Editorial comment: Affordable housing's watery grave

The city's Water Board will hold a public hearing on its proposed 14.5 percent water rate increase at Manhattan College's De La Salle Hall, Room 209 on Monday, May 5.

Riverdalians reacted predictably to the news that the cost of tap water is going up: with a combination of anger and indifference, a brief flash of indignation followed by a what-canyou- do shrug.

But at a meeting at Fordham University last week, the mood was very different. There, the Bronx-based United Neighborhood Housing Program warned that unending double-digit water rate hikes will doom efforts to provide affordable housing to poor and working- class New Yorkers and could bring back an era of blight and abandonment.

Failures in federal policy and municipal ineptitude have combined to create a water-borne crisis, UNHP says in a report that accompanied the summit meeting of city officials and providers of affordable housing.

The feds have piled costly mandates on the city. Initially, measures to stem pollution came with federal funds to pay for them, but for 20 years, cities like New York have been required to go it alone to meet federal standards.

As a result, the city Department of Environmental Protection has had to borrow huge sums to build the Third Water Tunnel, protect the Catskill-Delaware watershed, and build the filtration plant under construction in Van Cortlandt Park and an ultraviolet disinfection facility in Westchester.

As local residents know all too well, the costs of these projects have ballooned beyond all reason, leaving ratepayers to pay more and more interest on the bonds that fund them. In 2004, the DEP's capital program called for spending $16 billion over the next 10 years; a year later it pegged its building costs at $23 billion. And that was when the filtration plant was supposed to cost $1.6 billion (up from $1.3); now the projected cost is closer to $3 billion.

UNHP wants to see some of those costs passed on to the city's general fund, instead of being borne entirely by ratepayers. Otherwise, it warns, the buildings abandoned in the 1970s and restored to useful, decent housing through the expenditure of our tax dollars will again be at risk of deterioration and abandonment.

"Operating expenses will claim a larger share of an already slim budget" for "maintaining quality housing and preserving affordability for low income tenants," the organization's report concludes. "As for new affordable housing projects, increased amounts of City subsidy will be necessary to defray these rising operating costs."

When the city transferred responsibility for setting water rates to the Water Board, our elected officials no doubt breathed a sigh of relief, as they generally do when they can hand off unpleasant responsibilities to unelected authorities and public benefit corporations.

However, insulated from public opinion, institutions like the Water Board are also insulated from the need to make wise public policy. They confine themselves to their own internal imperatives, in this case to meet the mounting cost of debt service. They have no mandate to consider the consequences in spheres other than their own.

Restoring responsibility to the mayor, the City Council and the state Legislature will require those we elect to make difficult and unpopular choices. But it will also create an incentive to hold down costs, while demanding a perspective that takes into account the broad needs of city residents, and not just those of bond-holders.