Ben Carson, De Blasio To Continue NYCHA Talks At Meeting

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio and President Donald Trump's top housing official are scheduled to discuss New York City's beleaguered public housing at a Tuesday meeting. The mayor and Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, will meet at noon at an undisclosed location in Manhattan, according to the mayor's office.

"It's a continuation of their conversation on the future of NYCHA," mayoral press secretary Eric Phillips wrote on Twitter, referring to the New York City Housing Authority.

The sit-down will come about four days after NYCHA and the federal government submitted a court filing asking for more time to determine a path forward after a judge rejected a federal court settlement over the housing authority's failure to inspect apartments for lead paint, among other issues.

The rejection of the settlement has sparked debate over a federal takeover of NYCHA, the nation's largest public housing agency, at a time when it faces a mountain of repair needs.

Carson further raised the specter of a takeover in a Friday letter to interim NYCHA Chairman Stanley Brezenoff. He warned that he would "declare a substantial default with respect to NYCHA" if a new agreement wasn't reached by Jan. 31.

De Blasio, a Democrat, has argued a takeover, also known as a receivership, would be the wrong path forward for the troubled housing authority, saying such arrangements have a mixed history.

"Some of them turned out very poorly, some of them involved privatization, some of them involved tearing down public housing in different cities," the mayor said Friday in his weekly WNYC interview. "A lot of them involved displacing their residents who never got to come back."

The mayor unveiled his own turnaround plan for NYCHA last week that aims to tackle $24 billion in repairs.

The plan won praise from Lynne Patton, the Department of Housing and Urban Development's administrator for New York and New Jersey. But Patton said she and Carson still have "serious concerns" about whether the city "can make these improvements without robust oversight and without significant remediation milestones."

"They're going to have to prove to us that they can do that," Patton said Monday in an interview with PIX11.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the time of de Blasio and Carson's Tuesday meeting. It is at noon, not 11 a.m.

(Lead image: Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson is seen in Washington, D.C. in August 2018. Photo by Shannon Finney/Getty Images)