Housing Authority keeping thousands of units empty while many families wait

The financially strapped New York City Housing Authority has kept thousands of units empty for years despite a list of nearly 130,000 low-income New Yorkers waiting for an apartment.

- About 20% of the units at the James Weldon Johnson Homes in East Harlem - 265 out of 1,299 - were vacant last month. That includes 145 that have been empty for five years or longer and 25 that haven't had a tenant for more than 10 years.

- At Prospect Plaza in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, where NYCHA emptied three buildings with 369 units a decade ago to make way for a mixed-income development, that project has stalled. The agency quietly shelved plans to have a private developer build new low-income housing to replace the lost units.

- At Castle Hill Houses in the Bronx, 127 units, 6% of the development's 2,023 apartments, are being kept off the rolls.

Asked about the authority's vacancy rate, NYCHA spokesman Howard Marder said only 2,670 of the 179,000 apartments citywide are off the rent rolls, most of them for major renovations. "Another 1,386 are turnover units," Marder said, with new tenants about to move in.

Yet the agency's occupancy records show at least 6,500 units off the rent rolls - more than double the number NYCHA claims.

The records were supplied to The News by employees who are critical of the vacancy policy. They cover most, but not all, of the 198 developments the agency manages.

Those NYCHA employees claim the actual number of vacancies surpasses 20,000. They say top officials are hiding the true extent of the problem.

"The number of empty units is a scandal," said one source at NYCHA headquarters.

Agency officials strongly reject those claims.