The Fight Against Privatization on Manhattan’s Upper East Side

(Editor’s Note: This story was written during fall 2022 for my NYU Journalism Capstone.)

La Keesha Taylor had never noticed her popcorn ceiling until white light dust began to trickle down onto her floor and furniture. Fearing she could be exposed to asbestos, a carcinogen commonly found in ceilings constructed prior to the late 1980s, she contacted her super at Holmes Tower, a public housing development on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

But Taylor, a 48-year resident of the complex, was told that her ceiling was safe because the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the public corporation that oversees more than 177,000 apartments across the city, had replaced it decades earlier.

“I knew that was a lie,” said Taylor, a lifelong resident of the complex located between First and York avenues from East 92nd to East 95th streets. “I would have remembered a big project of NYCHA coming to my home to replace it, and there was no such project.”

Taylor is one of thousands of residents living in the city’s sprawling public housing system who have reported frequent elevator outages, hot water disruptions, rodent infestations and extreme heat fluctuations over the last few years. In response to the growing crisis, city officials have turned to privatization to solve the growing number of repairs.

Although the agency is the largest of its kind in the country, the living conditions of its units are the result of decades of divestment and neglect, according to several residents. The problems have been especially acute in Holmes Tower and the neighboring Isaacs Houses, which in 2018, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ranked as two of the worst public housing complexes in the country. The previous year, they were tied for 13th out of 3,800 maintenance scores determined by inspectors. The two developments — comprising more than 1,1000 units — are occupied by people whose gross income is below the local and national poverty lines.

Taylor and longtime Isaacs resident Saundrea Coleman co-founded the Isaacs-Holmes Coalition in 2019, and have continued working to combat the city’s worsening conditions in the nation’s largest public housing association. The two complexes total more than 1,100 units.

“People are beaten down and tired,” Taylor said. “I get tired, but then I get fed up. And most of the time, fed-up overrules tired.”

Taylor’s parents were among the first Black families to move into Holmes shortly after the development opened in 1973. At 18, Taylor was added to the lease, but later decided to move to the Bronx for a year. When her parents told her that they were going to retire in the south — which she said is common for those who grew up living in NYCHA housing — she returned to her family’s 25th-floor apartment.

Taylor, who now lives with her sons Ethan and Anthony, ages 7 and 11, respectively, said the living conditions in Holmes have become “progressively worse” in recent years. When she wakes up in the morning and returns home later in the day, she worries if she will still have hot water and proper heating. On some days, when the elevators stop working, Taylor and her sons have to walk up and down 50 flights of stairs if they leave their apartment.

“I’m really tired of this idea that people in power, particularly NYCHA and tenant association presidents — they tell you and they want you to believe,” Taylor said. “‘Well, at least this development is better than dot, dot, dot. That’s equal to people just telling you to be grateful with what we’re giving you, be happy with these little scraps of us fulfilling what we’re supposed to do. They’re getting hand over fist money, just to be the worst landlord.”

During the winter, Taylor said the heating in her apartment is never consistent. After she complained about how there was not enough heat, she now receives too much. She added how she has to closely watch her sons to make sure they do not touch and burn their skin from the radiators, and she had to buy a thermometer to monitor the high temperatures the heat was reaching — one time up to 220 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The burden is always on you,” she said. “Every night, when I thought it was too hot, I had to get up, jump up, go hit it and film it. I have to film it rising up, stop filming, snap a picture when it hit the highest point — it’s exhausting. And if I’m at the very top and I have the last temperature, and it’s that high, how high is it at the middle, how high is it at the bottom?”

Coleman, a native of The Bronx, had waited seven years to be placed into public housing on the Upper East Side. Her ex-husband, who was a caretaker at NYCHA, had told her that the two towers were among the best public housing complexes in the city. She moved to Holmes in early 1992, and has lived in the same building for 23 years.

Coleman said that one of her biggest issues has been the mold build-up in her bathroom, which she believes has been caused by water leaks that were never repaired. She said she has woken up with headaches and stuffy noses from the exposure, noting how the pandemic had slowed down the response time for repairs.

“They broke the wall and I had this thick plastic,” Coleman said of an unfinished repair in her bathroom. “When I was showering, you could hear stuff in the walls, and I didn’t know what it was.”

Fueled by their frustrations, Taylor and Coleman, alongside more than two dozen residents, in 2019 successfully sued the agency to repair their elevators, fix the water system, and fully exterminate infestations. Taylor said it still took the agency over a year to complete the basic repairs for their aging amenities.

In response to a plan to replace a playground at Holmes with a 300-unit, mixed income 47-story tower, Coleman and Taylor formed the Holmes-Isaacs Coalition to advocate for improved living conditions for NYCHA residents across the five boroughs.

“This was the playground that my youngest son learned to walk on,” Taylor said. “This is the playground where I grew up. I refused.”

The proposal, designed by private real estate developer Fetner Properties, was planned to be the first development of NYCHA’s 50/50 projects, with half of the units offered at market-rate value, and the other designated for residents making less than 60% of the neighborhood’s median income. An additional $25 million in funds raised by the market-value apartments was to go toward repairs, NYCHA officials said.

Coleman and Taylor were among a handful of residents who actively attended planning board meetings, City Council hearings and NYCHA roundtables to discuss the plan. The residents, citing the demolition of the playground and the obstruction of light, all opposed the proposal, but Taylor said she and Coleman became the two “disruptors.” Shola Olatoye, the former NYCHA chair, remained adamantly in favor of the project.

“She basically told us to our face, ‘We’re building this building, regardless of what you want,’” Taylor said. “That was the fire. I was like, ‘Oh hell no. This is not going to happen.’”

Coleman has since become the co-chair of the Social Justice Committee on Community Board 8, which represents the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island. After four years of back-and-forth, she said the coalition helped organize a public hearing in 2019 to enable more residents to testify before NYCHA leadership and elected officials.

The night before the meeting, she rediscovered a letter written by stakeholders three years prior, calling on former agency chair Kathryn Garcia to go through the city’s uniform land use review process.

The letter, which Coleman recited at the meeting, became the basis of the lawsuit against NYCHA in April of the same year. Filed by former Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, the lawsuit claimed that the agency did not comply with state and local law that requires full community input when creating development plans.

In June, NYCHA shelved the plan, and housing officials hoped the lawsuit would be dropped. Attorneys representing the agency had immediately moved to dismiss the case and attempted to reconfigure the plan

“In keeping with NYCHA 2.0 vision, we are reevaluating our previous plans at Holmes Towers so that we can continue to engage residents in a meaningful manner while also addressing the $58.9 million needed to improve their quality of life,” agency spokesperson Chester Soria said in a statement to Patch following the plan’s withdrawal.

James Rodriguez, an assistant professor in the School of Labor and Urban Studies at the City University of New York, noted the paradox of the outstanding repair needs of Holmes residents and NYCHA seeking to build a large tower in the middle of their complex.

He said the push toward privatization in one of the nation’s most unaffordable cities continues to threaten the future of public housing, as New York City has become one of the most unaffordable cities in the country.

“This created a real physical dimension to the divide that is happening in the city, both around income inequality and around rental housing, which is at the crux of this issue,” Rodriguez said. “As much as so many points of it are animated by residents’ present-day living conditions, there’s also a real need, desire and value for maintaining this institution for future generations. Folks don’t want their apartment fixed right now — they want this to remain a critical source of housing for generations to come.”

After their activism led to the eventual reversal of the proposal, Coleman and Taylor turned their attention to demanding what they believe the plan should have included in the first place: ways to combat the poor living conditions in Holmes and Isaacs.

According to city officials, NYCHA needs more than $40 billion to repair and renovate all of its developments — a result of underfunding from the city, state and federal governments over the last decade. The system, which currently serves around one in 15 New York residents, previously was seen as a model of affordable housing for the rest of the country.

Established in 1934 by former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the purpose of NYCHA was to mitigate the city’s housing crisis following the Great Depression. Its creation came after decades of advocacy to reform housing for poor and working-class communities, as many lived in substandard buildings that lacked ventilation, sanitation and safety measures.

The agency, within four years since its inception, demolished around 1,100 tenement buildings and 10,000 rental units, while property managers vacated 40,000 apartments. NYCHA’s “clearance, replanning, and reconstruction” of New York slums ultimately created a shortage of affordable housing for families across the city.

With the support of the state and federal governments, NYCHA then turned to providing public housing to alleviate the deficit. In 1935, the agency opened a development — the first of 335 — in the East Village, known as the First Houses. Due to an increased demand among residents for inexpensive apartments, in which rent cost $6 a room per month, the agency expanded its housing system into upper Manhattan and Brooklyn.

However, NYCHA excluded most poor and working-class residents from living in its units between 1953 to 1969 through screenings based on “need and merit,” including questions about insurance policies and bank accounts, single motherhood and furniture ownership. Once admitted, all of the developments were segregated, with Williamsburg open to only white residents and Harlem only to Black residents.

“We don’t want to act in such a way and do this thing in such a way that it will deter white people from going into projects,” Mary Simkhovitch, a social worker and member of NYCHA’s board, said at the time.

Despite the discriminatory policies, most NYCHA developments were predominately comprised of majority Black and Puerto Rican residents by 1959. In 1968, city officials and social justice activists called on the agency to accept more low-income families in need of housing, leading to twice the number of public assistance in the next decade as NYCHA began to oversee the Section 8 housing program in 1973.

While New York public housing had flourished, other systems across the country declined into disrepair, including developments in Chicago and Atlanta. However, NYCHA became victim to decades of disinvestment by local, state and federal governments starting in the 1980s — a period which marked the height of the city’s crack epidemic and an uptick in violence and vandalism. The lack of oversight has led to aging apartments and amenities, mounting renovation costs and growing spending deficits, according to residents.

The deterioration of public housing has prompted state legislators to pass the Public Housing Preservation Trust — a funding mechanism aimed at settling the maintenance needs across NYCHA — which Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law in June. Under the trust, around 25,000 apartments will be leased under a public benefit corporation to use private dollars raised to fund repairs across developments.

The bill, first introduced in 2020, was on its third version when it passed following fierce opposition from NYCHA residents, many who have argued that the trust would de-prioritize community needs and ultimately lead to full privatization. While tenants of each campus have the option to vote on whether they would participate in the program, the trust would convert a development from the traditional Section 9 public housing model to Section 8, which would provide residents with rental vouchers in order to pool funds together to borrow private money for repairs.

Coleman said the coalition’s success at Holmes is only one example of how most residents are against privatization in their own developments, and instead want to fund NYCHA to address the ongoing repair needs.

“The lack of care and a lack of respect, the disregard for Black and brown people, poor management, poor policies in place, and now it’s ‘Everything is OK, we can fix it this way,” she said. “We can fix it that way with privatization. But who benefits?”

Professor Rodriguez, who grew up living in public housing on the Lower East Side, said the citywide push for privatization is part of a broader narrative that predates the current state of the agency. He called the disinvestment of public housing a “paradox,” stressing how the city government is justifying its move away from the system, despite elected officials causing and exacerbating the problem in the first place.

“There are so many ways that NYCHA as an institution has fallen short — be it maintenance, be it repairs, be it responding and listening to residents,” Rodriguez said. “Yet at the same time, residents are also organizing really independently, fiercely and steadfastly around their living conditions and around NYCHA as an institution. Folks are not saying ‘NYCHA is a failure, let’s get rid of it.’ It is actually the other flip side of this coin.”

Ocean Bay Houses in Far Rockaway became the first development to undergo privatization in late 2016 under the Rental Assistance Demonstration, a federal program aimed at transferring campuses to private management. In New York City, the program has been rebranded as the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together. Between January 2017 and February 2019, a report found that 80 households were evicted directly after privatization occurred — more than double the next highest rate in Brownsville.

Following Ocean Bay’s conversion, NYCHA has been in the process of privatizing more than 21,000 apartments across the city, and the agency hopes to triple the number by 2028. In response, several tenant advocacy organizations and residents have protested against NYCHA’s turn to privatization in recent years.

Ryan Costello, a member of the anti-gentrification group United Front Against Displacement, said that privatization is part of a larger effort to transform the demographics of the city, and particularly poor neighborhoods. He called the conversions a path to “playgrounds for the rich,” and emphasized how the transition away from public housing will limit working-class families from having the opportunity to permanently live in the five boroughs.

“We have the largest concentration of wealth and disparity in wealth in human history,” Costello said. “And we have a political system which has facilitated that to the utmost degree, while increasingly cutting all the minor benefits people had at least since the ’90s. We’re told supposedly our representatives are the way we can have democracy, and the way we can make change, but time and time again, we’ve seen one administration to the next that has not done one serious thing to even stop the bleeding, let alone heal the wound.”

Louis Flores, a member of Fight for NYCHA, is working with residents living in two developments in Chelsea to fight against their privatization. The agency proposed for the two complexes, Fulton and Elliot-Chelsea, to implement infill development and transition to private management.

The new development, which would contain nearly 700 units among four sites, would raise only one-fifth of the $366 million needed for maintenance repairs. The rest of the funding would instead be generated through the PACT program — a move that Flores and others have decried over the past year. In hopes of keeping Fulton and Elliot-Chelsea public, Flores has filed a similar lawsuit to Holmes and Isaacs and is waiting on the ruling to see if the same arguments apply.

“Without it, we would be at a loss, and so would other people,” he said. “The government still has an obligation to provide housing, because the same market system will never provide low-cost housing to people earning low incomes. There is a government role for that, and we can’t turn our backs to it. That’s why public housing needs to stay public.”

At Holmes and Issacs, Coleman and Taylor are continuing to advocate for the everyday needs of their neighbors. Across the two developments, scaffolding with layered light gray netting lines the paths connecting the six towers, and residents have to walk under and next to construction when leaving and entering their apartments.

The $4 million project is part of the HPD’s plan to repair the roofs of the developments, which is set for completion by November 2023. According to Taylor, she has complained to New York City Council Member Julie Menin, who currently represents the 5th district, about the lack of safety mirrors, proper signage and the narrowness of the walkways.

“When it rains, it’s utterly disgusting,” Taylor said. “I dread the first snowfall, because I have no idea what we’re going to go through when it snows. When it first rained, we were tracking so much mud into our homes — that’s what started my first set of emails.”

Anna Correa, a spokesperson for Menin’s office, said they are aware of complaints from residents about the renovations. She noted how they attend monthly resident association meetings at Holmes to hear from tenants about their concerns, and frequently meet with tenant leaders and the management team.

“We have been advocating to NYCHA on a variety of issues, including better lighting under the scaffolding, and our Director of Constituent Services has already convened a meeting with the 19th Precinct’s Commanding Officer and Tenant leadership to discuss security concerns,” Correa said.

Coleman has also started a log tracking reports from residents to ensure their cases are properly handled by the agency. She said she has helped her next-door neighbors, who are seniors, fulfill a repair request after the husband caught 50 mice throughout their apartment.

“I cannot leave my building into this community without being stopped, pretty much on a day-to-day basis,” Coleman said. “When I know I have something to do, I plan to leave 10 minutes early, because I know I’m going to be stuck.”

Taylor hopes the Isaacs-Holmes Coalition will serve as an outlet for the community to know someone is listening and will fight for their basic needs.

“If you stand up and fight, you have the right,” Taylor said. “We are entitled to the same rules and regulations that everyone in New York is, and the only problem is that many people don’t know this. Many people are afraid to fight because they have been retaliated against. We have to stand up for this, we have to fight for this and we have to help others.”