Monitor Bart Schwartz News Today

Concerns ranged from the functionality of security cameras at developments to broken locks and entryway doors, as well as how elevator breakdowns impact tenants with mobility issues.

Sometimes it’s hard to quantify scale in New York, which is a city in the same way an aircraft carrier is a boat. The city’s public housing authority system houses just under 340,000 authorized residents, significantly more than the entire city of Newark — and that’s not counting hundreds of thousands of estimated unofficial residents.

The low rate of replacements comes in spite of the fact that NYCHA is supposed to swap out at least 108 of its more than 3,000 elevators by the end of 2022 under the federal monitor agreement the agency entered in 2019.

Mayor Adams questioned Monday whether NYCHA’s federal monitor has done enough to get to the bottom of an arsenic scandal engulfing a public housing project in Manhattan — and suggested bankrolling the watchdog’s operation is not money well spent for city taxpayers.

The city’s approval process was two to three times as long as the process in cities with similar requirements like Boston and Los Angeles.