New York City has lost its focus on the importance of good property management in our housing ecosystem.
Property management is a complicated balancing act with an enormous impact on housing quality and resident quality of life. It is where the concept of housing intersects with people’s actual lived experience of their homes. It occupies a unique space at the center of the compact between owner and resident, with both as clients.
New York City today has an ever-increasing array of codes and regulations that require housing owners and property managers to meet minimum standards for the maintenance of housing, provide basic resident services, and comply with the financial terms of subsidy programs, with extensive reporting requirements and penalties for building owners when they fail to meet standards.
But increased compliance requirements do not necessarily translate into better management experiences for residents, or into improvements in the long-term health of our residential buildings.The negative and oppositional focus of our regulatory system, often designed to deter and punish bad actors, can also impedes the ability of good actors to pursue strategies that could both improve resident satisfaction and address owner imperatives. This is exacerbated by inadequate financial support of property management for affordable housing.
We need to restore housing policy’s focus on what it means for a building to be properly managed – to the benefit of all parties.
The evaluation of property management at the policy level has largely settled on using code violations and evictions as measures of tenant experience, and regulatory agreement compliance as a measure of sound affordable housing management. But a narrow focus on violations and fines can undermine good-faith efforts to provide sound property management. Property management teams are often overwhelmed by compliance reporting, which consumes limited budgets and diverts them from proactive strategic management. Fines can also compound the financial burdens on providers, further reducing the very management and operation budgets that are already strained to run affordable housing developments in NYC. Affordable providers who are taking over poorly managed buildings to rehabilitate them are hit with violations and fines that can be repeatedly reported.
Affordable housing pro formas are not keeping up with real-world needs for good property management, to serve residents and support the longevity of the building. Affordable housing operators are forced to in-source property management or rely on a limited number of property management firms, or forced to scrounge for supplemental resources to address property management needs. We have established consequences for failure – and more and more requirements for owners and property managers to document compliance – but we have few ways to reward or even measure good property management.
CHPC is embarking on a research initiative to reenvisage the goals we set for property management; to set out recommendations to elevate its importance within affordable housing, address resource needs, generate more transparency and accountability, celebrate wins, and address failings.
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Participatory Property Management: A Toolkit from the UK
Utilizing Seven National Tenant Engagement Standards from the UK, CHPC has developed a toolkit of options for how public housing residents could productively participate in property management after a PACT conversion.
Making Shared Housing Work
CHPC’s new guide to shared housing identifies core themes that make shared housing work as a long-term, high-quality housing option for single adults.
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