Chair Russ’s Record of Success in Renovating Residents’ Homes
Public housing across the nation is getting revitalized thanks to creative housing preservation programs like the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), which converts developments from Section 9 public housing funding to project-based Section 8 funding (a form of Section 8 that provides enhanced protections for residents). This enables public housing authorities to raise significant amounts of funding to repair and upgrade their properties.
At the same time, RAD ensures that homes remain permanently affordable and residents have the same basic rights as they possess in the public housing program. To guarantee public control and stewardship, the housing authority retains public ownership of the land and buildings, as well as control over affordability requirements and resident protections, and administers the Section 8 funding contract with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
NYCHA Chair Greg Russ knows well the benefits that this long-term and sustainable solution can bring to residents – he has used it to completely renovate apartments and buildings at other housing authorities he has led.
While serving as the Cambridge Housing Authority’s Executive Director (a post he held until 2016), Mr. Russ launched an effort to renovate all of the agency’s more than 2,100 apartments through RAD. By converting its entire portfolio to project-based Section 8 vouchers, the Cambridge Housing Authority was able to leverage more than $200 million in funding to preserve the apartments.
“We needed to find a vehicle to finance these improvements over time, just like other owners of affordable housing,” Mr. Russ said at the time. “The long-term Section 8 project-based assistance contracts under RAD were the essential tool we needed to pull it off.”
The Cambridge Housing Authority’s portfolio-wide RAD conversion was approved by HUD in 2013 and was at the time the fifth-largest RAD conversion in the country. The agency converted all 2,133 of its public housing apartments in three phases.
After leaving Cambridge in 2016, Mr. Russ took over as executive director of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, where he continued to advocate for RAD conversions. The efforts to implement RAD in Minneapolis have led to significant improvements for residents, as highlighted in a recent Star Tribune article.
Mr. Russ’s experience with RAD was seen as an asset when he left Minneapolis to become Chair and CEO of NYCHA in 2019. The NYCHA 2.0 plan involves using RAD [implemented as Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT) in New York City] to fully renovate and preserve 62,000 apartments, bringing comprehensive repairs and building upgrades to more than 142,000 residents. Since PACT’s launch in 2016, NYCHA has generated almost $2 billion in capital repair work across the city, modernizing over 9,500 homes.
Some recent achievements include the completion of major rehabilitation projects at Baychester, Murphy, and Betances Houses in February. In November 2020, NYCHA closed a PACT deal to provide more than $271 million in major repairs and renovations for 1,718 apartments throughout Manhattan.
With both PACT and the innovative Blueprint for Change preservation strategies that Chair Russ has proposed, NYCHA has a comprehensive repair plan for all of its more than 170,000 apartments – which currently have $40 billion in major repair needs, a figure that grows at the rate of about $1 billion a year. Blueprint also involves transferring developments from HUD Section 9 funding to the more stable HUD project-based Section 8 funding. This enables NYCHA to raise money for renovations and access lucrative HUD Tenant Protection Vouchers. At the same time, NYCHA remains 100 percent public – NYCHA continues to own the land and buildings and NYCHA staff continue to manage and maintain the properties – while residents maintain their full rights and protections permanently.
“This is the beginning of a journey that will result in very significant improvements and benefits for our residents and their homes, our organization, and New York City as a whole,” Mr. Russ noted.