'Black Hole' Agency NYCHA Needs Compstat To Track Money, BP Says

FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN — NYCHA residents who spent a blisteringly cold weekend without heat, hot water or any explanation why joined Brooklyn Borough Eric Adams to call for the increased transparency they believe a data tracking service like the NYPD's CompStat would provide.

"This is a dark, bottomless black hole," Adams said of the current state of affairs at NYCHA, the city agency responsible for maintaining and repairing public housing. "Where is the money being spent?"

Adams and Louis Anemone, the former NYPD chief who in the 1990s designed the police's data tracking service CompStat, held a press conference outside the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene Monday afternoon to demand NYCHA implement a similar program.

NYCHA resident Isabella Lee joined Adams in his call for improved transparency because the Whitman Houses have been under construction for years, which means children have access to dangerous construction sites and entire buildings, she said.

"My residents cannot breath through this netting," Lee said. "It's like we're living in prison."

Ingersoll Houses resident Darold Burgess added that his building at 5 Fleet Walk has no working incinerators, which means mounds of garbage are piling up outside his front door and attracting rats.

Burgess also spent the weekend without heat and hot water, but when he filed complaints through the NYCHA data portal over the weekend, he received an email stating the complaint had been closed even though no repairs had been made.

"We're in horrible, deplorable conditions," Burgess said. "And they keep passing the buck."

City Hall officials and NYCHA representatives have been discussing since 2017 a real-time tracking system that would monitor agency spending on housing maintenance and repairs, according to the Borough President.

NYCHA representatives did not immediately respond to Patch's request for comment.

While Adams decline to estimate how much the system would cost, he and Anemone claimed the technology would be inexpensive and the savings significant.

"We were working with a wing and a prayer and real cheap computers," Anemone said of the original CompStat, which he credited with the historic decline in New York City crime in the 1990s.

"We would see an effect in one year," Adams added.

The next steps would be for NYCHA to issue a Request for Proposals for a CompStat style system similar to those already in use in the FDNY, Department of Sanitation and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the officials said.

"You have problems in NYCHA," Anemone concluded. "Bring in CompStat and let us fix it."

Photos by Kathleen Culliton