The New York City Housing Authority, tasked with building and maintaining hundreds of thousands of affordable apartments in the five boroughs, is losing a big chunk of its budget this year.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development notified the NYCHA that it planned to reduce its contribution to the city agency by 5% in 2017, the Wall Street Journal reports. That would equate to a $35M cut, the sharpest decrease in federal funding in five years at a time when the city continues to grapple with crises of housing affordability and homelessness.
Officials with the NYCHA, after conversations with HUD officials now working under newly confirmed Secretary Ben Carson, fear that the city could lose up to $150M in federal money, which NYCHA leaders say would cripple the organization's mission. Almost two-thirds of the authority's $3.2B budget comes from HUD. It operated with a $21M surplus in 2016, but the cuts turn that into a $14M deficit this year.
