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“Giving” them equity that they would just sell before they move elsewhere is a stupid idea. If they were good at handling money like that, they wouldn’t be in public housing.

The best thing would be to just boot all the illegals from NYC to reduce the pressure on housing costs and the number of residents that might need alternatives while instead selling the buildings to developers.

Bid out each building for renovation, with the winning renovator getting the number of units bid.

Imagine a 50-unit building. There are three bidders, one at 14 units, one at 12 units and the low bidder at 10 units.

The building gets renovated. The NYCHA picks out its 40 units and the renovator gets the 10 not picked by the NYCHA.

First step: get rid of rent controls. Let that action work for a couple of years and I think you’ll see landlords making the decisions as to what happens next. My guess is that many people will not be able to continue living in NYC and they will be forced to live elsewhere. But, why is that a bad thing?

From the article: ...the “privatization” consists of bringing in a couple of well-connected developers to run the process for years on end. Those have been named via a non-competitive process called an RFP (request for proposals).

Francis Menton, the author, gives away his ignorance (or deception). A Request For Proposals (RFP) is not the process, it's one step in a process. And the process is competitive, hence the request for proposals (plural).

As a retired lawyer, living in Manhattan, he should know this. A city like New York City releases thousands of RFPs, for everything from garbage pickup to police radio servicing. They're public record.

The proposals are received, reviewed, scored, and a winner selected. That there are only two firms bidding, as he claims, for housing renovation is expected in such a narrow field of work that few firms are interested in - whether by design or by default. Few companies want to do renovations, especially of government housing, when they can instead do new construction from private developers. I'm sure there are companies in Russia or China that specialize in renovating government housing. New York City could open up the bidding to those companies, with the expectation that some of the building will collapse spectacularly.

On a related note, Direct Sourcing is when a company or government agency bypasses the bid process and directly contracts with a firm. This normally happens with specialized expertise or proprietary software.