Rethink NYCHA

For many readers of this newspaper, a dead light bulb is just an inconvenience. But for residents of the city’s deteriorating public housing complexes, it can mean a death sentence.

A number of questions remain after the tragic Saturday death of Akai Gurley in the Louis H. Pink Houses in Brooklyn. But it seems likely that if the NYCHA complex Mr. Gurley called home only had a working light bulb in a seventh-floor stairwell, a police officer on the eighth floor would have seen that the victim waiting at an elevator below posed no threat and relaxed his trigger finger.

Just think of it: a light bulb goes out, and a New Yorker dies.

Along with raising questions about practices at the NYPD — which officials like Public Advocate Letitia James are right to raise — the tragedy serves as a reminder that conditions within the city’s public housing have deteriorated to unacceptable levels.

New York should either completely revamp and reinvest in NYCHA or undertake to find a creative long-term alternative for housing low-income residents. The kinds of half-measures that have characterized the city’s handling of NYCHA for too long are a service to no one.

Earlier this fall, Comptroller Scott Stringer rolled out the latest litany of problems endemic to NYCHA: 79 percent of public housing apartments had at least one deficiency in 2011, compared to a rate of 60 percent in 2002, and the number of water leaks, broken windows and rodent sightings also went up. 

Regular stories of problems at the Marble Hill and Ft. Independent houses in these pages show NYCHA buildings within the boundaries of Community Board 8 are no exception to this dismal rule. That is to say, the tragedy that happened at the Louis H. Pink Houses could happen here.

A few months before the comptroller’s report came out, the City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio announced an influx of $210 million to NYCHA. The move seemed refreshing after former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s less than stellar record on public housing.