Ruffin has been at Elliott-Chelsea for more than 30 years. The apartment’s two bedrooms allowed her to raise Prince, who liked keeping small pets and fixing electronics, until he was a teenager. She often worked two security jobs at a time to make ends meet. Eventually, she earned a master’s degree in speech therapy. By the late 2010s, Ruffin was making a decent salary and paying a little over $1,500 a month, still a manageable sum in a neighborhood that she had watched transform as artists and luxury retailers crept in, followed by the lush tourist trap of the High Line park, the gleaming towers of Hudson Yards, and the soaring rents that came along with them.
One day in 2024, Doris Ruffin returned to her apartment after a long hospital stay to find a notice from NYCHA taped to her door: She would be relocated. The housing authority—working with Related Companies, the mega-developer of Hudson Yards, and its spin-off firm Essence Development—intended to demolish and rebuild her home, along with the whole of Elliott-Chelsea and the nearby Fulton Houses. Ruffin’s building would be among the first leveled. Staff “relocation specialists” would help the 67-year-old move into a different unit in the complex. In a few years’ time, she would be placed into a brand-new building packed with modern amenities like fitness centers and central AC. Ruffin was unmoved by this pledge. “I was in disbelief,” she said. Sure, the elevators needed an overhaul, and the plumbing clearly deserved repairs. But why did these problems require a teardown?
The plan to transform Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea falls under a federal scheme that allows local agencies to convert developments out of the public housing system and bring on private real estate companies that can finance their rehab or reconstruction. Often, these partners are big corporate landlords that are more than happy to take over managing the homes—and collecting the government-guaranteed rent that they provide. As Congress has withdrawn funding from public housing, many cities have used the program to turn their entire portfolios over to private managers. This might be fine if the companies consistently delivered big upgrades. But the program does not exactly have a stellar track record. A 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office found that large percentages of tenants in converted developments nationwide reported poor renovation quality and nonresponsive management, and a 2022 assessment from Human Rights Watch warned that, in New York City, it has “negatively impacted the right to housing of low-income residents by leading to a reduction in oversight.” That neglect has caused a range of serious problems for tenants, from increased evictions to poor living conditions.
None of this smelled right to Ruffin. “These developers are just being greedy,” she said, her eyes growing big. “They don’t care about the people and how it’s affecting them.” When she viewed the temporary apartment that NYCHA had reserved for her, she found small, narrow rooms that were impossible to navigate with her walker. Ruffin decided that she was staying put. In her 14-floor building, she is one of 24 holdouts, as of late September. Six other families have refused to move out of a mid-rise in Fulton, the first marked for demolition in that complex. Together with tenants across their community, they are fighting in street rallies and in court against a plan that they view as a land grab. “This is what we’re used to, this is our environment,” Ruffin said. “If you take that away, you’re taking everything away from us.”
As the country unwinds the social gains of the twentieth century, what remains for public housing tenants?
Over the decades, however, that sunny New Deal vision has clouded. In the midcentury, cities struggled as white residents fled for the suburbs, lured by incentives denied to families of color. Public housing became the high-rise terrain of a Black urban underclass. Politicians and the media blamed the projects for rising crime and poverty, despite the vibrant communities millions still found there. Beginning in the 1970s, notorious superblocks, like St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe and Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, served as justification for Congress to drastically defund the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Local agencies spiraled into dysfunction; much public housing was allowed to deteriorate. In 1995, President Bill Clinton promised to “end public housing as we know it,” a bid for bipartisan agreement. “Most public housing worked pretty well,” said Edward Goetz, a professor of urban planning at the University of Minnesota and the author of New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy. “Yet we embarked on this large-scale effort to eliminate it.”
Into this smoky air of decline, HUD launched a new plan for public housing transformation. Adopted in 2012, the Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD, is a classic Obama-era public-private partnership—much like the deals that cities strike with companies to manage everything from utilities to hospitals. Under the program, local agencies can convert public housing into what’s called project-based Section 8 housing, a different form of low-income rental that provides roughly double the funding stream. The public still owns the land, while the private partner leases it for 99 years and takes a 50 percent stake in the venture. The idea is that these companies can borrow private capital and access tax credits to finance repairs in ways that housing agencies can’t. Unlike the diabolical demolition schemes of the 1990s and 2000s, the program stipulates one-for-one replacement of public housing units and guarantees tenants the right to return, with the same rent and without rescreening. For struggling housing authorities, the advent of the program was something of a stunner, said Paul Williams, a housing policy analyst who serves as executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise. He described it as a “life hack” for the agencies.
From the outset, however, RAD had problems. Certainly, the program attracted billions in investment, and there were complexes where it resulted in serviceable rehabs. But introducing corporate landlords with a profit motive meant completely changing the incentive structure of running these homes. Plenty imported their habitual cost-cutting practices. “When you bring in these new companies, some of them have very checkered histories,” said Iziah Thompson, a senior policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York. “Some of them are companies that the tenant movement has been fighting as ‘slumlords’ in the low-income housing space for years.”
In January, Doris Ruffin held onto her walker as she spoke into a cluster of local news mics at the entrance of the Hudson Guild, Elliott-Chelsea’s community center. Dressed in layers against the cold, she admonished NYCHA for harassing her. Flanking Ruffin were residents of the complexes, supporters from the Chelsea neighborhood, the Democratic district leader, a former state senator, and members of local left-wing organizations. After the seniors refused to leave, NYCHA began putting heat on them, they allege. Agency staff knocked on their doors day and night. Notices arrived threatening lease termination for unspecified rule violations. Many of the seniors are ill, disabled, or speak limited English. NYCHA, for its part, has said that all these measures were taken in the spirit of providing tenants with accurate information about the plan and the terms of their lease. In 2025, the housing authority sued 16 residents, including Ruffin, in hopes that a judge would have them removed; the judge declined, and the agency withdrew its request. But some tenants were intimidated by these tactics. “It is not right,” Ruffin said to the crowd. “It is not ethical.”
How the process of repairing Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea became a crucible for the fate of public housing in New York is a long and complicated story. But as Keitt indicates, it begins and ends with tenants feeling that their wishes are being ignored, a familiar experience for people of color across the United States whose government-run homes a city has decided to tear down in order to make room for the more affluent. Back in 2019, officials gave up on an initial plan to demolish two Fulton buildings and replace them with mixed-income towers when residents revolted. Chastened, the mayor’s office launched a working group process, where tenant representatives, community board members, and officials hashed out the gritty details of repairing both complexes under the local RAD variant (known as Permanent Affordability Commitment Together, or PACT). There were asbestos issues to consider, as well as leaks, mold, outdated elevators, and faulty heat and hot water. A delicate compromise was reached, with tenants agreeing to conversion on two conditions: no demolition of residential buildings and a limited amount of new market-rate construction. After NYCHA and tenant leaders chose Related and Essence to lead the project, community meetings were held, and tenants were bused to sample properties to demonstrate the companies’ good work. In 2022, Keitt recalled, the developers promised that tenants would receive renovation plans the following year.
Much about this change of plans outraged tenants who had been part of the process. The renovation estimates used to justify wholesale demolition, which had ballooned from $492 million to more than $1 billion when rerun by the developers, seemed fishy to say the least. Tenants believed that their buildings were in sound structural condition. And NYCHA and its partners helped nothing by failing to provide a third-party building condition and cost report, claiming that it was not officially required by HUD now that the plan was to redevelop. In 2025, the figures were called into question by a former NYCHA chief architect, who balked at the notion that rehabilitation costs could have doubled in the space of two years and suggested that the numbers were likely invented to support the partners’ preferred plan. (NYCHA contends that it has provided tenants and community groups with cost estimates. New buildings will provide a higher “degree of preservation,” a spokesperson said, meaning that they will last longer before needing repairs, not to mention offer greater value for NYCHA and the city.) Meanwhile, the housing authority and the companies stood to split $16.3 million annually in revenue from the first Section 8 tower alone. Tenants, of course, wanted repairs for their homes. But they suspected that the land they lived on was becoming a piggy bank to cover NYCHA’s capital shortfalls and “unlock tremendous value,” as the project’s website put it, for two real estate giants.
An irony of all this engineering is that it only hardened some tenants’ opposition. Their resistance was not limited to objections about an illegitimate process. As details emerged, tenants learned of significant material costs inherent in the plan. For one thing, conversion to a Section 8 lease and private management would mean a loss of certain protections afforded them by conventional public housing—despite New York City’s expanded rights for program participants. Tenants, for example, are no longer permitted to transfer into other complexes. Most consequential is a seriously defanged grievance process for issues like nonpayment of rent and succession of tenancy after a relative moves or dies, legal advocates have said, with private landlords moving more quickly to remove tenants and frequently bypassing required procedures intended to keep them housed. “We know that there is an increased eviction rate after a conversion,” said Celines Miranda, a lifelong resident of Elliott-Chelsea and vice president of its resident association, who strongly opposes the plan. “This is an issue throughout the city as a whole.”
Meanwhile, tenants like Ruffin, who were expected to relocate during construction, would lose their neighbors as they moved to temporary apartments in buildings where they knew nobody. Even under the best circumstances, the strong networks of the complexes would be radically disrupted. “We will lose a sense of community, something that has been so essential in our lives,” Miranda said.
There are, of course, pro-demolition tenants who simply want improvements to their homes, come what may. Miguel Acevedo, the president of the Fulton Houses resident association, has been especially outspoken on behalf of those eager for new construction. His attitude is basically pragmatic. Washington is not coming to the rescue, Acevedo reasoned: “If you have no funding, you get nothing fixed. If you get some type of funding, at least you have the opportunity for capital improvements.” Fears about poor-quality redevelopment are unfounded, he told me. Related and Essence are “the best of the best.” Tenant opposition he dismissed outright as being ginned up “through lies.” His position has resulted in some pretty ugly confrontations in community meetings with the anti-demolition crowd.
The Chelsea neighborhood, over the last two decades, has witnessed a dramatic influx of wealth in one of the most extreme gentrification processes in the country. Part of the rationale for allowing developers to clear public land for new housing is that it will absorb the renters who want to live there, a supply-side logic that has gained traction in recent years. Adams is fluent in this line of rhetoric. “Everyone knows that we need housing,” he said, yet “we allow the loud minority to slow down and stop and delay much-needed housing stock in the city of New York, and it’s not OK.” But those in public housing can’t help noticing that the new mixed-income towers will include few if any rentals that they, their families, or their friends can afford.
Seemingly galvanized by these provocations, this coalition of supporters has poured time and money into scrutinizing the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea plan by researching public documents and posing challenges in the courts. A variety of legal filings exploits everything from land-use arguments to state public housing statutes to tenant law in an effort to halt demolition. In several cases, Ruffin is a named plaintiff. “She has been harassed and threatened,” one filing reads. NYCHA is firm that its conduct is about working with tenants to find a resolution. “It’s absolutely not harassment,” said Bova-Hiatt. “It’s engagement.” The legal approach, however, has created obstacles. Early this year, tenants won a temporary restraining order, bringing all the engagement to a grinding halt, at least for a time.
Miami offers the most vivid warning in its conversion of Liberty Square, the subject of a chilling PBS documentary that Keitt has screened at the Hudson Guild Theater as political education for her tenants. In a rapidly gentrifying district of the city, the housing authority worked with a subsidiary of Related Companies on a $300 million redevelopment of the historically Black public housing complex. Input sessions were held; promises were made to avoid displacement. But before the new mixed-income complexes came online, the housing authority turned around and offered tenants the option to take vouchers for the private market in place of their right to return to reconstructed homes. In the end, only five of the more than 600 original families remained in the community. Complaints about mold, leaks, and cracks in the walls have continued in the replacement buildings.
New York City, with its newfound will to remake an expanse of noncommodified brick towers into productive assets, provides some of the most extensive data on the outcomes of RAD conversions. More than 44,000 units have been converted to private management under the program since 2016, and another 18,000 are marked for inclusion. In a survey published in 2024, the Community Service Society found that tenants of converted properties were more likely to report that their new landlords met their repair needs—as should be expected, given the large capital infusions to the developments. At the same time, however, tenants were more likely to describe issues like leaks, mold, and faulty heat and hot water as “serious” than those in conventional NYCHA public housing. New York City tenants have also suffered more than 10,000 code violations in converted developments since 2021, according to data from the independent local news outlet The City Reporter. In the worst cases, such neglect has allegedly led to catastrophes like a recent gas explosion at the Boston Secor Houses in the Bronx.
Converted properties in New York City have also shown higher eviction rates. One problem is the loss of a rigorous grievance process under private landlords, according to attorneys from the New York Legal Assistance Group. Tenants technically retain the right to request a hearing to dispute rent increases after a loss of income, resolve nonpayment, or plead for succession of tenancy. But it is significantly more burdensome for them to do so, and whereas the housing authority is prevented from pursuing evictions during the grievance process, private landlords under the program are not. That change has undermined succession rights and led to a shift away from NYCHA’s long-standing efforts to avoid removing tenants. Indeed, in 2024, eviction rates in NYCHA properties under private management were nearly five times greater than in conventional public housing, according to a report from the New York City comptroller’s office.
Recognizing these problems, some advocates and policymakers have fought for federal funding to preserve the existing public housing system. The cost of full repair may sound insurmountable: A recent report from the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities found that it would take roughly $170 billion over the next 10 years to address the system’s needs. But compared, for example, to the $28 billion per year in mortgage interest deductions for homeowners, itself a form of subsidized housing, the price tag sounds less daunting, said Korey Lundin, a senior attorney at the National Housing Law Center. “The federal government could choose to do something different,” Lundin said. “Congress could choose to adequately fund federal housing.”
In the face of capricious federal decision-making, more grassroots policy demands have arisen. Ramona Ferreyra, the founder of the New York–based public housing preservation group Save Section 9, promotes an array of state and local taxes that could provide sustaining revenue. “People kept asking, how are you going to fund public housing?” said Ferreyra, a NYCHA tenant. “Funding the repairs is the only way to stop privatization.” A state proposal would tax every transaction that Wall Street processes, and the group requests that it earmark for NYCHA 5 percent of the proceeds, which would provide $2 billion in annual operating funds. Ten percent of a local tax increase on millionaires could bring NYCHA some $400 million per year. To finance renovations, Keitt favors the use of a program called Comprehensive Modernization, which has been responsible for revitalizing several NYCHA complexes when residents negotiated funding as part of local rezoning efforts. In the end, what tenants like Ferreyra and Keitt demand is straightforward: the option to preserve public housing, without unasked-for private entanglements. “What I would like to see is democracy at work,” Keitt said. “Ask people what they want. Give them choices.”
Before long, the Mamdani administration came out in full-throated support of the program. His housing plan, released in May, devotes significant funding to the local version of RAD and a related program called the Public Housing Preservation Trust, which would lease properties to a public-benefit corporation. Unable to gain an audience with the mayor himself, the opposition has taken its message to a range of public forums. In July, several dozen agitators showed up at NYCHA’s Annual Plan public hearing, held in an airy auditorium in Downtown Brooklyn. Many wore T-shirts that read PROTECT PUBLIC HOUSING. One by one, they testified against the inclusion of thousands of new conversions in Mamdani’s 2027 budget. “Our buildings are sound and strong,” said Samantha Ortiz, a Fulton resident. “We want rehabilitation, no privatization.” Miranda urged tenants not to sign new Section 8 leases. Even policymakers chimed in. Council member Chris Banks, chair of the Committee on Public Housing, has been a skeptic of the program and advocates that all tenants get to vote on whether their properties will be converted. At the hearing, he questioned the Mamdani administration’s commitment to NYCHA residents. After Banks spoke, as an official attempted to call the meeting to order, the crowd broke into shouts: “Save Section 9!” Officials looked dourly out from the stage.
What gets lost in policy debates is that the people who actually live in public housing may have separate motivations from those of political and real estate elites. For them, it doesn’t seem like NIMBYism to say that they don’t want their perfectly good apartment buildings razed for the sake of the bottom line.
In July, an appeals court lifted the temporary restraining order that had throttled the plan at Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea. For developers, that means it’s open season. Yet NYCHA must turn the buildings over unoccupied. The Mamdani administration, high priests of pristine optics, would prefer to avoid the spectacle of hauling seniors into housing court. At the moment, the city’s approach is “bespoke, one-on-one engagement,” according to NYCHA, with groups of city officials knocking on holdouts’ doors to inform them of their rights and persuade them to move into temporary apartments. As of late September, there were no takers. But in the end, the housing authority is a landlord, with all the tools of one. Recently, it delivered lease-termination notices to those who remain. The agency has repairs to consider, revenue, and especially development—not just of homes for the “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished” of the Roosevelt era, but these days, apparently, for all of Gotham’s twinkly-eyed in-movers. “We never want to evict somebody,” Bova-Hiatt said. “But we can’t let a handful of people stand in the way of progress.”
But all the uncertainty is stressful, she said. Will her home be demolished? Will it ever be rebuilt? Will her new landlord be worse than the last? She loses sleep. “I put in my time,” she said. “I worked. I should be able to live in peace, not worrying about who’s going to knock on my door.” She has contributed to her family and community, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent to landlords in the private and public sectors. Now she’s sick. What she wants, she feels, is simple: repair without loss, improvement without displacement. For some reason, this city, this state, this country are no longer designed to provide that.
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