Deteriorating Living Standards

[Paul]

ChadTen months after the fighting erupted in the Central African Republic (CAR), thousands of Chadian returnees are still living in appalling conditions in transit and temporary sites in Chad. With the rainy season now in full swing, their situation is deteriorating.

As of 17 of September, IOM and partners registered more than 113,000 Chadians who fled the insecurity in CAR and who have entered Chad with air and road evacuations organized by the government of Chad, with IOM assistance or by their own means since the fighting broke up in CAR in December 2013.

While 30,000 of the returnees are hosted by friends and families in different parts of the country, at least 73,000 are still living in tents in transit and temporary sites. They are provided basic facilities by IOM and other humanitarian actors, such as temporary shelters, water and sanitation facilities, health centres, schools, children-friendly spaces, as well as vouchers for their food subsistence.

Following the massive influx from CAR into Chad, the Humanitarian Coordinator (HC) on behalf of the Humanitarian Country Team has decided to reactivate the Shelter/Camp Coordination Camp Management (CCCM) cluster that is led by UNHCR and co-led by IOM. The aim is to provide technical support for the management of both transit and temporary sites as well as to advocate for durable solutions for the displaced persons in the sites in the long run.

The main objective of the trainings was to improve the knowledge and skills of the trainees in identifying and addressing needs and gaps in the sites both in terms of management and provision of services.

The people in New York City leading both the efforts to bring attention to the deteriorating conditions in our public housing, and the efforts to have them repaired, are their residents. It is important to recognize that government and civic organizations, as well as the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) itself, have only followed after. We all benefit from public housing, and the entire city would be hugely affected by its loss. However, NYCHA residents need to be recognized as both the people with the most at stake, and the people who have taken the most direct initiative to secure repairs, both inside and outside of the existing resident engagement structure. For this, we all owe a debt of gratitude.

Throughout 2018, CVH leaders - all of whom were living in public housing - conducted a comprehensive survey of NYCHA residents in Far Rockaway. This included more than 700 face-to-face conversations at five different developments.

Conditions in public housing are consistently leading to impacts which spiral far beyond just apartment conditions. Health impacts from lead and mold exposure can stay with people for years if not lifetimes. Jobs can be lost because of the need to continually be home during working hours for repairs.

This is starkly illustrated on the Rockaway peninsula in particular, with the predominantly Black and Hispanic 11691 zip code on the eastern end of the peninsula having a death rate almost 6 times higher than the heavily White 11697 zip code on the western end of the peninsula.

This needs assessment, and the door-to-door survey which informed it, further illustrates the disturbing findings as to the health impacts of the conditions at NYCHA. These health impacts are fully avoidable with proper maintenance and decent living conditions. It is unconscionable that we are not prioritizing these improvements, which could greatly improve the underlying health of NYCHA residents.

While we cannot yet cure COVID-19, we can help mitigate the conditions that cause underlying health effects which can amplify its effects, and reverse the inequities which lead it to be more deadly. This report is meant to highlight the urgency with which we need to bring better conditions to NYCHA, because not doing so has a direct effect of the health of hundreds of thousands of residents. The current epidemic accelerated these detrimental health impacts in a terrible way. It is more urgent than ever to address them immediately.

Over the course of 2018, several CVH members engaged in an extensive door-to-door survey documenting health and living conditions. This effort reached more than 700 people across 35 buildings in five developments in the Rockaways, and residents spent over 400 hours in this effort. This is just one example of the time and effort residents have gone through in order to bring attention to the deteriorating conditions and their effects on the everyday lives of people who live in NYCHA.

The survey documented heat and hot water loss over the last year, with more than one-quarter of respondents responding that they had lost heat and/or hot water six or more times over the past year. 12 percent of the time this led directly to physical health impacts.

81 percent of residents responded that their apartment needed basic repairs or maintenance, ranging from painting and plastering, to kitchen and bathroom repairs and extermination. Numerous problems with buildings and grounds were noted at every development as well.

Some of the most significant findings from the survey are the health impacts of these conditions. One-quarter of the residents surveyed said that living conditions had impacted their physical health, and almost one-third said that it had impacted their mental health.

More than half of respondents who had mental health impacts from living conditions said that they had experienced increased depression, and more than 80 percent said they had experienced increased stress.

The physical health effects of these living conditions were also significant. Two-thirds of respondents who had mold in their apartments reported that these conditions had affected their physical health, or the physical health of a member of their family, with asthma being the most common condition.

Fundamentally, NYCHA residents simply need the same things as residents of all other housing: homes and buildings in good repair, and safe and healthy living conditions. At this point, however, it will be a major effort to achieve these standards. Virtually every public housing building needs a comprehensive renovation requiring significant investment. RPA, CVH, and several other organizations have suggested paths toward financing and effecting this larger effort, including calling for each level of government to work together to fully fund NYCHA repairs.

Complaints with the centralized call system are myriad, including dispatchers not knowing where to refer residents, requests getting lost or incorrectly notated, and incorrect times being given for repairs.

The inability to get responses to emergency conditions is also a large problem with the system. Residents noted that the centralized complaint center was not able to handle emergencies well, and that access to the emergency NYCHA service line was not made available to all residents.

Doubly frustrating is that NYC already has a professional complaint system for city services with the 311 system. This is the service used for all other housing complaints in NYC, and also helps document and analyze issues.

NYCHA does have two in-person drop-in centers, one near Fordham Road in The Bronx and one near Atlantic Center in Brooklyn. However, the survey showed that these were not well known or utilized - likely because very few people in NYCHA live near these centers. Only 616 NYCHA apartments, or 0.4 percent of the total, are within a 10-minute walk of one of the drop-in centers. Only 6,363, or 3.7 percent of all NYCHA apartments, are within a 20-minute walk.

With a move toward a less centralized complaint system, there are some aspects of the current system which are important and should be retained. These include the documentation of the complaint with registered ticket number, and a uniform experience in customer service - albeit a much better experience than currently exists.

If a problem is reported, the first person to respond should be someone who can fix the problem as reported. Instead, residents report that NYCHA will often send someone first to validate a problem. This is not only inefficient and costly, it is insulting.

Residents also point to very little advance notice is given to residents for scheduling repairs, in some cases as short as next-day notice. This results in an inability to take off work or rearrange other obligations in order to be home for a repair appointment. Residents also report a disconnect between the call centers and the property management offices. Oftentimes, the window of time given for an appointment by the call center is not communicated to or not accepted by the management office. This results in missed appointments, which are blamed on residents not giving access, or continual rescheduling resulting in even more time needed to be taken off from work or other obligations.

Longtime residents, those who have lived in NYCHA for more than 20 years, point to a property management system which was stronger when development level managers had more authority and felt a stronger sense of responsibility and accountability to residents. Extended hours for maintenance calls would also be valuable and allow for more flexibility for residents, as long as it resulted in quicker and better repairs.

NYCHA also needs to do more on providing better language access for non-English speakers in developments, and invest in a management training and evaluation system that prioritizes respect for residents.

Even when conditions and problems are heavily documented through organizing efforts and brought to the attention of senior management, problems are not addressed and conditions remain the same. As a result, residents are forced to continually go to local elected officials and engage in organizing actions in order to meet concerns and needs.

To this end, direct access to specialized technical help, such as construction managers, elevator and plumbing technicians, engineers or architects with development experience, and design professionals would be invaluable. This would help residents understand the root causes of problems at their developments, and gain a sense of the actual capital needs and potential costs of repairs. In turn, this would allow residents to be better positioned to make proposals to NYCHA as well as the local, state, and federal government to secure necessary dollars and execute planned repairs and renovations.

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