The New York City councilman Ritchie Torres, who chairs the council’s
Committee on Public Housing, had never heard of Lynne Patton before last
week, when Greg B. Smith, a reporter for the Daily News, called him to
ask what he thought about Patton’s new role in the federal government.
When Smith’s story on Patton ran, it appeared on the front page, with
what was, even by the standards of these unpredictable times, a notably
outraged headline: “She planned Eric Trump’s nups & falsely touts law
degree. Now Prez has decided new housing boss in N.Y. is . . . THE WEDDING SCAMMER.”

The White House, Smith wrote, was going to give Patton a top position at
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, putting her in
charge of the regional office for New York and New Jersey. As with so
many of the Administration’s appointees, her primary qualification for
the job seemed to be her loyalty to the Trumps. She had planned
celebrity tournaments at Trump golf courses, in addition to Eric Trump’s
wedding. Speaking from the stage at last year’s Republican National
Convention, she told the Trump children, “Eric, Don, and Ivanka, I love
you like the siblings I never had. You are compassionate, you are
charitable, you are my heroes!”

Not surprisingly, the news of Patton’s new position was roundly
criticized and, by the end of last week, a HUD spokesperson was
insisting that “there has been no official appointment”—a sign, perhaps,
that Ben Carson, Trump’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was
not going to give Patton the job after all. Torres told me, “I think the
Trump Administration must be confusing wedding planning with urban
planning—that’s my only explanation.”

Torres, whom I wrote about last year, chairs the committee that oversees
the New York City Housing Authority, also known as NYCHA, which runs the
nation’s largest public-housing program. (The number of people living in
the city’s public-housing projects exceeds four hundred thousand—more
than the total population of Cleveland.) The Housing Authority operates
three hundred and twenty-eight housing projects in the five
boroughs, and runs the largest Section 8 program in the country,
distributing vouchers to two hundred thousand low-income people living
in private buildings, to help them pay their rent. To fund all this, the
Housing Authority relies on more than two billion dollars a year from
the federal government.

The title of the job that Patton was reportedly up for sounds bland and
bureaucratic—the regional administrator for HUD’s Region II—but the
position is extraordinarily important. “Most funding for affordable
housing comes from the federal government, so, without the federal
government, we have no means of addressing the affordability crisis in
New York City,” Torres told me. “The regional administrator is supposed
to be the central point of contact between New York City and Washington,
D.C. I think, at its best, the regional administrator is the city’s
greatest internal advocate for affordable housing at the federal level.
So, you need somebody who understands the sheer scale of the city’s
affordability crisis, as well as the unique challenges of the New York
housing market.” He added, “We cannot afford to have a patronage hire
oversee New York City’s affordable-housing stock.”

In the past, the position of regional administrator has been held by
people like Mayor Bill de Blasio and Adolfo Carrión, the former Bronx
borough president. On WNYC last week, the host Brian Lehrer asked de Blasio about
Patton’s possible appointment. “It’s surprising, to say the least,” the
Mayor said. “Folks in that role historically have had substantial
background in government or in housing.” He added, “We’ve got six
hundred thousand New Yorkers who are directly affected by HUD policies
and HUD funding, a lot of which is on the line.”

Even before last week’s news, Torres and other housing advocates in the
city were extremely worried. Trump’s first few months in office brought
a parade of headlines about the possibility of steep cuts to HUD. In
March, after it was reported that Trump might cut its budget by six
billion dollars, Torres, ten other City Council members, and two members
of Congress held a press conference at City Hall, along with about a hundred
housing-project residents. In April, some eight hundred people protested
outside the regional-administrator’s office, on Broadway in lower
Manhattan. Torres and seven others were arrested for civil disobedience.
Their activism seemed to pay off in early May, when Trump signed a HUD spending bill that did not include significant cuts—but that bill was only a temporary measure, covering spending through September.

Last month, the unveiling of Trump’s proposed budget for the 2018 fiscal
year quantified the damage for New York City: three hundred and forty
million dollars in cuts to NYCHA, as well as a proposed raise in rents
for housing-project residents, from thirty to thirty-five per cent of
their income. The budget requires congressional approval, and Shola
Olatoye, the chair of the Housing Authority, has already said that the
cuts would “threaten our day-to-day operations.” In a statement the
agency released, she did not hold back: “The Trump Administration’s
devastating budget is an assault on public housing and affordable
housing as we know it in this City.” As Torres puts it, “Donald Trump
poses the gravest threat to public housing in the eighty-three-year
history of the Housing Authority.”

By now, most of the city’s projects are at least fifty years old and in
severe need of repair. Elevators routinely break down, lobby doors fail
to lock, boilers malfunction, and roofs leak, accelerating the spread of
mold. Greg B. Smith has been chronicling the deteriorating conditions in
the projects for years. In April, he wrote about a father in Harlem who
lives with his teen-age son in an apartment in which he’d had “no heat
in his bedroom for nearly five years,” the kitchen had no cabinets or
countertops, and the electrical outlets failed to work “in every room
except one.” The same month, WPIX aired a story about a
seventy-two-year-old woman in Williamsburg who bathed herself with a
hose because she had no working shower. If the proposed budget cuts go
through, worsening conditions in the city’s housing projects appear
inevitable.

When I interviewed Torres last August, we spoke about the upcoming
Presidential election, and he said, “In the end, the President has far
greater influence over NYCHA than even the mayor himself.” At the time,
Trump was behind in the polls. Ten months later, speaking about the
Patton appointment, Torres said, “Given the scale of the affordability
crisis in New York City, how could you afford to appoint someone so
frivolous to handle a serious crisis? I think it shows the President has
contempt for the social safety net because, if he took it seriously, he
would make a serious appointment.”