The day after an NYPD police officer fatally shot 28-year-old Akai Gurley in East New York’s Louis Pink Houses, crews from nearby public housing complexes converged on his building and fixed it up, residents say. The repair workers replaced broken light bulbs, fixed the elevator, and installed a lock on the front door for the first time in years.
But in its hurry to address long-neglected problems, the New York City Housing Authority created another problem when it failed to issue many resident keys to the building. More than three weeks after the shooting and the installation of a lock on the lobby door, the only way many residents can get in is by waiting patiently by the door until someone lets them in from inside.
Many of the maintenance failures at the Pink Houses—and all across public housing in the city—have been recast as safety and security issues in the wake of the death of Gurley. Bad lighting may have been a factor in why rookie Officer Peter Liang was allegedly startled by the Gurley’s approach in a seventh floor stairwell. Gurley was unarmed and is said to have merely tired of waiting for an elevator.
Council Member Ritchie Torres, who chairs the Committee on Public Housing, held a hearing on Tuesday on the “Relationship between Lighting and Safety in the Wake of the Akai Gurley Shooting.” Torres and fellow council members spent much of the three and half hour hearing grilling housing authority head Shola Olatoye on the authority’s record as New York City’s biggest landlord.
The strongest indictment of the authority, known as NYCHA, came from Karin Coldwell, tenant association leader for Pink Houses. After the shooting, “then all of a sudden they can find the money to do repairs,” she said in her testimony before the city council members. “Nothing occurs until something happens.”
Whatever blame lies with NYCHA’s lapse in management, the consensus at the hearing was that government disinvestment was behind many of the problems that plague public housing.
“The image of a dimly lit stairwell in Pink Houses tells a larger story about the decline of public housing in New York City,” Torres said. “If the city and the state truly think that black lives matter, then the political establishment should stop disinvesting from the safety and black and brown lives in public housing.” Torres, who is 26 and from from the Bronx, was pointing to a decision by Governor George Pataki in 1998 to eliminate the state’s $10 million dollars in operating subsidies for NYCHA, and also to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to reduce the city’s operating subsides from $30 million to $10 million in 2002 and then to eliminate them altogether in 2003. Currently, 97 percent of the Housing Authority’s budget comes from federal funds.
Community Service Society, one of the city’s main public housing advocacy groups, released a report this summer detailing the effect of the disinvestment. “The impact on resident living conditions has been disastrous, spurring a mounting resident outcry about elevator breakdowns, perennial water leaks, untreated mold, and the like. Long delays in getting repairs were common—often a year or two,” the report said.
The Pink Houses have 3,400 interior space lights and 400 exterior lights. Immediately after the shooting, when NYCHA inspected the development, it found and fixed 143 broken lights, Olatoye said. That work, however, barely puts a dent in the backlog of 85,000 maintenance and repair orders across New York City’s public housing, as per NYCHA’s metric from October.
“We are facing 20 years of deferred maintenance for NYCHA housing,” Olatoye said. “The current budget does not provide for safety and security enhancements.”
In his questioning of Olatoye and her aide, Torres delved into NYCHA’s maintenance protocols. Repairs are classified into three categories: emergency, urgent, and routine. The light in the stairwell where Gurley was shot went unnoticed by the building staff but had it been reported, the repair should have taken about a week—light replacements are considered the lowest priority repair.
Torres criticized NYCHA’s system, saying that a broken light causing a stairwell to go pitch dark is a major concern for residents. Oyatole conceded that NYCHA is now reconsidering its classifications.
Some relief may be coming to public housing residents early next year. NYCHA announced on Tuesday during the hearing that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has committed $101 million dollars from bank settlement funds to improve security across 15 public housing developments. The money is a coming from an $8.8 billion payout by BNP Paribas, over allegations the French bank violated U.S. economic sanctions by accepting business from clients in blacklisted countries.
New York State was the recipient of 5.1 billion of those dollars and Torres called on Governor Andrew Cuomo to spend a “substantial share” of the windfall on public housing. He also called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to direct some of city’s $8 billion in housing plan subsidies toward public housing.
NYCHA is not the only government body receiving renewed scrutiny in the fallout of Gurley’s death. Torres and Council Member Vanessa Gibson, chair of the Committee on Public Safety, announced on Tuesday a hearing for next month on NYPD’s protocol for vertical patrols, that is, officers walking up and down apartment building staircases.
At the end of Tuesday’s hearing, Torres gave a preview of what may be expected next month. The council member took a swing at NYPD’s policy of enforcing NYCHA rules even when the violations are non-criminal in nature. For example, officers on patrol in public housing will write up residents for noise, or they’ll stop and question residents who are lingering in the lobby. He characterized the practice as belonging to the “Broken Windows” theory long-championed by Police Commissioner William Bratton. Torres said the practice raises “the risk of confrontation between police and citizens.”
“The core notions of ‘Broken Windows’ have to be rethought in the wake of Garner and Gurley,” he added. “It’s an inherently biased form of policing.” Bratton and others have argued that the philosophy of zeroing in on small crimes has helped prevent bigger ones, and is one reason for the city’s declining crime rate.
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