During a forum billed as Prospects for Black America organized by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, federal Housing Secretary Ben Carson said he wanted to encourage public housing residents to act more like homeowners by handling their own apartment repairs.
The New York City Housing Authority has a $17 billion backlog of maintenance requests. But many of the problems are of a serious nature and include building-wide items such as leaky roofs, crumbling facades and mold infestations.
At the forum, Carson told the audience he wanted to create escrow accounts for public housing residents that would hold money for apartment repairs. The accounts would have the potential of growing over a period of time if, instead of calling on the housing authority to fix their apartments, tenants opted to handle problems themselves.
"Your toilet's running, I'm not calling the [public housing authority], I'm lifting the lid. I'm gonna see if I can fix it because I'm saving the money," Carson said. "And if you leave public assistance within 5 to 10 years, you get the money for a down payment."
A spokesman for HUD tried to walk back Carson's remarks and said the secretary wanted to promote a culture of self-sufficiency, and was not suggesting that such a program would address the serious conditions in public housing developments across the city.
City Councilman Ritchie Torres, who represents part of the Bronx and chairs a committee on public housing, accused Carson of having a cartoonish view of residents.
"The old roofs and bricks are falling apart, not because tenants are dependent, but because the federal government has been derelict in not paying for the roofs and bricks," Torres said.
A Manhattan Institute housing policy expert, Howard Husock, said Carson's approach could work for modest repairs, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development needed to attract more financing from the private sector in order to address more serious issues.
"This is a modest complement that could, as the secretary suggested, encourage people to feel a little bit more like homeowners than dependents," Husock said. "But it's not going to replace the large-scale maintenance that the housing authority has to undertake."
Deborah Goddard, executive vice president for capital projects at the New York City Housing Authority, called Carson's proposal confusing and unworkable.
"Who is liable when a repair goes wrong?" she asked.
Goddard said she was also concerned about the way in which Carson's remarks targeted public housing residents and not tenants in privately owned affordable housing.
"It's just another manner in which different expectations and rules for public housing as opposed to private affordable housing put housing authorities behind an eight ball," Goddard said.