Two audits were recently released by Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. which fault the New York City Housing Authority for warehousing vacant apartments awaiting renovation for years, and for having insufficient controls over its tenant selection and assignment systems.

“These audits show significant weaknesses in the Authority’s ability to manage two of its most basic functions – planning for capital improvements with minimal tenant disruption and maintaining an accurate waiting list,” Thompson said. “As NYCHA looks to increase its tenant fees to compensate for reduced Federal funding, it must ensure that it is spending its dollars prudently.

“Keeping apartments vacant longer than absolutely necessary deprives New Yorkers of desperately needed housing, and deprives the City of rental revenue,” he continued. “NYCHA must take appropriate action now to rectify these very serious problems.”

Audit of Timeliness of Apartment Renovations

The first audit determined whether NYCHA had adequate controls to minimize the length of time apartments were held vacant for capital renovations. It studied a sample of six developments undergoing large-scale capital renovations: Marlboro and Whitman/Ingersoll in Brooklyn; Johnson, Randolph, and Vladeck in Manhattan; and Ocean Bay in Queens.

The 2,107 units taken off the rent rolls at these developments were vacant for an average of 40 months, with 27 percent off the rent rolls for more than 60 months.

For one development, Ocean Bay in Queens, the average length of time that units were vacant was almost seven years.

The audit’s findings include the following:

•NYCHA lacked adequate controls to minimize the length of time apartments were held vacant for capital renovations and the length of time tenants need to be relocated. According to the audit, at the point that apartments are first removed from the rent roll, there are no specific plans in place regarding (1) the work to be done, (2) when the work will commence, or (3) the amount of time the project will take.

•Many apartments were taken off the rent rolls years before the earliest relocation activity took place. For example, the first unit at Ocean Bay was taken off the rent roll in June 1990, but NYCHA did not start relocation activity (distribution of notices to tenants or holding of a meeting with tenants) until May 1999.

•Construction at three of the six developments sampled – representing 65 percent of the vacant apartments in the audit – had not begun as of January 1, 2006.
Randolph, Johnson and Whitman/Ingersoll comprise 1,369 of the 2,107 vacant apartments in the audit. The first unit was taken off the Randolph rent roll in January 1995; for Johnson, the first unit was taken off the roll in July 1995; for Whitman/Ingersoll, the first unit was removed in April 1996.

•Long delays cited at developments where construction started. At Ocean Bay, the second phase of work was delayed at least two years while NYCHA’s Capital Projects and Development unit (CPD) underwent reorganization and a new contract- management process was implemented.

NYCHA could have gained more than $4 million in additional rental income by reducing by 20 percent the amount of time apartments were kept vacant. Auditors estimated how much revenue NYCHA could have collected had the apartments been off the rent rolls from 5 to 20 percent less time.

NYCHA officials generally agreed with the auditors’ recommendations.

Audit of NYCHA’s Tenant Selection System and Assignment Plan System

The second audit found that NYCHA maintains two computer systems to handle tenant selection and assignment. These systems are not integrated.

Auditors found that the lack of system integration leaves the systems susceptible to manipulation so that ineligible applicants could be deemed eligible and placed in NYCHA housing. Under the current systems, applicant information is first entered into the Housing Authority Tenant Selection (HATS) system. When an applicant is certified as eligible for NYCHA housing, this data is manually entered into the Tenant Selection and Assignment Plan (TSAP) system.

The audit’s main findings are as follows:

•Because the systems are not integrated, it is difficult for NYCHA to reconcile differences in applicant information and other data in the systems. A test of the databases of the two systems found 67 active applicants who appear on the TSAP waiting list, although there is no record that those applicants were first processed in HATS.

•Auditors found 3,920 instances in which applicants listed as certified in the first system, HATS, should have appeared in the second system, TSAP, but did not. This raises the possibility that eligible applicants might not have been offered NYCHA housing when it was available for them. NYCHA responded that the discrepancies between HATS and TSAP were the product of data-entry errors.

•There were many discrepancies between information contained on the HATS and TSAP systems in files for the same applicants. For example, there were 889 records whose priority codes did not match, and 193 records whose “number of rooms requested or required” did not match. In addition, there were 730 records whose family sizes did not match.