The Mann v. Steyn trial has ended, for now. Post-trial motions and appeals will likely play out over months and years, with little to report on a daily basis. It’s time to return to some of my other obsessions.

Like the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Over the years, I’ve had more than twenty posts on this utterly failed agency, which is probably the best large-scale example of a pure socialist-model economic enterprise in the United States. A few of my prior posts on NYCHA can be found here, here and here.

After starting out with great optimism and hope in the 1940s and 50s, NYCHA began to decline in the 80s and 90s. By 2000 it had entered full socialist death spiral mode. Each year since then, it only gets worse.

One of the ongoing mysteries of NYCHA has long been why it costs the Authority so much more to operate and maintain an apartment than it costs a private landlord.

There’s always something new to report on New York’s housing follies.

The accepted housing paradigm here in blue-model New York is that elite public policy geniuses with access to infinite taxpayer funds will create housing solutions to provide perfect housing fairness and justice to all. Somehow, they keep falling short.

Nowhere is this more evident that with the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA. NYCHA is the ultimate socialist-model low income housing provider, by far the largest such housing authority in the country. It owns and manages about 180,000 apartments in what are known as The Projects, home to something in the range of 400,000-500,000 people, or about 5-6% of New York City’s population. (In most other American cities, HUD-supported projects house about 1-2% of the population.) For decades, as housing authorities in places like Chicago and St. Louis were forced to dynamite many of their failed low-income projects, NYCHA was held up as the great success story of the genre.

But was the apparent success real, or was NYCHA just more artful than its compatriots in covering up its failures?

From time to time I like to check in on the latest from the New York City Housing Authority. NYCHA (along with many other municipal housing authorities) is one of the purest examples in the U.S. today of socialist-model economic organization.

When we last looked back in 2018, NYCHA had just been sued by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for failing to maintain “decent, safe and sanitary” conditions, including failing to remediate lead paint, failing to control mold and vermin, and failing to provide consistent heat, hot water., and elevator service. NYCHA had promptly settled that lawsuit with a Consent Decree in which it promised to spend some $4 billion of New York City taxpayer money to fix the identified problems.

In the intervening close to 5 years, NYCHA has been mostly out of the news. Surely, the large infusion of funds has turned things around, and all is now going smoothly?

The big front page story in the New York newspapers the past couple of days has been the fire on Sunday in an apartment building in The Bronx that has killed some 19 people so far — with as many as 30 more in the hospital with life-threatening injuries. This loss of life in a fire is the greatest in New York since a 1990 fire at a nightclub in The Bronx (which killed more than 80).

So what kind of apartment building was this? Is there anything we should know about it? Look up the coverage in the New York Times, and you will learn, unhelpfully, that the building in question was “a 19-story Bronx apartment building” at 333 East 181st St., that went by the name of “Twin Parks North West.” Nothing about how this building came to be built, or by whom.

But if you know anything about The Bronx, you will realize that, outside of the small Riverdale district, there are almost no apartment buildings there that are as tall as 19 stories other than those built with extensive government subsidies.