Job Opening: Wedding Planner/Housing Administrator
The New York City councilman Ritchie Torres, who chairs the council’s Committee on Public Housing, had never heard of Lynne Patton before last week, when Greg B. Smith, a reporter for the Daily News, called him to ask what he thought about Patton’s new role in the federal government. When Smith’s story on Patton ran, it appeared on the front page, with what was, even by the standards of these unpredictable times, a notably outraged headline: “She planned Eric Trump’s nups & falsely touts law degree. Now Prez has decided new housing boss in N.Y. is . . . THE WEDDING SCAMMER.”
The White House, Smith wrote, was going to give Patton a top position at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, putting her in charge of the regional office for New York and New Jersey. As with so many of the Administration’s appointees, her primary qualification for the job seemed to be her loyalty to the Trumps. She had planned celebrity tournaments at Trump golf courses, in addition to Eric Trump’s wedding. Speaking from the stage at last year’s Republican National Convention, she told the Trump children, “Eric, Don, and Ivanka, I love you like the siblings I never had. You are compassionate, you are charitable, you are my heroes!”
Not surprisingly, the news of Patton’s new position was roundly criticized and, by the end of last week, a HUD spokesperson was insisting that “there has been no official appointment”—a sign, perhaps, that Ben Carson, Trump’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was not going to give Patton the job after all. Torres told me, “I think the Trump Administration must be confusing wedding planning with urban planning—that’s my only explanation.”
Torres, whom I wrote about last year, chairs the committee that oversees the New York City Housing Authority, also known as NYCHA, which runs the nation’s largest public-housing program. (The number of people living in the city’s public-housing projects exceeds four hundred thousand—more than the total population of Cleveland.) The Housing Authority operates three hundred and twenty-eight housing projects in the five boroughs, and runs the largest Section 8 program in the country, distributing vouchers to two hundred thousand low-income people living in private buildings, to help them pay their rent. To fund all this, the Housing Authority relies on more than two billion dollars a year from the federal government.
The title of the job that Patton was reportedly up for sounds bland and bureaucratic—the regional administrator for HUD’s Region II—but the position is extraordinarily important. “Most funding for affordable housing comes from the federal government, so, without the federal government, we have no means of addressing the affordability crisis in New York City,” Torres told me. “The regional administrator is supposed to be the central point of contact between New York City and Washington, D.C. I think, at its best, the regional administrator is the city’s greatest internal advocate for affordable housing at the federal level. So, you need somebody who understands the sheer scale of the city’s affordability crisis, as well as the unique challenges of the New York housing market.” He added, “We cannot afford to have a patronage hire oversee New York City’s affordable-housing stock.”
In the past, the position of regional administrator has been held by people like Mayor Bill de Blasio and Adolfo Carrión, the former Bronx borough president. On WNYC last week, the host Brian Lehrer asked de Blasio about Patton’s possible appointment. “It’s surprising, to say the least,” the Mayor said. “Folks in that role historically have had substantial background in government or in housing.” He added, “We’ve got six hundred thousand New Yorkers who are directly affected by HUD policies and HUD funding, a lot of which is on the line.”
Even before last week’s news, Torres and other housing advocates in the city were extremely worried. Trump’s first few months in office brought a parade of headlines about the possibility of steep cuts to HUD. In March, after it was reported that Trump might cut its budget by six billion dollars, Torres, ten other City Council members, and two members of Congress held a press conference at City Hall, along with about a hundred housing-project residents. In April, some eight hundred people protested outside the regional-administrator’s office, on Broadway in lower Manhattan. Torres and seven others were arrested for civil disobedience. Their activism seemed to pay off in early May, when Trump signed a HUD spending bill that did not include significant cuts—but that bill was only a temporary measure, covering spending through September.
Last month, the unveiling of Trump’s proposed budget for the 2018 fiscal year quantified the damage for New York City: three hundred and forty million dollars in cuts to NYCHA, as well as a proposed raise in rents for housing-project residents, from thirty to thirty-five per cent of their income. The budget requires congressional approval, and Shola Olatoye, the chair of the Housing Authority, has already said that the cuts would “threaten our day-to-day operations.” In a statement the agency released, she did not hold back: “The Trump Administration’s devastating budget is an assault on public housing and affordable housing as we know it in this City.” As Torres puts it, “Donald Trump poses the gravest threat to public housing in the eighty-three-year history of the Housing Authority.”
By now, most of the city’s projects are at least fifty years old and in severe need of repair. Elevators routinely break down, lobby doors fail to lock, boilers malfunction, and roofs leak, accelerating the spread of mold. Greg B. Smith has been chronicling the deteriorating conditions in the projects for years. In April, he wrote about a father in Harlem who lives with his teen-age son in an apartment in which he’d had “no heat in his bedroom for nearly five years,” the kitchen had no cabinets or countertops, and the electrical outlets failed to work “in every room except one.” The same month, WPIX aired a story about a seventy-two-year-old woman in Williamsburg who bathed herself with a hose because she had no working shower. If the proposed budget cuts go through, worsening conditions in the city’s housing projects appear inevitable.
When I interviewed Torres last August, we spoke about the upcoming Presidential election, and he said, “In the end, the President has far greater influence over NYCHA than even the mayor himself.” At the time, Trump was behind in the polls. Ten months later, speaking about the Patton appointment, Torres said, “Given the scale of the affordability crisis in New York City, how could you afford to appoint someone so frivolous to handle a serious crisis? I think it shows the President has contempt for the social safety net because, if he took it seriously, he would make a serious appointment.”
