New York City today: Slow subways, slummy projects, soaring rents

NEW YORK — Five years ago this seemed the very model of a modern major city, with its bike lanes, pedestrian plazas and smokeless bars. Outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg even started a pro-bono consulting firm, staffed by veterans of his administration, to tell cities around the world how to solve their problems.

''We have heard this huge demand and need from other cities to learn from New York,'' Amanda Burden, city planning director, told The New York Times. ''New York is the epitome that cities look to of how to get things done.''

These days, however, other cities look at New York and see three great systems in crisis – mass transit, public housing and rent control. Their dysfunction both undercuts Bloomberg's image of a can-do city and afflicts the average New Yorker that his successor, Bill de Blasio, claims to champion.

This summer, New York has endless waits on sweltering, packed subway platforms, where frustrated riders occasionally slug it out; public housing projects contaminated with lead paint, mold and the smell of urine; and housing prices that drive the poor into the street and almost everyone else farther and farther from fabulous Manhattan.

The July cover story in Harper's Magazine decries New York's "systematic, wholesale transformation into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy … the world's largest gated community.'' The article's title: "The Death of a Once Great City.''

After Bloomberg’s we-know-best hubris, and de Blasio’s “tale of two cities’’ campaign rhetoric, it’s been disturbing to learn how city Housing Authority maintenance workers routinely faked paperwork and deceived inspectors; how subway track signals intended to make travel safer have bogged it down; how big landlords are allowed to routinely cheat and bully renters out of their legal rights.

In such times, the city has always looked to the mayor – Fiorello La Guardia in the Depression, Ed Koch after the mid-1970s fiscal crisis, Rudy Giuliani on 9/11 and Bloomberg afterward. Each rallied the populace and became a national figure.

But de Blasio can look like a bystander. For instance, The New Yorker magazine reported that he'd not spoken with the new subway system president since the man began the job six months ago. (A meeting ensued.)

Two factors may explain de Blasio’s remove from the fray. For one thing, he shares control over the systems in crisis with other levels of government. A state agency runs and partly funds the subway; state law controls rents; and the Housing Authority gets federal funds.

For another, he’s intent on becoming a national leader of the Democratic Party’s left wing – an aspiration that remains just that. His visit to Texas was notable mostly for the Border Patrol’s claim that his party illegally crossed the border on foot while trying to inspect a detention facility.

A bigger Big Apple

For all its problems, New York today is safer, richer, healthier and quieter than any time since the 1950s. It’s also bigger; its population of 8.6 million is the most in history. Since 1980 the city has gained 1.5 million residents, more than the total population of all but six other U.S. cities.

The subway carries 8 million riders on weekdays, 10 times the Washington Metro. The Housing Authority is landlord to 400,000 people, more than the entire population of Cleveland. The city’s number of rent controlled apartments is six times greater than San Francisco’s.

New York also has added about 700,000 jobs in the past six years, a number greater than the entire civilian workforce of Hawaii. Twenty five years ago, the city was claiming only one in 10 new jobs in the metropolitan area; for the past decade, nine of every 10 of new metro jobs have been here.

But these gains are part of the problem, according to Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, a venerable good-government group, “We’ve added all these people,’’ he says, “but we haven’t added capacity in transit and housing.’’

Here’s how the three crises evolved:

• THE SUBWAY

Because of delays and safety concerns (derailments, track fires), Gov. Andrew Cuomo last year declared a “state of emergency’’ that shows no sign of abating.

Wait: Wasn’t the subway crisis – crime, graffiti, stifling cars, breakdowns – in the 1980s? And wasn’t it solved?

Yes. But in recent years a series of mechanical deficiencies, particularly the aging track signal system, and deferred maintenance have again crippled the system.

Despite the much-publicized opening last year of the first three stations on the Second Avenue line (which cost almost $5 billion), service delays have escalated. Only 65% of trains are on time weekdays, compared to 90% a decade ago.

Assuming money can be found to pay for it, the signal replacement project will not begin until 2020 and won't finish until 2030, at the earliest.

• PUBLIC HOUSING

Despite public housing’s reputation – to most Americans, the term evokes high-crime high-rises and/or the dynamiting of same – New York’s public housing was long the envy of the nation and a proud legacy of the New Deal.

But this year, federal investigators accused the authority, over a period that extended into the Bloomberg administration, of failing to comply with lead-paint regulations and then covering it up. Elevated lead levels have since detected in more than 800 children who lived in Housing Authority apartments over the past few years.

The agency also was accused of training its workers to deceive government inspectors. Maintenance crews would turn water off to cover up leaks and post “Danger – Do not Enter’’ signs outside apartments they didn’t want inspected.

The authority has agreed to spend $1 billion on repairs over the next four years and submit to a federal monitor. But the bill for necessary long-term capital improvements is much larger: $32 billion.

• RENT CONTROL

Love it or hate it, the law limits yearly increases on about 1 million apartments in the city. That’s roughly half of its total, and its largest block of affordable housing.

The system has long been decried by landlords for discouraging private reinvestment and giving an unnecessary break to some affluent renters.

But big landlords and developers have figured out how to remove large numbers of units from rent restrictions. They're able to charge higher rents by promoting rapid tenant turnover; by making cosmetic improvements to justify hefty rent hikes; and by harassing tenants – by cutting off the heat in winter, or by undertaking renovation projects so loud, messy and prolonged that they drive other tenants out.

In May, a New York Times investigation described a fractured, underfinanced regulatory apparatus that can't even enforce the law. The result is a steadily shrinking number of rent-controlled units, because once an apartment's legal rent passes $2,733.75 (or if it's converted to a condo or co-op), it passes outside control forever.

The rent-control crisis accentuates the critical shortage of affordable housing.

One manifestation is homelessness. Each night about 61,000 people sleep in publicly-provided shelter. Although no one knows exactly how many more live on the street – thousands, certainly – their number seems to be increasing.

The price of housing also affects what makes New York New York.

The author of the Harper's article is an Upper West Side resident, the writer Kevin Baker. He argues that the influx of the super-rich, particularly foreigners who don't live full time in their new multimillion-dollar condos in ever-higher Manhattan apartment towers, are sapping the city of its elan vital.

In their high-rise insulation and their sheer absence, he argues, they threaten to make New York something it’s never been before: boring.

A Gotham vendetta

De Blasio, who has twice been elected in a landslide, is not without accomplishments.

He’s instituted universal public pre-kindergarten, presided over a continued decline in crime and is planning to preserve or construct 300,000 units of affordable housing. Last year, the city financed 32,000 new units of subsidized rental housing, enough to house two-thirds of Green Bay.

But he's also gotten embroiled in a vicious political feud with Cuomo, the liberal Democratic governor and a native New Yorker who should be his biggest ally in Albany.

One of many things on which Cuomo and de Blasio can’t agree is how to pay to fix the subway. Its president, Andrew Byford, needs roughly $19 billion over five years to fix the track signals. Cuomo wants to pay for repairs by charging vehicles to enter most of Manhattan (congestion pricing), while de Blasio favors a “millionaire’s tax.’’

However great the city’s problems, though, only a fool would count it out.

The Harper's article's subtitle – "The fall of New York'' – is the same as that of The Power Broker, Robert Caro's biography of master public works builder Robert Moses. It was published in 1974, a reminder that if New York is falling, it won't be the first time.

This resiliency has been noted by Byford, who happens to be English.

When he announced his plan to revive the subway system, he said, “New York is renowned for the way it stares down a crisis.’’ But he said fixing the subway would take time – he could have been talking about housing, too — and he asked New Yorkers for something that's in short supply here, even in the best of times: patience.

WPXI