End-of-Year Message from Chair Shola Olatoye

Dear NYCHA Employees,

2015 has been a year of tremendous change for NYCHA. Last spring, we launched NextGeneration NYCHA, our 10-year strategic plan to fundamentally change how we do business. With unprecedented support across the City, we’ve focused on getting our financial house in order to improve NYCHA for today’s residents and future generations.

It’s taken considerable hard work, but thanks to your efforts, we’ve moved the Authority forward. We’ve made meaningful changes to how we approach maintenance and repairs by focusing on improving service levels with common sense changes in our procedures in the Fix-It-Forward initiative. We launched the MyNYCHA app, which has been downloaded 15,000 times, allowing residents to schedule repair appointments from the convenience of their phones. All 18 of our OPMOM sites are meeting their goals to address emergency repairs within 24 hours and within budget.

For too long, NYCHA was forced to put off major roof repairs because of a lack of money. This year, with support from Mayor Bill de Blasio, we were able to do something about it through our Bond B program. As of this week, we’ve replaced old and crumbling roofs on 143 buildings, housing 18,500 residents.

After three years and many rounds of negotiating, we secured $3 billion in federal disaster recovery funds from FEMA to begin the real recovery from Hurricane Sandy. We’ve put four contracts out and shovels in the ground at 17 developments.

In 2015, we also focused on improving safety at our developments. In addition to enhancing communications between NYCHA and NYPD, we’ve started the installation of new exterior lighting at seven developments and installed new camera technology at over 30 developments.

Along with improving the quality of our current public housing stock, we’ve looked for ways to increase the affordable housing options for NYCHA residents and New Yorkers. This year, we moved forward with plans to build up to 500 new, 100-percent affordable apartments at Ingersoll, Mill Brook and Van Dyke.

We also closed the CAMBA project, providing 30 percent of the units to homeless families and 70 percent of the units to low-income families. As part of NYCHA’s Home Ownership Program, our Development department sold 13 FHA single-family homes we inherited from HUD in the 1970s to NYCHA public housing residents and plans to sell the remaining 35 FHA homes in 2016.

Leased Housing provided rental subsidies to 387 homeless veterans this year, bringing the total number of veterans’ families served by NYCHA to 2,488. Ninety-eight percent of all Section 8 re-certifications were completed, surpassing our goal of 95 percent.

This year we’ve made significant progress resetting our relationship with our residents. In addition to creating seven new tenant associations and four new youth councils, Community Programs and Development worked hard to engage the residents of Holmes and Wyckoff as part of NextGen Neighborhoods—the initiative that will build new housing, half affordable and half market-rate, to expand affordable housing options and generate much-needed revenue for major repairs to our existing buildings.

This is an amazing list of accomplishments. I am deeply grateful for your hard work. I also want to note that our work is far from done. Our service levels remain persistently high and rent collection too low at certain developments. Two hundred employees are out every day due to workplace injuries. Our developments are still not as clean as they should be. And despite concentrated efforts, only about 60 percent of you communicate with your NYCHA colleagues using email.

How do we address these long-standing and disturbing trends? What will you do in 2016 to make NYCHA developments safe, clean and connected? 2016 is going to be a pivotal year for NYCHA. I welcome your continued partnership on the road to our NextGeneration NYCHA vision of safe, clean and connected communities. I hope you accept the challenge as I have.

Sincerely,

Shola Olatoye