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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Manny Martinez, Resident Council President of South Jamaica Houses, on NYCHA Security and Resident Rights
0:06:02
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3 min
Manny Martinez, Resident Council President of South Jamaica Houses, delivers a powerful testimony criticizing NYCHA's approach to public housing residents and the DOI's report on security issues. He emphasizes the lack of recognition of residents' rights and their exclusion from decision-making processes, despite federal laws mandating their involvement.
- Martinez argues that NYCHA treats residents like "correctional facility inmates" rather than partners in maintaining their homes.
- He highlights the failure to involve residents in contract oversight and policy-making, which he believes could have prevented issues like security guard absenteeism and the micro-contracts raid.
- The testimony calls for centering resident participation and recognizing public housing residents as the "backbones" of the system, not just subjects to be managed.
Manny Martinez
0:06:02
Good morning, and thank you for this opportunity and for putting focus on this and for inviting me.
0:06:07
I have a a testimony here I would like to provide.
0:06:11
Living in public housing can feel like living in the embassy of a foreign country.
0:06:15
But instead of diplomatic immunity, we are centered in political and bureaucratic crosshairs.
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We are hunted, not helped, for the billions our presence brings into the system.
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That's not a punch line.
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It's policy and it's practice.
0:06:30
This report by the Department of Investigation shows what we already know because we live it.
0:06:35
The guards left, the doors fell, the cameras didn't work, fires happened, and NYCHA said nothing did nothing.
0:06:43
But while it's easy and even convenient to beat up on NYCHA, let's not ignore the other failure happening right here.
0:06:50
This report never mentions our rights, not once.
0:06:53
It talks about contracts, it talks about staffing, but it says nothing about how residents were excluded from the process, from oversight, from partnership even though federal law requires it.
0:07:05
Under 24 c f r nine sixty four one thirty five, we are supposed to be included in operations.
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Under one zero five, we are supposed to help shape policy.
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Under 11, we are supposed to be equal partners in protecting the homes we live in.
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But NYCHA treats those rights like fine print and DOI didn't even read them, not in the findings, not even in the recommendations.
0:07:27
This is a failure, not just of NYCHA, but of the DOI in the city because this isn't the first time residents' rights were ignored.
0:07:35
Last year, 70 people were arrested in a raid tied to NYCHA, micro contracts.
0:07:40
The report said nothing about those how those events could have been prevented if resident if residents' economic rights had been respected, monitored, and enforced.
0:07:49
The law says residents should have been involved in contract oversight and shape and policy in a reviewing of how money moves, and if we had been, that raid never would have happened.
0:08:00
This isn't just a failure of security, it's a failure of recognition.
0:08:04
We are not correctional facility inmates, but that's how NYCHA treats us.
0:08:08
The cameras we live under, 20,000 of them aren't used to protect our rights or enforce housing policies.
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They're used by the NYPD.
0:08:17
That tells you everything about how NYCHA sees us, not as neighbors, not as retirees, not as working families, but as threats, as cases to be managed, as noise to be contained.
0:08:29
The real crisis isn't just that guards left their post, it's that we were never invited to stand at the post with them.
0:08:35
If NYCHA had honored our federally mandated right to partnership, this failure wouldn't have lasted five years.
0:08:42
It would have ended in five minutes.
0:08:44
So, yes, this report is a start, but it doesn't name our rights.
0:08:48
If it doesn't center resident participation, if it doesn't examine how government intention that intentionally excludes the people it is required to serve, then it's just paperwork with a headline.
0:08:59
We are not guests in this system.
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We are the backbones of it.
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And we will not sit quietly while you audit the contracts, ignore the people.
0:09:08
Thank you.