The Housing Authority is asleep at the switch when it comes to evicting tenants who commit serious crimes on NYCHA grounds, a city Department of Investigation report released Tuesday charged.
The Housing Authority has the right to bounce tenants if they or their children are charged with committing drug and violent crimes either on or near NYCHA property.
But DOI found the agency’s efforts to use evictions to keep developments safe are a joke.
“NYCHA continues to allow criminals including gang members, drug traffickers and violent offenders to reside in public housing,” the report states. “NYCHA often failed to take steps to remove criminal offenders from public housing and protect the overwhelming majority of law-abiding residents.”
The agency often won’t evict the tenant of record, instead choosing to exclude only the person charged. But DOI found the excluded felons often return and live openly in units from which they are allegedly barred.
There they commit even more crimes without fear of eviction, according to DOI Commissioner Mark Peters.
In response, Jean Weinberg, spokeswoman for NYCHA, said the agency “works closely in partnership with the NYPD to ensure public housing residents have safe, stable homes” and noted that some of DOI’s reform recommendations “highlight the progress we’ve made in improving communication between our agencies.”
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NYPDII Appendix D Major Incidents (PDF)
NYPDII Appendix D Major Incidents (Text)
The city’s 328 public housing projects shoulder a disproportionate share of crime. While overall crime fell 4% citywide last year, it rose 2% in NYCHA developments. DOI noted that 25% of all rapes reported in New York City and 33% of all shootings occur within 500 feet of a NYCHA development.
The biggest problem centered on NYCHA’s tendency to try and exclude the charged criminal instead of evicting the tenant of record. That allows these “permanently excluded” to return and live openly in NYCHA apartments, DOI found.
“NYCHA overlooks even blatant and repeated violations of permanent exclusion,” the report found.
DOI pointed to a tenant the agency dubbed “Tanya Jones” and her son Christopher.
NYCHA moved three times to evict Tanya from her Van Dyke Houses apartment in Brooklyn after Christopher was repeatedly arrested for committing crime after crime in the development.
Each time NYCHA agreed to exclude only the son, but DOI discovered the son never left the apartment.
While living at Van Dyke, he attacked a man in the subway at 16, shot a woman at Van Dyke and choked his girlfriend inside his mother’s apartment. In 2015, he was charged with federal bank fraud in a takedown of the Van Dyke Money Gang.
“Remarkably,” DOI noted, “NYCHA found indications that (the mother) had moved out of her NYCHA apartment years earlier and turned it over to family members” — including Christopher.
Then there’s the case of “Yvonne.”
In 2016 NYCHA moved to evict Yvonne, a tenant of Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene, after her brother, Russell, shot at three uniformed NYPD officers on the street adjacent to the development.
He admitted to cops he’d lived in the Ingersoll apartment his entire life, but Yvonne told NYCHA he lived in New Jersey. As a result, NYCHA dropped its bid to evict Yvonne in March 2016.
One month later, Yvonne’s uncle was arrested for a triple homicide in front of an Ingersoll building. He admitted he lived in Yvonne’s apartment and had lived there during seven prior arrests, always telling cops that was his address.
His parole officer even visited him at that apartment, yet NYCHA withdrew his tenancy termination in June 2016.
The report comes 15 months after a prior DOI finding that the NYPD was also failing to let NYCHA know about arrested tenants.
The new report says that communication gap has been largely eliminated, though investigators still found numerous examples of NYPD failing to tell NYCHA about tenants arrested for crimes including shootings and stabbings.
“NYCHA has an obligation to protect the residents of its buildings. Its failure to do so, even after DOI’s Report in 2015, is inexcusable,” Commissioner Peters said. “Unlike other concerns at NYCHA, this is not the result of underfunding or lack of tools. Rather it is a repeated failure to act decisively long after a problem and solution have been well documented.”
Peters also noted that the NYPD often fails to report to the authority off-site arrests of NYCHA residents, even though they’re required to do so. That included:
A 16-year-old tenant in Whitman Houses and a member of a gang called Fort Greene Family who shot and killed an 18-year-old at an intersection near the development. His case was not reported to NYCHA.
A 36-year-old tenant of Albany Houses and member of a gang called Old Side used an illegal firearm to shoot a man inside a bodega across the street from Albany Houses. His case was also not reported to NYCHA by NYPD.
A 25-year-old resident of the Roosevelt Houses busted a year earlier for selling crack in the halls and lobbies at Tilden Houses shot and killed a 29-year-old near Roosevelt. Again NYPD didn’t report this to NYCHA.
