After more than two years of engaging with residents, the establishment of the City’s first-ever Resident Audit Committee, and dozens of surveys, the results of our audit were not particularly surprising…
We found maintenance request records incomplete and in disarray, some even moldy. We also found a sore lack of mechanisms to properly monitor contractors. This is even as NYCHA allocated more than $413.5 million for contractual services in Fiscal Year 2024, and the agency faces $80 billion (and growing) in capital needs.
And, overwhelmingly, our audit found extremely low resident satisfaction with the way NYCHA vendors are handling repairs and maintenance – from fixing broken doorknobs to painting and tiling. In one survey of NYCHA residents, thirty percent of those who rated the work performed by contractors gave a rating of “poor,” and less than half rated the work performed as “good” or better.
Our city’s more than 520,000 NYCHA residents deserve more. And what better way to hold vendors accountable than to give residents the ability to rate them?
As outlined in the audit’s accompanying policy report, a participatory and resident-driven approach to vendor oversight is urgently needed. NYCHA must embrace resident engagement and innovative technology tools to manage their properties more effectively.
What is a simple solution to this? Give NYCHA residents an opportunity to rate their vendors with a real-time “vendor scorecard,” if you will.
Creating an easy-to-use, accessible, and multi-lingual Yelp-like contractor evaluation tool would provide residents with the opportunity to rate vendors at the completion of every work order and before the vendor gets paid.
In fact, my team mocked up what that very tool could look like. Check out the "vendor scorecard" mobile app in action and see what it could look like if adopted by NYCHA.
