Housing And Urban Development Secretary and perpetually tired ass Ben Carson, professional national broadcasting bloviater, bullshitter and predatory slumlord Sean Hannity and former NYCHA commissioner and confirmed ugly defiant liar Shoya Olatoye. A pyramid of impoverished morals and ethics.
Great news about public housing comes as rare as a solar eclipse and none can be greater than New York City ridding of the oblivious incompetence, deception tactician and hideous presence of former commissioner Shoya Olatoye, whose just exited her post along with her fourth heinous hairstyle in four months. But just as wanting to admire such a natural wonder as aforementioned, such events can be temporary or even permanently blinding.
For the culture of criminal incompetence and intimidation still reigns. On the same day the stupid succubus of NYCHA left her post, a tenant was threatened with eviction because she had the gumption and goddamn right to do a interview with a PIX News correspondent to show off the utter inhabitatibility of her government issued dilapidated apartment as well as other units of the Jacob Riis Houses in the now tony East Village of Manhattan by displaying for the camera and the viewing public of the persistent mold and the leaky pipes causing it.
After getting busted for still avoiding lead inspections a good six months after NYCHA officials and then Shoya lied to the feds about it and a judge ordered to start doing them, basing her decision on how full of deceptive shit they are; NYCHA is still using the same shitty software to track the apartments that need the lead removals.
And to be expected from Mayor de Faustio of his utter lack of resourcefulness and dependence on brazen histrionic cronyism, he decided to replace Shoya Olatoye with the same guy, Stanely Brezinoff to oversee the Board of Corrections and Long Island University Hospital, which both led to existential and permanent disastrous results retrospectively. Which gives this Permanent Government club member the specter of a political Pennywise or Grim Reaper to supervise the processes and maintenance of the real only affordable housing program in the five boroughs.
The willful obliviousness by NYCHA executives continues to hang in the ether as the lead and mold they ignore as the interim GM Vito Mustaciuolo unambiguously declared that public housing was beautiful. Reportedly, he didn’t cite certain housing projects that earned this alleged distinction, so it was safe to assume that he was talking about the entirety of NYCHA. Not much is known if he was sober when he made this statement at a City Council but this outright blatant denial of the general opinion and tenant witnesses of the horrible conditions they are living gives the impression that when Vito saw these beautiful buildings he must have been huffing lead and mold from the walls.
And to make matters even worse and a crushing irony for the 400,000 plus living and paying rent in these beautiful buildings, NYCHA officials decided to implement a mandatory smoking ban to take effect at the end of July. So the only time NYCHA shows concern and responsibility for the health of their tenants and their perpetual toxic environment is to issue a regulation that could lead them to arbitrary fines and possible eviction. This may be stretching medical diagnosis, but smoking Kools or Marlboros might be more healthier than inhaling the lead and mold in addition to the rat feces and urine stench that has remained in apartments from managerial neglect in the last 4 years under the fauxgressive neoliberal policies and actions of our current mayor and the former hairdo obsessive commissioner.
Another burn from this bullshit ban is that if marijuana becomes legal (and it fucking will, believe me), the weed smoking tenants won’t be able to enjoy it in their apts (the way it ought to be consumed, with Hendrix and Funkadelic flowing through the speakers and headphones) and the elderly won’t be able to smoke it if it’s medicinally prescribed. So NYCHA will be banning a substance that is actually good for people’s health but ignored requests to remove a substance that remained on the walls of rooms for decades and lied that they did (until a judge told them to remove it).
Of course the only way the tenants of public housing could have their conditions improved and have the toxins of lead and mold removed is if they are naturally removed themselves. For it’s more healthy to be homeless than having an actual home in the beautiful NYCHA buildings according to these maniacs.
The city cannot be fully to blame for these are established federal rules and ultimately federal inaction and funding extraction (that had to be spent for America’s expensive proxy wars, bank bailouts and the current oligarch welfare tax cuts) that is the root cause and the bane of the suffering tenants existence.
Because the HUD Commissioner, idiot savant brain surgeon, alleged successful belt buckle stabber and America’s landlord Ben Carson has lifted his squinty eyes for a moment and proposed to raise the rents on all subsidized housing across the nation. A vicious hike that will cost the poorest and most vulnerable of citizens another $100 a month. Considering that most of those affected would be the elderly which will pilfer a chunk from their social security checks and whatever amount they were able to save in their lifetime, and single mothers which will force them to scrimp on food, school supplies and diapers and in both targets, their reliance on public transportation.
Carson’s austerity attack on the lower and most vulnerable class of society in general is being proposed and promoted as some sort of incentive to encourage people to get better jobs with better incomes so they can get better apartments or homes and wean them off dependence of the government that their tax dollars extracted from their meager checks pay for. Which is the thought process expected from a man who spent a good deal serving his country with high end furniture shopping for his office with his domineering wife.
Amidst Carson’s crass assumptions that public housing tenants don’t work and prefer not to, he sort of mollified those concerned and affected by these brutal hikes that no one will wind up homeless. Well, not now but eventually precisely for the elderly and infirm, because their subsidy will end in six years and then their rents will go up instantly when the due date arrives. Surely when the cap expiration date arrives this will incentivize these residents, who will be in their seventies, to go back to the workforce and righteously earn their keep. And maybe all those poor young moms will get incentivized to get a second job to got with the job they got to qualify for food stamps.
These sound like ridiculous, ignorant and cynical opinions but consider the source:
“What we really do is start thinking ahead, but also recognizing that the federal government has been responsible for creating a system that causes people not to necessarily want to work, because if they make more money, their rent goes up, or they may no longer be eligible for their apartment, and this is a nonstarter.”
“So we really need to figure out a way to incentivize people while at the same time providing them with the help that they need in order to move up that ladder,”
“We have to understand that in 30 states you can actually make more money from just sitting back and receiving entitlements than you can from working a minimum-wage job, so it shouldn’t surprise us that a lot of people elect to take the first option,”
“What they don’t actually understand is that if you take the minimun-wage job, you gain skills, relationships, opportunities that you would not otherwise have had, and in the long run you end up in a much better place. And this is where we really want people to be.”
The last statement/belief is preposterous and sounds like bad human resources orientation copy, as if all those that will be victimized by these hikes have never had relationships or had human interaction before. How does that explain all those kids and grandchildren.
As for making the needy earn their keep and right to dwell and pay rents they can afford from their stagnant salaries, they can only be as fortunate as who Secretary Ben deems worthy of robust government funding, one Mr. Sean Hannity. The Fox News Network putrid pundit was discovered by accident (actually exposed during the court hearing of yutz lawyer Michael Cohen over an alleged illegal payoff now cash transfer to a porno star) to be the proprietor of low income housing properties and foreclosed homes through proxy shell company LLC’s with the help of HUD funding. Way to suck and profit off the government teet, and he gradually raised the rents 50% on the tenants of the apartment buildings in a small town in Georgia. Hannity did all this while he had a guy from a law firm he hired who handled his investments on his radio show to give financial expertise and later had ol’ Bennie on his t.v. show discussing the lazy and non-incentivized poor tenants of the nation as Hannity recently got new loans worth 22 million dollars from HUD to cover his collective mortgages.
But nothing beats Bennie’s earlier comment in the first months of his post as HUD commissioner when he stated that public housing shouldn’t be “too comfortable”, which Ms. Olatoye and her minions at NYCHA were only to willing to oblige and justify his opinion by worsening environmental conditions in the last year since Ben got appointed to his position in Trump’s plutocabinet of wealthy and stupid dunces along with Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos and Rick Perry.
To sum it up, the plan for subsidized affordable housing is to ruin it and convert it into luxury “affordable” housing. It’s all and has been for the last half century a government sanctioned plan to rid tenants who don’t spend enough by the demolition by neglect tactic and the fatalist idiom that you get the housing you pay for because of the low price you pay to live in a subsidized apartment so untreated mold and lead, broken doorbells and rats in the hallway and roaches crawling in the baby crib has got to be expected. And now it can only be remedied with privatization and crass market rate tower development.
This is why poor people can’t ever have nice things, mainly a non-leaking, non-mold infested well painted roof over their heads. Because the people assigned and elected to provide them of their human right to have a home are all lying and denying sociopaths and pscyhopaths with no sense of decency or awareness of other realities beside the pristine aristocratic existence these “leaders” currently roam around in. From gala events to their luxury homes devoid of such disgusting and hazardous sights and smells.
Mostly though, these people assigned and elected are fucking stupid and were unqualified for their positions in the first place. Who are driven by their preferred agendas and investment portfolios than a desire to actually help people they are supposed and sworn to serve.
This is madness. But this is NYCHA. This is now America. And it needs the money from the renting poor more than from the renting frivolous spending and shell company owning rich.
This will not and cannot be sustained.
Impunity City 