NYCHA: Capital Planning for Public Housing in New York City
The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is a New York State chartered public benefit corporation established in 1934. NYCHA is the largest public housing authority in North America providing affordable public housing for over 500,000 authorized residents.
Maintaining a comprehensive database of building condition information is essential to NYCHA’s effective operation. Federal regulations require NYCHA to conduct a facilities condition survey for every residential and non-residential property within its portfolio. NYCHA must complete a Physical Needs Assessment (PNA) once every five years to identify current facility conditions. These surveys must include a comprehensive inspection of various site, building, and utility components and their sub-components.
The aim of the PNA program is to identify, plan capital improvement programs (CIP), and begin the rehabilitation process for each of NYCHA’s developments, seeking to bring those developments up to acceptable modernization and energy efficiency standards. Our team developed an executive summary report that presents critical findings identified through NYCHA’s PNA program. The STV | AECOM Joint Venture team conducted facility condition assessments at all Housing Authority developments across the five boroughs of New York City. The PNA program provides facility condition data for 2,300+ buildings found on 325 properties (over 2,500 acres) citywide, as well as 700+ non-residential facilities, more than 170,000 apartments, and over 3,300 elevators.
LOCATION
New York City, NY, USA
CLIENT
New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)
ROLE
Technical advisement as part of AECOM team
The team’s technical expertise was central in the delivery of Energy Auditing and Modeling services for this program. The team modeled over 30 typological buildings and developed energy conservation measures (ECMs) to help NYCHA reduce energy and water consumption across the portfolio.
The team developed a sophisticated capital planning software application that leverages the PNA database. This platform supports NYCHA staff to build and cost capital projects, then compare and contrast groups of projects into various scenarios for advanced planning purposes. The capital planning app gives the client deep insights into the management of their asset portfolio, allows deferred maintenance strategies to be defined, and helps optimize spending through informed decision-making policies.
The primary goal being to drive a discourse toward strategies that might bring about effective change through broader financial and asset management platforms with an eye on modernizing NYCHA’s portfolio to meet the next generation of New York City’s public housing needs.
The strategies presented within this program leverage data from the 2017 PNA to generate a range of approaches that might better serve residents by improving living conditions and by lowering operational costs and long-term capital expenditures. Various capital improvement programs are proposed and defined such that the remaining useful life of properties, buildings, systems, and asset components are balanced according to the needs identified within the 2017 PNA. Threshold triggers are suggested to prioritize one type of CIP over another.