By Xenia Pamulaklakin, Staff Reporter
Public housing residents welcome the city's new admission policy that gives preference to working families over welfare recipients, but tenant advocates question whether it will succeed -- and how it will affect the poor if it does.
When the city Housing Authority announced the new policy two weeks ago, it said the goal was to have working families, the elderly and welfare recipients each make up a third of every project. The mix, officials said, would lower crime rates in the projects.
Most borough projects now have have between 1 and 10 percent working families, authority records show.
"We see so much vandalism here, and it shows people just don't care," said Rosa Boiro, 50, a resident of the Webster and Morrisania Houses along Webster Avenue. "I think if people actually pay for a part of their rent out of the money they've worked for, they'll be more interested in making it a good place to live."
When the first housing projects opened in 1934, applicants had to go through a stringent screening process that included "morality factors" such as arrest records and alcoholism. In the 1970s, under pressure from civil rights groups to provide easier access to housing for the poor, the policy was relaxed.
The new guidelines, which are supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, bring back the more stringent screening process in an attempt to restore stability in the projects.
But Carmen Allende, 63, director of the South Bronx Action Group, a tenant advocay organization, said the policy will have little effect because there is no space available for new tenants -- working or not.
"It all depends on how fast people in the projects are going to move out, but as I see it, no one is going to move out any time soon," she said.
The apartment turnover rate in the city's 337 projects is 4 percent, or roughly 8,000 units a year. Of the 46,000 apartments in the borough, only 2,510 were vacated this year. Under the new guidelines, half of all empty units will be given to working families on the waiting list.
At present, however, only 14,000 of the 186,000 applicants on the citywide waiting list are working families -- about 1,000 of whom have applied for housing in the borough.
Allende said subsidy programs that help cover rents in privately owned buildings are more popular than public housing among both working families and on those on public assistance.
"The terrible conditions in the projects do not really encourage people to live there,'' she said. "At least in subsidized housing, you have landlords who are compelled to fix things for you, but in a project you're on your own."
Knowing that conditions will be an issue in attracting working families to the projects, the Housing Authority has started a $48 million renovation at one Queens project. Housing Authority spokesman Allen Monczyk could not say when the borough could expect similar improvements.
Angel Caballero, director of the Davidson Community Center, another tenant advocay organization, acknowledged the merits of the new policy, but said the center has about six years' worth of pending applications for public housing.
"I just feel that less and less housing will be available for the poor people that need affordable housing," Caballero said.