Amir Khafagy
Samantha Colman, a resident of New York City’s Harlem River Houses
For a little over a year, 32-year-old Samantha Colman and her seven-year-old son have proudly called New York City’s historic Harlem River Houses home. After a tumultuous year in New York’s archaic shelter system that found her being shuttled from one seedy motel to another, Colman eagerly jumped at the chance at permanent housing when the opportunity presented itself in 2019. It was her first apartment on her own, and she could not be prouder to be standing on her own two feet. Soon after settling into her new New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) apartment, however, she received a notice informing her that her building will no longer be managed by NYCHA but instead by the private contractor C&C Management, the management subsidiary of L+M Development Partners. The change was part of NYCHA’s PACT program, a local rebranding of the federal Housing and Urban Development Department’s controversial Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program.
Unsure of what that meant at first, Colman soon heard horror stories about other public-housing complexes falling into the hands of private management companies, which has led to a wave of rent hikes and evictions. With the fear of becoming homeless again hovering over her, Colman joined other concerned residents to learn more about how PACT will affect them—and, if possible, how they could fight back.
“I was all excited to have my new apartment,” she said. “It’s my first apartment ever for me and my son. So I felt accomplished, but then it’s like they’re trying to take something from you when you just got it. That’s why I got involved: I don’t want anyone to take anything from me.”
RAD is a federal grant program that incentivizes local housing authorities to seek out private investment.
Colman is not alone in her sentiments. Public-housing residents from cities ranging from Boston to New York and Milwaukee are pushing back against RAD and other private-public partnership schemes in what they see as the federal government’s plan to privatize most of the nation’s public-housing stock.
Founded in 2011 as a way to address—or evade responsibility for—the state of the nation’s decaying public housing stock, RAD is a federal grant program that incentivizes local housing authorities to seek out private investment by transferring all or some of their public-housing units to private management companies. By so doing, the government can defer HUD’s estimated $35 billion backlog of public-housing capital needs. In turn, so they can fund upgrades, the management companies are allowed to apply for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, secure a plethora of loans from banks, and apply for mortgages through the Federal Housing Administration.
On paper, city housing authorities will still own the land, but private developers will manage, renovate, and collect rent from the properties. The units are converted into Section 8, voucher-based housing. Currently, under RAD, roughly 10 percent of the nation’s public-housing stock has already been converted, while an additional 455,000 public-housing units have been authorized for conversion. New York City alone plans on converting 62,000 units, nearly a third of its public-housing stock, to private management.
Initially launched under the Obama administration, RAD was one of the few Obama-era policies that the Trump administration fully embraced and, indeed, expanded. The Biden administration has not shown any signs of changing course. HUD’s 2022 proposed budget includes $13.455 billion for contract renewals and amendments that include public-housing properties converted under RAD, with an additional $50 million RAD conversion subsidy.
“The program appealed to the privatization orientation of the Trump administration. There is very little in the RAD program design that was problematic to [Trump’s HUD secretary] Ben Carson and to Trump,” said professor Edward Goetz, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota. “It really converts public housing into another kind of subsidized housing. It relies very heavily on private-sector investment.”
RAD has seen its share of praise from both sides of the aisle, but many academics, advocates, and public-housing residents are raising the alarm about the program’s shortcomings. Ideally, the rights of public-housing residents are protected under RAD. Tenants have the right to return to their apartments without screenings. They can continue to organize resident associations. For those who are already paying 30 percent of their income toward rent, their rent will not increase. But in actuality, those rights are not always enforced. In Hopewell, Virginia, public-housing residents were repeatedly harassed and threatened with eviction after their complex was converted under RAD. Disabled tenants were denied basic accommodations.
RAD has seen its share of praise from both sides of the aisle, but many academics, advocates, and public-housing residents are raising the alarm.
“I think the RAD is very good on paper; that’s really an important preservation program for public housing that preserves a lot of tenants’ rights and long-term affordably of units. But we’ve seen that implantation has been challenging in a number of areas,” said Deborah Thorpe, supervising attorney at the National Housing Law Project. “It’s a new program, right? What was supposed to be a demonstration is now covering almost half of the public-housing stock we have throughout the country, and to date, there have been very few studies and research around the program. A lot of what we do know is anecdotal. Implementation has been challenging in part because it’s this new program that grew in size exponentially and HUD staff doesn’t have the capacity to oversee all these deals.”
Vanessa Walsh, a retired EMT, along with her granddaughter, has lived in the Harlem River Houses since 2013. Suffering from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, she depends on the accessibility, safety, and convenience that her community provides. When she learned of PACT/RAD and the new rules the new management would implement, she was alarmed.
“They got a lot of rules they put in place that NYCHA didn’t have in place, like fixing up your apartment,” she said. “You should be able to fix up your apartment the way you want to make yourself comfortable.”
Not one to take things lightly, Walsh decided to organize with other residents. Soon after Walsh commenced, residents began to feel pressured by C&C Management to sign a new lease despite their lack of knowledge of what they were signing. Their apartments were selected for random inspections. Walsh received numerous letters and announced visits.
“The feeling of security is now gone, replaced by insecurity and uncertainty as well as wonder,” said Walsh. “Wondering if I and my neighbors will eventually have to leave and become homeless. We are under fire, being bullied and pressured into accepting the RAD/PACT takeover. Trying to force us to sign new lease agreements under C&C Management that’s known for dirty tactics of bullying, harassing, and not making repairs for tenants.”
In fact, residents of the Harlem River Houses were alarmed to learn that in 2019 L+M, C&C’s parent company, was ranked as having the second-highest eviction rate in New York City. Since 2017, New York City Marshals have served 529 evictions across all C&C managed properties, with 113 evictions alone occurring at Arverne View (formerly known as Ocean Village), a New York state–subsidized affordable-housing complex; the highest of its entire portfolio. Since C&C took over the management of Arverne in 2012, it has received 2,799 New York City Housing Preservation & Development (HPD) complaints, including 1,172 complaints in just the last three years. Overall, C&C has been cited with 4,713 HPD violations and currently has 613 open violations.
Along with her neighbors Walsh and Colman, 63-year-old Lidia Gonzalez Diaz was also feeling the pressure. A disabled widow, she has lived in Harlem River since 2008—alone since her mother passed away last Mother’s Day from COVID. When she received her new lease, she refused to sign it without understanding what exactly PACT was. She then claims that she was threatened by C&C with eviction if she did not sign. Diaz then reached out to organizers with the United Front Against Displacement, a national coalition organizing public-housing residents, and began to organize a dozen of her neighbors to launch a rent strike and class action suit against NYCHA.
“I’m still a little scared because NYCHA is so big and they use a lot of tactics that could evict us. If they padlock my door, [I don’t know] where I will go,” she said. “But I don’t care anymore. I really don’t. If we don’t do this [rent strike], they will take over all our buildings. We got to push and keep pushing until we win.”
Amir Khafagy
Residents of West Harlem take part in community outreach.
Abraham Zamcheck, an organizer with the United Front Against Displacement, believes that the only leverage residents have is to not passively accept the conversion but to actively disrupt it.
“Most people I’ve talked to know this is a bad deal and won’t want to sign the lease,” he said. “They are being forced to believe that they don’t have a choice and will be evicted if they refuse. But because the whole process is so phony in terms of resident engagement, they are actually aware that their only choice is to not play ball and not to sign. And that’s what many are doing on their own.”
Since Obama left office, Congress has expanded RAD from 225,000 units to 455,000 units. The RAD conversions have taken place with very little federal oversight. A U.S. Government Accountability Office study on RAD found that “HUD’s focus on the conversion process itself (and less on its results), as well as limitations in HUD’s data, have contributed to limited monitoring by HUD. Specifically, by not developing and implementing monitoring procedures to assess the effect of RAD on residents, HUD cannot ensure compliance with resident safeguards.”
Although residents are guaranteed protection so they can stay in their homes, unauthorized evictions are not uncommon. In New York’s Ocean Bay Apartments, one of the flagship RAD developments, the eviction rate is among the highest in the city—one reason why tenants remain skeptical of the program.
Janine Henderson has lived in Ocean Bay for 27 years, raising her four children there. At first, she welcomed RAD and looked forward to the renovations. But after $560 million in renovations, including a state-of-the-art boiler system, Henderson found that things have gotten worse. Her rent has increased, yet, despite the new boiler system, she said that her apartment was still freezing during the winter, She was forced to buy a space heater to keep her four-year-old granddaughter warm.
“It’s the same old two-step,” she said. “The outside looks beautiful, but they put cheap-ass things in here. All the things that they showed us the apartment would look like—it doesn’t. The shit we got had been refurbished. The refrigerators were shit, excuse my French.”
Although residents are guaranteed protection so they can stay in their homes, unauthorized evictions are not uncommon.
In response to the Prospect’s inquiry, Rochel Leah Goldblatt, NYCHA’s deputy press secretary, insists that none of Ocean Bay’s eviction cases were due to tenants losing their rights. They claim that the Legal Aid Society reviewed all the cases and found that none of the evictions that took place at Ocean Bay were avoidable.
“NYCHA has enhanced our resident engagement process to ensure that households are more prepared to transition to PACT,” she said. “We require that our development teams include providers that can enhance social services, such as emergency assistance or eviction prevention programs. We have also developed housing retention guidelines for our PACT property managers to ensure that all households have been provided with appropriate processes, resources, and support prior to starting a formal legal proceeding.”
Jonathan Gouveia, NYCHA’s executive vice president for real estate development, admits that it has been challenging to convey all the facts about the program to residents, but claims that NYCHA has made its best effort to educate tenants. Fear about the program, he says, has been spread by outside agitators.
“Look, I get that there is a lot of fear out there, a lot of misinformation, and people are confused—and there are just some other folks intentionally spreading misinformation. But once we have conversations with real people living in our developments, I can say that a lot of folks come to understand that the protections are there.”
The National Housing Law Project’s Thorpe contends that RAD is fraught with lax oversight and little tenant involvement, which remains the most persistent barrier to the success of the program.
“We have seen a lot of successful deals, which are typically in places where the community has the resources to put into these conversions. But in a lot of places, it has been problematic because there is no oversight. You need the tenants and advocates at the table monitoring it. If they’re not, a lot can go wrong.”
With the number of RAD conversions expected to skyrocket in the coming years, Thorpe believes that the program as it currently stands will hurt residents more than it will benefit them.
“Based on the information that has been presented, tenants could face rent increases, evictions, and harassment under RAD.”
Kristen Hackett, a Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and organizer with the Justice for All Coalition, which is organizing public-housing tenants against RAD, believes the program is a continuation of the federal government’s legacy of racist public-housing policies.
“Today, 90 percent of NYCHA residents are Black or Latinx. These are the descendants of the formerly enslaved and colonized and they don’t find themselves living in public housing by some fluke,” she said. “This is the direct result of ongoing historical processes which disinvest in impoverished and ghettoized neighborhoods and discriminate against and displace and exploit Black and brown lives—for the profit of a wealthy white minority of land grabbers and holders. RAD and other privatization plans for public housing continue these processes.”
Given Congress’s decades-long resistance to fully funding public housing, many argue that RAD is the best of the bad options. Not all public-housing experts agree, however.
“It’s not that RAD is the best option, it’s the only option,” said the University of Minnesota’s Goetz. “Congress has systematically underfunded public housing. It has even underfunded its own standards for the maintenance of public housing over time. Essentially, it starved local housing authorities so that they have no other alternative.” HUD did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.
Given the seemingly monumental task of saving public housing, Lidia Gonzalez Diaz knows the odds that are stacked against her. But she feels that if she doesn’t at least try, displacement will be all but certain.
“We were all scared. We were afraid, but we said no. If we don’t do anything, we won’t have a chance to win.”
Nor for Samantha Colman is giving up an option. Night after night, she loses sleep over the fear of what RAD will bring. Imagining being forced back to the homeless shelter makes her stomach knot.
“If [RAD] happens, what’s my next move? I shouldn’t have to wake up feeling anxiety every day. I don’t want to be homeless again. I don’t want to put my son through that again.”
