Why NYCHA Tenants Will Be Misled By Lander’s Eviction Audit

To paraphrase a famous line, real estate without evictions is like Christianity without Hell.

But zealots don’t weaponize Hell to scare people from going to church. Unfortunately, they do use evictions to paint the real estate industry as the Devil.

Which is exactly what they will do with Comptroller Brad Lander’s audit of private operators of New York City Housing Authority developments.

The activists will cherry-pick from the audit’s data and media coverage to legitimize their apocalyptic predictions of “privatization.” This matters, because NYCHA tenants have the power to reject the program, which taps private firms to rescue their developments from public housing’s own version of Hell.

It’s easy to be fooled. “Evictions spike at NYCHA properties under private partnership program,” QNS.com blared. A PIX11 headline said, “Evictions higher at private housing under private management.”

Lander didn’t sensationalize the audit, but he played up the eviction risk, which got the mayoral candidate TV time.

Debunking misleading stories takes longer than creating them. But I will try to be brief.

The program, called PACT, moves NYCHA developments from unreliable Section 9 funding to reliable Section 8 rent vouchers. This allows private firms to borrow against future rent revenue to make desperately needed renovations to public housing. Section 8 also pays for professional management, which most public housing tenants have never experienced.

PACT has been a smashing success. It is bringing as many as 63,000 of NYCHA’s 177,000 apartments from purgatory into something closer to Heaven. Units get repairs and modern appliances, and campuses get new roofs, facades, lighting, lobbies, windows and landscaping, not to mention reliable elevators and boilers that actually provide heat.

The audit found large percentage increases in eviction filings and actual evictions under PACT from fiscal 2022 to 2023.

But here’s where context matters. NYCHA’s eviction rate had been 0.01 percent. It had nowhere to go but up.

Why was the eviction rate so low? Not because everyone was paying rent; the authority only collected 65 percent of rent in 2022, and tenants’ arrears swelled to $443 million. Poor collection is one reason buildings deteriorate.

NYCHA turned to private firms to get renovations done and improve management. The threat of eviction is necessary to accomplish that. Otherwise, too many tenants don’t pay rent, which is unfair to those who do and leads to horrible conditions for everyone.

So, did the private firms go on an eviction spree? Absolutely not.

Their eviction rate last fiscal year was 0.57 percent. That’s fewer than 6 of every 1,000 households. The previous fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2022, it was unusually low at 0.18 percent — because the statewide eviction moratorium didn’t end until January and housing court was horrendously backlogged. Even when the court is functioning normally, it often takes more than a year to evict someone.

Yet QNS.com called the jump from 0.18 percent to 0.57 percent “a staggering increase of 300 percent.” Classic journalistic malpractice.

PACT evictions in 2023 totaled only 91 out of 15,983 units — hardly staggering, and below the citywide rate.

Meanwhile, at properties still operated by NYCHA, the eviction rate went from 0.01 percent to 0.12 percent. For whatever reason, QNS.com did not call that “a staggering increase of 11,000 percent.”

Lander’s audit spotlighted C&C Management’s 1.11 percent eviction rate — “almost twice the citywide rate” — at the Linden, Baychester and Murphy, and Harlem River PACT projects.

But C&C’s eviction rate was 0 percent the year before, which suggests that 2023 represents two years’ worth of evictions.

Incidentally, C&C wiped out all tenants’ rent arrears upon taking over from NYCHA. Everyone got a fresh start.

The comptroller’s office says it did the audit at the request of a NYCHA residents committee that it formed. Few tenants will read the 67-page report, however, or put it into context. Their takeaway will be, “If I vote for PACT, I risk being evicted.”

An audit that causes tenants to reject public housing’s most successful program does them a grave disservice. Full stop.

Although Lander has not taken a position on PACT, I am certain that if elected mayor, he would support it, just as the last two administrations did. He owes it to NYCHA tenants and all New Yorkers to tell them if that is the case.