Over the last year, the number of vacant public housing apartments in New York City has risen by nearly 50% — with just under 5,000 units sitting empty as of January, while more than 240,000 applicants languish on the New York City Housing Authority waiting list.
In a report published Wednesday, NYCHA federal monitor Bart Schwartz charged that a special team the authority’ central office created to speed up turning over vacated apartments actually had the opposite effect, slowing down the process and causing apartments to sit empty for months at a time.
The job of getting emptied apartments ready for new tenants used to be handled by staff at each housing development. Then it got more complicated after the U.S. Department of Justice accused NYCHA officials of lying about lead paint and other hazards — a case that culminated in a 2019 settlement and the monitor’s appointment.
As the number of vacant apartments began to climb, NYCHA tried a new tack beginning in early 2022, transfering the work of turning over apartments NYCHA was setting aside for homeless families to a new entity called Operational Analysis and Contract Management (OACM), overseen by NYCHA Chief Operating Officer Eva Trimble.
The monitor found that the COO “deployed the specialized group to improve turnover speed, but ultimately it was not successful.”
“The shift resulted in confusion and frustration from development staff,” Schwartz’s report determined, noting that at times local developments would begin the work “to advance the turnover of these apartments, only to have OACM come in to take control of an apartment and then have it sit vacant with no work occurring for months.”
NYCHA has previously cited a variety of reasons it hasn’t been able to get apartments ready to re-rent, including the need to clean up lead paint before bringing in new tenants.
In response to THE CITY’s questions about the monitor’s finding, Michael Horgan, a spokesperson for NYCHA stated, “Since the 2019 HUD Agreement, NYCHA has been working tirelessly to transform the Authority. We have not only rebuilt the management structure and implemented strong internal oversights but have also reformed policies and developed and employed best practices in the pillar areas, and continue to work towards solutions for the preservation of this vital affordable housing stock.”
The number of vacant apartments has been consistently growing since February 2022, when there were 460 empty units. The numbers then began to rise steadily, hitting 3,360 in January 2023. In the last year it jumped another 46% to 4,920 as of last month.
‘Work Stopped for Months’
The monitor’s team interviewed staff at local developments, who described communication lapses about who was in charge of what work, leading to needless delays in getting apartments available to rent.
“In some cases development management would initiate work orders to advance the turnover of these apartments, only to have OACM come in to take control of an apartment and then have it sit vacant with no work occurring for months,” the monitor wrote.
Managers complained that they couldn’t get straight information about which apartment turnovers would be handled by OACM and which ones were assigned to local developments. Because of this, local staff would begin doing the work and then, late in the game, the team from headquarters would arrive and order the crew to stop work so they could jump in.
“An apartment might be sitting there for so long and the development may have already started to turn it over,” one manager said. “A supervisor from [the central team] will then show up, stop us from doing work, make us cancel our work orders, and then they will take over.”
One manager at a development spelled out what this did to the speed of turnovers, recounting how after “a central unit came in to do a few turnovers…then the work stopped for months.” Three units sat empty for several months “before someone showed up to do an inspection.”
One manager told the monitor that “the problem with move outs was created by [the COO]” — adding that local developments simply stopped handling move outs for a long time, creating the current backlog of apartments sitting empty.
“It is clear this program did not work [so] the developments are being relied upon to fix the problem,” the manager told the monitor.
By August 2022, as the number of vacant units had risen to more than 2,000, NYCHA threw in the towel, returning the task of turnover to local developments. But by then, the monitor found, it was too late. As of September 2023, a NYCHA executive admitted to the monitor that it would take an additional 12 to 18 months to work through the backlog of turnover apartments.
During a City Council hearing on public housing apartment vacancies last November when the backlog was 4,800 and climbing, NYCHA COO Trimble admitted, “We know that’s a lot of vacant units given the affordable housing crisis in our city.”
At the time, Trimble noted the time it took to turn around a vacant apartment and get it back on the rent rolls was now averaging 400 days. She attributed much of the delay to the complicated task of abating lead paint in hundreds of apartments, which she estimated could add 130 days to the process.
Trimble also blamed the general “needs of our aging buildings due to decades of insufficient federal funding,” adding, “NYCHA apartments required extensive health and safety work once vacated due to their age and often deteriorated conditions.”
On Wednesday Councilmember Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) noted that during the November hearing Trimble made no mention of the bureaucratic conflicts between central office and the local developments documented by the monitor that contributed to the backlog of vacant units.
“It seems the [central] management at 250 Broadway level hates the people in the field and the people in the field hate 250 Broadway and nothing gets done,” said Brewer, whose district includes Amsterdam Houses, a NYCHA development where 40 units sat vacant late last year.
Schwartz released one of his final reports Wednesday as he approaches the end of his tenure as monitor. He was appointed in March 2019 under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development that NYCHA signed in which the authority promised to implement meaningful reform on a specific timeline.
HUD allowed NYCHA management to request an end to the monitor’s oversight after five years if they could show they’d made significant progress, but that did not happen. A law firm, Jenner & Block, will take over as monitor starting March 1.