Stanley Davis, a Housing Authority superintendent at Ingersoll Houses in Brooklyn, didn’t mince his words. Sitting at a table in front of NYCHA General Manager Doug Apple and Operations Manager Roland Laedline at NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) headquarters on March 24, Davis warned of a tenant rebellion brewing in the city’s developments, but he may as well have been talking about a rebellion by Housing Authority employees.

A few days earlier, more than 150 housing assistants crowded into union hall. They were angry and frustrated with NYCHA management for “overwhelming us with work” and refusing to hear their complaints or recommendations to improve members’ working conditions. The members, several close to tears at times as they recounted their stories, complained that they routinely come to work ahead of schedule, leave late at night and return on the weekends to meet the demands of their increasing workload, and struggled with “inadequate and substandard equipment that hinders their productivity.” Failure to meet management’s “unrealistic quota system,” they added, usually resulted in disciplinary memos in their personnel files.

At that meeting, Local 237 President Carl Haynes assured the housing assistants that a “summit meeting” had already been scheduled with NYCHA officials to discuss several key issues and to “open the line of communication” with the Housing Authority. He also chastised the members for not coming forward sooner to file grievances. “File a grievance and we will work it out with your managers and supervisors. That’s why we have the grievance process,” Haynes told them.

In the meeting with NYCHA officials at 250 Broadway in Manhattan, Haynes told General Manager Apple that the meeting was necessary because “I want you to understand what we are going through out in the field. Whether you like it or not, we are all in the same boat. We all want a system that works. Haynes added that part of the problem “is that you’re making changes at your level (headquarters) but are not making the appropriate adjustments in the field.”

Davis, who also heads the superintendents’ and assistant superintendents’ chapter, Housing Assistant Kimberly Taylor and Housing Manager Doreen Mack pleaded with the General Manager for “some relief.” The three Local 237 members reminded NYCHA officials that employees in the field have been shouldering the burden of a heavier workload since the Housing Authority imposed a hiring freeze and reduced the workforce through attrition about three years ago. Severe staff shortage at many developments, they said, “has created a crisis that has to be managed daily,” Davis explained. On top of that, NYCHA recently imposed a new federally-mandated policy for handling tenant claims for subsidized housing and requires tenants to provide more detailed personal information to verifying their eligibility. Housing assistants, who interact directly with the tenants and process these claims, say the new procedure is timeconsuming and cumbersome.

This so-called Third Party Income Verification procedure, the brainchild of the federal Housing and Urban Development agency, “is what pushed housing assistants over the edge,” said Tyrone Washington, housing assistant chapter chair. “The tenants have not been given any information about the new procedure, and we’re the ones who have to deal with them.”

“We’re spending a lot of time in the morning explaining new procedures to tenants who are puzzled about what we are demanding from them when all they want to do is to get their apartment fixed or a sink changed,” said Kimberly Taylor, who works at the Bronx Borough Management Office. “That means we can’t do the other work we’re supposed to do.”

“The tenants are suffering,” and they are up in arms, Davis said. “We’re providing services but we are not giving them what we were able to give them in the past because we are short-staffed and overwhelmed by paperwork. The smaller developments suffer the most. If you have two caretakers and one is out sick, you can’t expect that one caretaker to service the entire building and do everything else he needs to do.”

“We are trying, but there are a lot of things that challenge us and prevent us from getting the work done,” Taylor added. To prove her point, Taylor handed General Manager Doug Apple a 29-page document listing the duties and responsibilities of a housing assistant on a given day, including six pages of recommendations to improve the situation. The housing assistant, who had compiled the list with a colleague, Kathy Washington of Vladeck Houses in Manhattan, told Apple she wanted him to see what she has on her schedule every day because “I don’t think you have any idea what housing assistants do.”

The document listed more than two dozen different tasks, including handling all calls for assistance, move-ins and move outs, rent collection, tracking legal issues and serving tenants with papers, representing the HA in court, completing annual reviews of account, and many other items.

The housing managers and superintendents submitted a “streamlined” job description for their titles, adding that the full-length version ran 70 pages.

“We’re tired and overwhelmed by the workload,” said Doreen Mack, who spoke on behalf of NYCHA’s housing managers. “I understand the importance of getting the job done. We are the legs the HA stands on and if we don’t do it, the system would collapse. We understand that; but each year our jobs as managers get more and more complicated and it becomes more difficult to do the job we have to do.” A manager since 1988, Mack told Housing officials that employees in the field “are demoralized.”

“People are afraid to say what they are feeling. But I’m not afraid to tell you we need to have the tools to do the job you want us to do. But when management says we don’t want to hear it, what does that tell us?”

Mack added that the pressure of being held accountable for what happens or does not happen in their development forces managers and superintendents to direct the pressure downward on housing assistants and caretakers. “In the old days,” she said, “the old timers like me stayed and put up with the problems; the younger workers are saying ‘I’m done, I can’t take this.’ They are leaving. Now even some of the old-timers are calling it quits. We respect that you have to make the hard choices, but we need support services. We need some relief. We need to know we’re part of the team.”

The union called for a review of the problematic income verification procedure, which Local 237 Housing Director Edmund Kane called, “dysfunctional,” and questioned the need for housing assistants and managers to duplicate work already being handled by other titles. Haynes also cited the dangers involved in housing assistants being forced to knock on doors to pursue delinquent rent payers.

For his part, General Manager Apple conceded that “I do agree the job has changed. It has gotten harder and more complicated over the last couple of years for lots of reasons. And I agree that 98 percent of staff really care about the job” and the people they serve in their developments. He added: “We all know the system we have today doesn’t work for anyone. It doesn’t work for housing assistants, it doesn’t work for Operations Manager Laedline, and it doesn’t work for me. So we have to work together. Between us we have all the knowledge and expertise, but I am not opposed to bringing in someone to look over the system. We’ve used consultants in the past.”

Holding up the 29-page housing assistant job description, Apple thanked Taylor for providing it. “This level of detail is what we need to understand what we need to do. I want a process that works. I want recommendations, even little things that we can implement right away.” He added: “I can’t predict what the future will hold, whether we will have new mandates from HUD. But, I agree we have to find ways to make the system work better for everybody.”

Union members left the meeting with a promise from Apple to create a committee of employees and management to review the workload and systems operation in the city’s approximately 345 developments. They also agreed to bring in a third party to review the situation in the event the labor-management committee cannot reach agreement on how to resolve some of the issues.