A Year of Progress and Promise
Dear Colleagues,
With the holidays now upon us, I’d like to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of you for your extraordinary talents, professionalism, and hard work as we reflect on some of NYCHA’s achievements in 2024. Whether you contributed toward improving residents’ homes and quality of life, the strengthening of our organization, or blazing new paths forward, you have all played an indispensable role in transforming public housing in New York City.
Improving Residents’ Homes and Providing Opportunity
Every day, NYCHA’s Operations staff work hard to repair our buildings and apartments and keep our grounds in good shape, as evidenced by the improved HUD inspection scores in every borough. The efforts to ensure safe and decent living conditions for residents extends to the removal of hazardous materials, and I’m proud to say that we recently passed a significant milestone: abating lead in more than 10,000 public housing apartments, providing families with the peace of mind they deserve. NYCHA’s TEMPO team has also tested more than 86,000 apartments for lead using the City’s new and stricter standard. Paired with the more than 3,000 apartments abated by the PACT program, this equates to significant progress in this important area.
And for the second year in a row, we invested over a billion dollars on capital projects across the city.
We are not only addressing the issues of the past but are also strategizing for the future. For instance, our Sustainability team is helping to address the climate crisis while elevating residents’ quality of life. The Clean Heat for All Challenge is spurring the production of new energy-efficient heating and cooling systems for apartments; two manufacturers were selected, who completed pilots in NYCHA apartments and are currently scaling the initiative for full-building pilots. The Induction Stove Challenge is similarly producing energy-efficient electric cooking systems, exploring the possibility of replacing more gas stoves with induction stoves in NYCHA apartments. At Polo Grounds Towers, we are installing the first-ever pneumatic waste collection system in a public housing development, and we recently connected the first building to the system. Once fully complete, this system will reduce the time staff spend transporting trash, enabling them to focus their efforts elsewhere.
Our Resident Services, Partnerships, and Initiatives team made great strides this year in fostering stronger collaboration across our communities and connecting residents to life-changing opportunities. That included connecting nearly 2,000 residents to jobs and facilitating over 1,200 resident referrals to economic opportunity partners; awarding a record number of NYCHA-CUNY scholarships; supporting resident associations in putting $2.2 million in Tenant Participation Activity funding to good use in their communities; training nearly 600 residents and over 1,500 staff on how we can better work together to transform the Authority; obtaining more than $6 million in grants for education and jobs programs and nearly $5 million in grants for health initiatives; providing residents with more than 35,000 books and 2,600 tickets for arts, cultural, and sporting events; and hosting 162 NYC Human Resources Administration benefits enrollment events at our developments.
Another very tangible way we’re providing opportunity to New Yorkers is by opening the Section 8 waitlist for the first time in 15 years. This summer, 200,000 households were randomly selected via a lottery. This remarkable milestone was achieved through the dedicated hard work of cross-departmental teams, from IT and Leased Housing to Communications, who ensured that the online application process was a smooth experience for the hundreds of thousands of people who applied.
We’re also providing opportunity and stability by connecting residents to valuable rent assistance programs. We fought to ensure NYCHA residents got their fair share of Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) funding from the State (approximately $159 million), and now we’re connecting eligible residents to two new programs: the Covid-19 Rental Assistance Program (CRA) and the HOME American Rescue Plan Program (HOME-ARP), which will provide up to an estimated $185 million to cover rent arrears resulting from the pandemic. Kudos, again, to our staff from Finance, Law, the CEO’s office, and other teams who worked hard to implement these programs and are helping residents benefit from them.
Blazing New Paths Forward
We are also forging new frameworks for bringing our aging developments the funding they desperately need. This year, one of our major housing preservation programs, PACT, closed on the financing for eight developments, representing $1.7 billion in comprehensive renovations for nearly 7,600 residents. That brings us to a total of nearly $7 billion invested in NYCHA properties to date through PACT. We recently announced that the next phase of work is beginning at one especially notable PACT project, at Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses, following years of community engagement there. Ultimately, we aim to bring dramatically improved quality of life to a total of 62,000 NYCHA families with the PACT program.
We also announced a recent milestone involving another of our groundbreaking initiatives – that residents of Throggs Neck Addition and Randall Avenue-Balcom will be the next to vote on the future of their homes (that is, whether they want their developments to join PACT or the Public Housing Preservation Trust or remain Section 9 housing). The voting process was first launched at Nostrand Houses in 2023, followed by votes at Bronx River Addition, Coney Island Houses, Coney Island I (Site 1B), and Hylan Houses this year. In October, the Trust and NYCHA issued the first Request for Proposal for major capital renovations and repairs at Nostrand Houses.
Our Comprehensive Modernization (Comp Mod) program will also complete top-to-bottom repairs and renovations at selected developments – from beautiful, new apartments to modernized building systems – through a streamlined approach that considers the needs of an entire property. Earlier this year, design-build teams were selected to carry out renovations at Saint Nicholas and Todt Hill Houses. Resident engagement is also a hallmark of the Comp Mod program, and residents at Todt Hill Houses recently got to see what their fully renovated apartments will look like, thanks to a mock apartment that previews the colors, finishes, and overall designs which residents themselves selected.
These are only a few examples of all that we have accomplished together. As we transition to a New Year, I hope you take some time to be proud of your achievements in service to the NYCHA community and New York City. I can’t wait to continue our progress and transformation in 2025.
Happy holidays and New Year to you and your families! And thank you, again, for all that you do.
Sincerely,
Lisa Bova-Hiatt, Chief Executive Officer
