Looking to earn the kind of salary a finance professional might enjoy on Wall Street without ever being there? Consider plumbing work for the New York City Housing Authority.
Between July 2024 and June 2025, Jakub Markowski, a plumbing supervisor at NYCHA, took home an impressive $465,000. This amount included $332,000 for nearly 2,600 hours of overtime, which surpasses the combined salaries of both the mayor and the City Council speaker.
Simultaneously, while receiving these substantial paychecks, Markowski was also running two private plumbing businesses.
Currently, Markowski is under investigation by the Buildings Department.
As advocates for the city’s growing socialist left demand more housing under public or nonprofit management, the history of NYCHA unravels tales of inefficiency and corruption, with Markowski emerging as its most recent noteworthy case.
Lest we forget, Shola Olatoye, NYCHA’s chairwoman under Mayor Bill de Blasio, lied for years under oath to the federal government about nonexistent lead-paint inspections and other safety failures.
As part of the feds’ settlement with the city, since January 2019, an independent monitor has been in place to oversee NYCHA’s compliance.
Yet federal oversight has not stopped the rot. In 2024, Damien Williams, the Biden-appointed US attorney for the Southern District of New York, charged 70 NYCHA current and former employees with bribery and extortion.
The takedown represented the largest number of bribery charges brought in a single day in the Justice Department’s history.
All 70 pleaded guilty or were convicted.
Nor has public ownership delivered livable conditions for tenants. In fact, they’re bad enough to qualify as a moral stain on this city.
On July 6, the federal monitor released its latest quarterly report. Despite modest progress, it shows that NYCHA buildings are riddled with hazards.
Under the federal agreement, NYCHA is supposed to ensure that no more than 15% of mold complaints involve visible mold of 10 square feet or more. In the latest report, 86% did.
Without acknowledging why city government has long proved such a poor landlord, Democratic Socialists want to put even more housing under public or nonprofit control, in the name of affordability.
The far left has not shown why NYCHA is a success story in disguise, or why new public housing wouldn’t devolve into similar dysfunction.
Instead, they fall back on the claim that NYCHA is underfunded.
About 80% of NYCHA buildings are 50 years old or more, well past most buildings’ useful lives.
Rents cannot rise to support an estimated $80 billion in backlogged repairs and capital needs. The system has thus grown more dependent on taxpayer-funded city subsidies.
NYCHA’s capital expenditures on capital improvements increased 48% between 2021 and 2025, to $1.2 billion per year, with most new money coming from city and state sources.
One big reason for NYCHA’s recent financial distress is that more tenants aren’t paying their rent.
NYCHA collected only 68.6% of its anticipated rent in fiscal 2025, down sharply from 89.6% six years earlier.
And it’s not because their rents are too high. NYCHA households’ rents average $621 per month, capped at 30% of household gross income.
Only 38.4% of NYCHA families are employed, and the average income of a NYCHA household was $26,129.
Sadly, they’re trapped by the system’s disincentives to work and earn more, a broken public-education system and the lack of new housing supply.
Meanwhile, it costs NYCHA $1,419 per month on average to operate and barely maintain each unit.
Despite 165,000 families waiting to enter, NYCHA has just 6,740 vacant units and takes an average of 371 days to turn one around.
By contrast, the private sector maintains pre-1974 rent-stabilized housing at an average cost of $1,192 per month.
In buildings entirely composed of stabilized units, that figure is $1,037— about 27% less than NYCHA’s average.
In May, a typical market apartment in Manhattan and Brooklyn spent only about 37 days before being rented.
Rent-stabilized owners effectively sustain an affordable-housing program for 1 million units — over five times NYCHA’s 177,000 — and at lower average cost.
Yet Mayor Mamdani and his housing czar Cea Weaver treat private landlords as villains.
The duo is planning to funnel bankrupt buildings to their friends in the nonprofit-housing world.
Yet, if anything, NYCHA offers real-world evidence against greater public-sector involvement.
Even with supposedly strict processes that aim to prevent favoritism, kickbacks and self-dealing, people will find ways to work the system.
Free, competitive markets reduce corruption because they leave government officials with fewer opportunities to intervene.
The private sector should simply build and operate much more housing in New York.
Private owners can’t afford to pay their plumbers $465,000 because they need to stay in business and can’t raise taxes.
Instead, NYCHA will just keep failing — and asking taxpayers to keep funding six-figure overtime rides on its gravy train.
John Ketcham is director of cities and a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
