The Repairs Crisis in NYC’s Project Based Rental Assistance Program

Private managers of some federally subsidized housing projects in New York City are failing to remedy health and safety issues in their buildings. Many tenants are scared to speak up, afraid they’ll lose their subsidy.

This is part two of an investigative series on the Project Based Rental Assistance Program in New York City. To read part one: “The Compliance Crisis,” click here. To read part three, “The Accountability Crisis,” click here. This series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Maria needed to transfer apartments. Every time it rained, water came running into her Manhattan two-bedroom from above the windows.

When her family came over for dinner one night, they were interrupted by dripping ceilings. They pushed all of the furniture to the center of the room to keep it dry. “That was embarrassing to me,” said Maria, who asked City Limits not to use her real name out of fear of retaliation from her landlord.

First came damage to her furniture. Her couch, bed, and curtains were ruined. She documented everything. She asked her property manager, Manhattan North, to repair the leaks. But management insisted, Maria says, that it couldn’t be leaking rainwater because she wasn’t on the top floor.

Mold grew. Her kids, 6 and 8 years old, started getting sick. Coughing, they had to stay home from school, which meant paying for a babysitter.

“I don’t know why they make my life so difficult,” Maria said.

She’s one of 100,000 tenants in New York’s Project Based Rental Assistance (PBRA) program, some of whom live in unsafe conditions, according to city data and reports to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request.

PBRA tenants—predominately low-income residents of color, many of whom are seniors or living with a disability—already face enormous challenges communicating with their property managers to retain their housing subsidies, a City Limits investigation published earlier this week showed.

Noncompliance from property managers also creates persistent housing quality issues that can go months without resolution, and threaten resident safety in some buildings, according to public records uncovered by City Limits. Tenants say they are scared to speak up, or risk getting hit with an eviction notice.

Weeks went by without Manhattan North fixing Maria’s issue. She got a note from the doctor about her kids’ risk of developing asthma and went to the company’s management office demanding a transfer.

“When I went to [the property manager], she said ‘Oh yeah, you’re gonna sign your new lease—but you owe us almost $7,000 in rent,’” Maria said.

Maria didn’t know how that was possible. She worked as a home health attendant and had steady income. She had been paying rent on time each month.

But a year and a half ago, unbeknownst to her, Manhattan North had terminated her federal housing subsidy because the income they had on file didn’t match what they saw in their records—a centralized HUD system that pulls information from public assistance databases.

Her subsidy through the PBRA program had enabled her to pay 30 percent of her income in rent, while the government picked up the rest. But when her income didn’t match, Manhattan North—which did not respond to multiple requests for comment from City Limits—pulled the subsidy and started charging her market rate.

Then they filed for eviction.

Unsafe conditions, little recourse

Tenants who reach out to get repairs in some PBRA buildings are ignored, avoided, or given the runaround. When things go wrong with their housing subsidies—as they often do, City Limits found—management sometimes tries to toss them out.

Across over 400 properties and 65,000 units, New York’s PBRA buildings are aging. The program, which began in 1974, has remained much the same since its inception. HUD contracts with the state Housing Trust Fund Corporation, which hires a monitor—a private corporation called CGI—and subsidizes tenants in buildings managed by private owners.

In leases from HUD, and under New York City law, property managers are responsible for providing a habitable apartment and addressing repairs. But advocates say the private management model, and a lack of close supervision, has incentivized some PBRA managers to defer maintenance.

“The core of the problem is that these private companies are profit motivated, and they are going to do whatever they can to maximize profit—that’s chronic with landlords who are not going to do repairs,” said Ashley Viruet, a supervising attorney at Legal Services NYC.

Conditions in PBRA buildings vary. Some are held up as shining examples of affordability, like Manhattan Plaza, the iconic Chelsea home for artists and families that birthed talents like Alicia Keys and Timothee Chalamet. Others are part of the Mitchell-Lama affordable rental program that, long heralded by politicians as an example of affordable housing, is not without its own warts.

But the large majority of PBRA properties are scarcely noticed in the affordable housing landscape: smaller, privately managed buildings sprinkled throughout Harlem, the Bronx, and Central and East Brooklyn. The average building was constructed in 1947. 

Across New York City’s PBRA portfolio, there’s an open housing code violation for every fourth unit, according to city records. In the most recent HUD physical inspection data, one-quarter of the city’s PBRA properties had a life threatening health and safety deficiency noted.

Some properties are in far worse shape than others.

At the Parkhill Apartments in Staten Island, there have been more than 10,000 housing code violations issued over the past 10 years, with over 3,000 of them more serious “Class C” violations that include immediate health and safety issues. In all, there were 12 violations issued for every unit over the past decade, with 2,000 still outstanding. There have been 400 violations just this year, SI Live reported.

Michael Shah, founder of Delshah Capital that owns the property, said the building is in the pipeline for comprehensive rehab from HPD.

At Manhattan North’s properties, the picture is similarly bleak.

Across the company’s 3,000-unit PBRA portfolio, there’s nearly one open housing code violation for every unit. A quarter of violations issued since 2016 were serious “Class C” violations that pose immediate threats to resident health.

At the 1775 Houses in Harlem, where there are 250 units, there’s been almost nine violations for every unit over the past decade, with 321 violations still open. According to notes from CGI (the program’s monitor in New York), Manhattan North bullied, harassed, and left one tenant to wallow in an unsafe apartment there. 

The tenant, Lisa Grant, had lead, multiple leaks, and mold in her unit, records from inspections by New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) indicate.

Manhattan North did not respond to the complaint for at least six months, according to notes from CGI. Grant sued to get repairs done in November 2023, court records show.

In reports from program monitor CGI, sent to the New York State Department of Housing and Community Renewal, representatives who receive tenant complaints via CGI’s call center flagged their “extreme concerns with this managing agent, Manhattan North.” 

“Tenant concerns are often health and safety concerns that go unaddressed for extended periods of time while attempting to get a response from management,” CGI reps wrote. 

“Residents often complain no one is following up with health and safety concerns reported to management and the call center can confirm as we also don’t get responses. The call center believes this matter should be escalated with HUD to address directly.”

HUD and CGI did not respond to questions about Manhattan North’s management practices, and HUD did not provide details on how it responded to CGI’s reports. Manhattan North did not reply to detailed questions from City Limits about repair issues and alleged harassment by staff at their buildings.

On CGI’s management evaluations, which City Limits obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request, most property managers pass the portions of their evaluations when it comes to maintenance and lead paint rules. But advocates say those reports do little to actually inform HUD about management policies and building conditions. 

For example, management agents are evaluated on if they follow the proper eviction procedures. But, “it’s a yes or no check box, and they take [the property manager’s] self reported answer,” said Molly Rockett, a staff attorney and Project Based Section 8 housing specialist at Legal Services NYC. 

CGI did not respond to detailed questions from City Limits about how they fill out audits or pass properties on their HUD-mandated Management and Occupancy Reviews, including those that pass while having outstanding housing code violations and physical inspection deficiencies.

“[CGI reps are] not really incentivized to represent the tenant’s interest against this overpowering force of the property manager,” said Rockett. 

When they ask for help, tenants are routinely bounced between a network of different entities responsible for overseeing the program, which City Limits will detail in part three of this series.

Renters in the PBRA program are entitled to the same safe living standards as any other renter in New York. When something goes wrong, they can call 311 and get the city to issue a housing code violation.

As violations pile up, tenants can withhold rent, or sue for repairs (In New York City PBRA buildings in the last 10 years, over 800 tenants have filed emergency legal suits to get repairs.)

But for PBRA tenants, the company controlling the flow of their rental subsidy is the same one in charge of maintenance, giving property managers considerable leverage, housing advocates say. 

Two other tenants at PBRA buildings said that hard-to-reach management made getting repairs done more difficult. Nicole E., who preferred only to be identified by her first name and last initial, said that it “takes a long time to get things fixed,” at her Manhattan North apartment building, Lexington Gardens. “It’s like pulling teeth.”

She says that the management office at Lexington Gardens is often backed up, which can make it difficult to get help, with both repairs and recertification.

HPD issued over 1,000 housing code violations at the 100-unit Lexington Gardens building in the last 10 years. The property had 50 open violations as of publication.

Tenants said speaking up sometimes makes them a target. “I call HPD. I call the city. And they [management] don’t like that,” said Maria.

A spokesperson for HPD told City Limits that they treat complaints and housing code violations in PBRA buildings the same way they do any private building. HPD emphasized that they have several tools they can use to address issues, including litigation, the alternative enforcement program, and emergency repair program, where HPD makes repairs themselves and charges the landlords.

Bridgett Simmons, staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project, says repair issues in PBRA housing are a national problem. It took a years-long, nationwide organizing effort to get Atlanta-based Millenia Housing, a negligent PBRA and Section 8 landlord, barred from future federal contracts.

“That’s allowed to abound because HUD isn’t empowered to enforce its condition standards,” said Simmons.

Nowhere to go

It’s often compounding quality of life issues that wear tenants down.

Maria’s Manhattan North-managed building was a hot-spot for drug trafficking and violence, making it scary for her and her kids to venture out of the apartment. The stairwells, she said, were littered with condom wrappers and filled with secondhand smoke.

One man would come to her door and harass her, leaving condoms outside on her welcome mat, following her home, and on one occasion, physically grabbing her and trying to enter her apartment. 

“He waited for me to come back upstairs. So I saw him moving in back of me, he pulled me by the sweater, and I fell down. I started screaming,” she recalled. A neighbor came out with a bat and scared the harasser away.

After Maria made multiple police reports, she asked to transfer apartments. But management said the best they could do was move her to another unit in the same building. On the other side of the building a few floors down, she still didn’t feel safe from her harasser, until he was arrested two years ago for a separate offense. 

One problem soon replaced another, though. That’s when Maria’s new apartment started to leak. A second transfer, from the apartment with the leaking window, was held up by paperwork errors.

Maria knew the income mismatch—which Manhattan North terminated her PBRA subsidy over—wasn’t her fault. Like many others, she lost her job during the pandemic. Since her rent is tied to her income, it went down while she searched for a new job and lived on unemployment.

When she got re-hired in 2021, she said she brought a letter from her new employer to Manhattan North’s management office. But they never processed it.

Maria went on paying the same monthly rent. “But something in my heart was telling me that something was gonna go wrong,” she said.

She didn’t hear from management for a year and a half, when they notified her that her subsidy had been terminated because of the discrepancy over her recorded income.

Paperwork errors by private managers of the PBRA housing in New York City are common, City Limits documented. But PBRA’s unique private management structure creates additional complications.

Many PBRA developments have just one building. And since PBRA subsidies are tied to a particular unit, they are hard to move.

Tenants in other federally subsidized housing programs in New York, like public housing or housing choice vouchers, have more options—there are far more units to choose from in NYCHA or on the private market with a voucher.

But for tenants like Maria, there’s little flexibility. 

“If there is an issue—your apartment is uninhabitable, you are living with a domestic abuser and you need to get out of that situation—there’s really nowhere for you to go,” said Viruet.

After Manhattan North filed for eviction, Maria filed a suit of her own demanding outstanding repairs be made. After she found help in housing court from Legal Services NYC, Maria won a settlement in 2024 that promised her a transfer, abated her rent because of the repair issues, and reinstated her subsidy.

“I have the rights and I don’t care. I’m not here for them to like me. I’m not here to like them either. I’m here because they need to fix my stuff,” she said.

Many times, tenants can’t afford to make a fuss. If they leave, they have nowhere to go, and they would be giving up their subsidy: a lifeline in New York’s bursting housing market. The lack of alternatives for tenants puts management in a powerful position, advocates say.

“I wish I could move from here,” Maria said. “But rent is really expensive right now, and I cannot afford to pay, like, $2,000 myself.”

Read the next part in this series: 
The Accountability Crisis in NYC’s Project Based Rental Assistance Program

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