Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine Outside Jay-Z’s former apartment, Marcy Houses, Brooklyn. In the current climate, the prospect of more money from the Feds seemed remote. With older developments like the Red Hook Houses, built in 1939 and sinking into the loam like a Mayan ruin, the capital budget shortfall-the money needed to repair the aging housing stock-exceeded $6 billion and was likely to balloon to a mind-boggling $14 billion by 2016. But now, the daily operating budget was millions in the red. For years, NYCHA was considered the most successful public-housing organization in the country, a vast, unwieldy, often-complained-about bureaucracy that somehow managed to maintain at least the illusion of acceptable marginality. Currently, 26 percent of working-age project residents are unemployed, a nearly threefold rise since 2008.Įarlier this year, after a decade of chronic underfunding from the Feds, John Rhea, NYCHA chairman, told the City Council what it already knew: Public housing was in dire straits. This was followed by the crash, a greater economic disaster at the Edenwald Houses in the Bronx than on Wall Street.
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Over at the Polo Grounds Towers on Coogan’s Bluff, where the Say Hey Kid once ran free, Bloods and Crips marched by windows in full colors. Then came the gangs, bands of territorial youths calling themselves the 40 Wolves, Gun Clapping Goonies, Broad Day Shooters, and Fuck Shit Up (FSU).
In the South Bronx, whole families at the Mott Haven houses were addicted, parents copping behind the developments, kids in front, hiding their stash so mom and dad wouldn’t steal it.
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The eighties and early nineties were the crack era. Only in New York does public housing remain on a large scale, remnants of the days when the developments were considered a bulwark of social liberalism, a way to move up. Louis imploded Pruitt-Igoe, New Orleans flattened Lafitte after Katrina. Across the U.S., public housing, condemned as a tax-draining vector of institutionalized mayhem and poverty, whipping-boy symbol of supposedly foolhardy urban policy, has largely disappeared. Indeed, perhaps Nychaland’s most compelling attribute is the fact that it exists at all. If Nychaland was a city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous in the U.S., bigger than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of Cincinnati.ĭespite these prodigious stats, the projects remain a mystery to most New Yorkers, a shadow city within the city, out of sight and mind, except when someone gets shot or falls down an elevator shaft-just these bad-news redbrick piles to whiz by on the BQE. The population of Nychaland is usually cited at 400,000, but this number is universally regarded as too low, since most everyone knows someone living “off lease.” One NYCHA employee says that “600,000 is more like it.” That’s about 8 percent of New York-with 160,000 families on the waiting list. It is almost unthinkably huge: 334 “developments” spread from Staten Island’s Berry Houses to Throgs Neck in the Bronx-178,895 apartments in 2,602 buildings situated on an aggregate 2,486 acres, an area three times the size of Central Park. New York might be a city of neighborhoods, but Nychaland is a zone of its own. My visit to the Linden Houses was part of a self-guided tour of what I’d come to call “Nychaland.” As in NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority, a.k.a. Lloyd Blankfein of the world, right here?” the man declared.
Currently reside in Manhattan with wife Laura and three kids. It said: “Graduate of Jefferson (’71), Gershwin (’68), P.S. Still, the Goldman CEO apparently retained affection for his childhood home, once sending a post to the East New York Project, a website for people nostalgic for the days of egg creams and spaldeens. That was in the fifties and sixties, before the white people moved out of the projects and East New York became one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Son of a postal clerk and a receptionist at a burglar-alarm factory, Blankfein had grown up right there, at 295 Cozine Avenue, a redbrick building more or less exactly like the other eighteen redbrick buildings at the Linden Houses. “He used to live in this building,” I said. They ruled Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission too, sat at the table with the Illuminati. In the projects, when someone who looks like me comes up to you, it almost has to be bad news: a cop, a process server, a guy from the Housing Authority. Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York MagazineĪsked if he’d heard of Lloyd Blankfein, the man in the Yankees cap standing by 295 Cozine Avenue in East New York muttered, “What he do?”