadline looming, meetings have been few. “For all intents and purposes there has been no substantive discussion at all,” Hecht says. While he expected the mayor’s intransigence—de Blasio obviously resented the governor’s grandstanding on NYCHA—Hecht says the Council’s silence is surprising. But the revelation that Gov. Cuomo’s order essentially gives the emergency manager a blank check for NYCHA repairs to be drawn on the city’s bank account appears to have given some city legislators cold feet. If the three parties don’t name someone by June 1, Comptroller Scott Stringer has 14 days to pick a manager.
Hecht doesn’t dismiss those concerns. His argument is that Barber is trying to make CCOP into the kind of vibrant body it should be. “It’s not a secret that CCOP was stagnant for quite some time under former leadership,” he says. “It’s also an open secret that NYCHA uses its Resident Engagement department to cut the legs out from any kind of organized tenant representation.” This is why At-Risk’s push to get NYCHA residents registered to vote is important, he says: It gives the city-within-a-city that lives in public housing the potential to exert its combined will at the ballot box.
Barber, who has discussed building NYCHA tenants into a political movement and contemplated seeking office himself, says he harbors no doubts about At-Risk. “They’ve stood by us. They’ve only been straightforward. The lift that we got with this case has been nothing but the will and the grace of God.”
NYCHA: Harlem developments not being sold and demolished
From: Rosalba Rodriguez, Borough President Gale Brewer’s Office <rrodriguez@manhattanbp.nyc.gov>
Date: 07/11/2016
FYI–I have received many calls and emails about a post made on July 8. Below is the response and the article.
Subject: NYCHA: Harlem developments not being sold and demolished
NYCHA: Harlem developments not being sold and demolished
AmNews Staff Reports | 7/11/2016, 1:17 p.m.
New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Houses Photo by Bill Moore
The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) says rumors claiming that three Harlem housing projects have been sold to a “billionaire housing developer” and are slated for demolition are not true.
The allegation stems from a WordPress blog post with the headline “Harlem Housing To Be Demolished” that appeared on the internet on Friday. The WordPress account and blog entry is authored by someone who identifies themselves as “Jett Rubenstein” claiming to be a Harlem resident from Boston and getting the information from a “reliable source.”
According to the post, the billionaire developer bought the Polo Grounds Houses, the Alexander Hamilton Houses and the Harlem River Houses with plans to demolish them and build luxury housing.
Only 10 percent of the new housing would be affordable and displaced NYCHA residents would get monthly vouchers and a “small moving stipend.”
Here is the full post:
Harlem Housing Projects To Be Demolished
By Jett Rubenstein / July 8, 2016
I am a Harlem resident originally from Boston. I have received some disturbing news regarding my community, from a very reliable source that an identified billionaire housing developer has recently purchased three Harlem housing project developments from the City Of New York, which will displace thousands of low-income families. The Polo Grounds Houses located on Frederick Douglass Boulevard at 155th Street, the Alexander Hamilton Houses on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and also the Harlem River Houses also located at Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in Harlem. These housing complexes which houses approximately 6,000 low-income tenants has been sold to a developer which will demolish the property and build 6,000 luxury condominium units ranging from 400,000-2.2 million dollars in early 2017 which 10% of the units being offered to middle income families with an average income of 58,000 a year through a special lottery. According to my sources, current tenants will be given a monthly voucher worth 1,000 dollars for rent and a small moving stipend to cover their moving expenses, but most tenants will not be guaranteed these vouchers according to a reliable source and many tenants will have to go on their own to find other housing. I have contacted several housing agencies and the Mayor’s office regarding this situation and neither agency will issue a comment regarding this breaking news matter. Of course, if I receive any additional news, I will update new information to my blog.
The blog post has gone viral getting heavy rotation on social media. It had been shared over 10,000 times on Facebook as of Monday afternoon.
In a statement to the AmNews, a NYCHA spokesperson said the rumors are completely false and that the agency has no plans of demolishing any public housing developments. The agency added that there are programs in place to prevent such a thing from happening.
“These rumors are 100% not true and irresponsible,” the statement said. “Every step NYCHA is taking under NextGeneration NYCHA, the Authority’s ten-year strategic plan, is to prevent the demolition and abandonment of public housing like other cities have done. NYCHA does not know the source of these false statements, which are intended to incite little more than panic, but residents can be assured they are completely untrue and baseless.”
The AmNews has reached out to Rubinstein about the allegation.
0% MARIJUANA 100% DANGEROUS!
Thanks to: Diana Ayala, Deputy Chief of Staff
Office of NYC Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito
105 East 116th Street, New York, NY 10029
(212) 828-9800
Judge to appoint special master to fix NYCHA’s mold issues
Dec 15, 2015
Thanks to : Rosalba Rodriguez
Deputy Director of Northern Manhattan Office
Office of Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer
431 West 125 Street – Storefront
New York, NY 10027
Office 212-531-3030
Judge to appoint special master to fix NYCHA’s mold issues
GREG B. SMITHNEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Today, 12:47 PM ET
A federal judge, fed up with NYCHA’s inability to abate toxic mold in its aging apartments, has agreed to appoint a special master to enforce a two-year-old agreement to fix the problem.
Manhattan Federal Judge William Pauley Tuesday granted a request by tenants to bring in an outside monitor to make sure the authority remediates “simple” cases of mold within seven days and “complex” mold problems within 15 days.
“The appointment of a Special Master appears warranted,” Pauley wrote in granting the request. “The failure to remediate mold and excessive moisture jeopardizes the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.”
The judge rejected a request by the tenants’ lawyers at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice to impose a penalty of $10,000 per apartment where mold returns after NYCHA claims it fixed the problem.
In his 8-page decision, Judge Pauley blasted NYCHA for its “indifference” in addressing the dangerous problem.
“NYCHA has been out of compliance with the Consent Decree from the day it was entered by this court,” he wrote.
“NYCHA’s justifications for its failure to comply are inadequate, and the attitude of NYCHA officials appears to be one of indifference.”
Pauley noted that no top NYCHA official bothered to show up at the last court hearing, and in his order Tuesday Pauley wrote that “because the health and general welfare of hundreds of thousands of NYC public housing tenants is a matter of great public importance” he will require a “senior policy-making NYCHA official” attend all future court appearances.
Two years ago this week, NYCHA signed off on a consent decree with housing advocates and lawyers who brought suit alleging that NYCHA’s failure to clean up its persistent mold problem was violating the rights of tenants who suffer from asthma.
In agreeing to the consent decree, NYCHA vowed to aggressively eradicate mold across its 328 developments. But the plaintiffs who filed the suit, the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, a conglomerate of church groups pressing for housing reform in New York City, say in dozens of cases NYCHA only painted over the mold and it soon returned.