From NYTimes writer Kyle Thomas McGovern: "Two Waverly Avenue townhouses owned by the New York City Housing Authority that have been abandoned for years need extensive repair, but renovating them would not be an efficient use of the city agency’s resources, a NYCHA spokeswoman told The Local. NYCHA recently announced that it plans to put the two townhouses up for public bid by the end of the year. If a private developer buys and renovates them, the units will no longer be designated as city-subsidized affordable housing, Sheila Stainback, a NYCHA spokeswoman, told AOL Patch in March.
"While NYCHA has owned the two townhouses since 1977, buildings such as 99 and 110 Waverly don’t fit easily into NYCHA’s property portfolio. The peculiarities of a particular townhouse’s design features make renovation expensive and time-consuming, she said. 'All of a sudden you have to go re-measure for a window from a unit that was built in 1885,' Ms. Popkin explained. 'That’s not NYCHA’s typical kind of work.' Currently, NYCHA owns only 26 of these multifamily townhouses, said Ingrid Faria, Deputy Director for Special Projects in Development at NYCHA. The buildings on Waverly Avenue comprise only a small number of units compared to those in the traditional housing projects that make up most of NYCHA’s 178,882 apartments. 'When you are sending maintenance or any kind of repair work over there for one or two units, it’s at the sacrifice of many, many scores of units more that need that kind of attention, and on-going attention as well,' Ms. Stainback said." Full article here.