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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we'll end today's show and end our week with our last Radio Rookie. So far this week, we've heard a story about a young woman who learned to embrace her Tibetan heritage, despite never setting foot on her ancestral land. She lives in Woodside, and we've experienced the gentrification of the South Bronx through the eyes of today's teens. Both of those stories could only come from the hearts and minds of our City's young people. Go back and listen to them if you missed out. Now, we head to a NYCHA apartment in Mott Haven, where 17-year-old Radio Rookie, Fanta Kaba, and her family have made a home. Let's listen to 45 seconds of Fanta's story.

[background conversation]

Fanta Kaba: I have a big family. I really don’t get any privacy. When things get too loud or when my siblings annoy me, I just go to my room and shut the door. All right, so this is my room. On the wall, there's a bunch of posters. One of them says, "Don't stop trying, and life is fantastic." I love my room. There's a poster of Jimi Hendrix. It's my favorite place. I do have to share it with my annoying little sister, but it's way better than when I shared one room with all five of my siblings, or when we live with my grandparents and aunts and uncles. Growing up, we moved around a lot.

Brian Lehrer: There's our first excerpt from the Radio Rookies piece by Fanta Kaba. She brings us to her home for a reason. She's concerned about the City's move to privatize NYCHA, and she's not the only one with these fears. Let's hear more about her journey to understand NYCHA's so-called PACT program and the tenants fighting against it. As Fanta Kaba joins us, and Carolina Hidalgo is here one more time, senior producer of Radio Rookies who has helped all of these rookies bring their pieces to fruition. Hi again, Carolina, and Fanta, welcome to the Brian Lehrer Show.

Carolina Hidalgo: Hi, Brian.

Fanta Kaba: Hi.

Brian Lehrer: Fanta. You want to get the first word here by bringing us even more into your room. That was such a great excerpt. Painting the picture of your room. What does having a space for you and your sibling mean to you?

Fanta Kaba: I think a lot of the times-- I grew up with a lot of siblings, so I valued space a lot because I feel like you need space in order to create a very definable version of yourself. If you're always consumed or around other people and you have no room to just become who you are, it's kind of concerning. I feel like, especially when you're growing up, you need room to grow, I guess.

Brian Lehrer: You share that your family moved a lot before landing a NYCHA apartment. Where did you all move? Give us a little of that history and how it affected you and your family.

Fanta Kaba: I was born in North Carolina, but we moved in with my grandma and then my grandma-- It's like I moved around a lot, but I moved three times before we ended up living in a shelter. Then I moved into NYCHA.

Brian Lehrer: What was involved, I don't know how old you were, you could tell us, but in getting that NYCHA apartment?

Fanta Kaba: I wasn't really involved in the process. My mom really did everything, but when I spoke to her, she told me that the shelter helped her apply for the NYCHA apartment.

Brian Lehrer: How long ago was that?

Fanta Kaba: When I was around eight or seven years old.

Brian Lehrer: For most of a decade now you've been in NYCHA and had that room and I mentioned earlier that you're concerned about the privatization of NYCHA. For those who aren't familiar with the PACT program, here's a 30-second clip where you explain in your Radio Rookies piece what it is.

Protesters: Leave public housing public.

Fanta Kaba: The New York City Housing Authority is putting for-profit real estate companies in charge of tens of thousands of apartments. The plan is called PACT, Permanent Affordability Commitment Together, it's also known as RAD. NYCHA residents across the City have protested against it.

Protester: What private developer do you know that gives a damn about low-income people? They don't.

Brian Lehrer: Well, great audio production, first of all, Fanta. That protesting that we hear under the narration and at the end of that clip, why are you and the tenants you spoke to concerned about the privatization of NYCHA?

Fanta Kaba: When I went to protest, a lot of the things I was hearing was born out of fear. They were hearing rumors about what was going on in the buildings, but no one had really a clear idea of what was really going on. Even then, those fears were completely valid, even if they didn't completely come from what was truly going on. The people I spoke to, they were hearing stories about how even if your apartment is becoming converted, it may not even be better than the situation you're in now and you may be losing things in the process. I think a lot of people were scared that the one thing that was completely stable in their home was going to go away.

Brian Lehrer: The City defends it and advocates for it as something that's going to put private money into the NYCHA system that's going to allow for better maintenance. There are so many maintenance needs, I don't have to tell you that a year's behind, and that it's a way of investing in the future of NYCHA, not just selling it off to private developers for the market. Did you consider that argument or would you put the argument some other way as you understand it, and did you reject it?

Fanta Kaba: I definitely did consider the argument because firsthand, I know that the apartments do need extensive and that is on the fault of the City for not making it a concern until it became a $70 billion problem. That is a concern and I know a lot of residents understand that. The biggest fear is that they're bringing private companies into something that is supposed to be public. NYCHA is a public domain, and because it's public, it exists to be there for residents solely, not for the profit of any company because these private companies are coming in with the intention, of course, repairing the buildings, but also maximizing their profit.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, as you can tell, we have another real journalist on our hands. 17-year-old Fanta Kaba is part of WNYC's Radio Rookies project. Anybody else who lives in any NYCHA building want to chime in here on the PACT or the RAD program, or just ask Fanta a question or talk about this piece. You don't have to live in NYCHA housing. Anybody can call 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. We have a couple of excerpts yet to go, but let me bring the senior producer of Radio Rookies, Carolina Hidalgo, back into the conversation. Carolina, an interesting piece to produce, and even though they're all about home, kind of a contrast with the gentrification piece we heard on day one and the growing up here, even though you're from another country, Tibet, in day two.

Carolina Hidalgo: Yes. It's a different approach. It's a lot more research. It looks like a lot more Zoom meetings where me and Fanta were reading through a hundred-page reports. All of our Radio Rookie stories, they're all unique, they're all different. If I had to categorize them, there are some stories that look more inward, that are more a Radio Rookie giving someone a glimpse of their world. For this story, it's more of Fanta's going to meet other people that aren't part of her world because she's trying to really understand this issue. She's going, she's talking to people that she doesn't already know. What she's doing is she's taking listeners along with her so that as she tries to understand what's going on, listeners can learn along with her.

Brian Lehrer: Here's another clip. Fanta spoke with a resident who was originally supportive of NYCHA's PACT program, and we're going to hear a few seconds, 40 seconds of an exchange with her.

Fanta Kaba: When Sanji Lopez heard about the renovation plans at Betances Houses in the Bronx, she thought it would solve all of the leaks, mold and pest issues in her family's apartment. She was so excited. She even appeared in a promotional video NYCHA made. I found it on YouTube.

Sanji Lopez: I trust that PACT has the residents' best interests in mind.

Fanta Kaba: This enthusiasm didn't last.

Sanji Lopez: The pain was the first thing, the pain started chipping in a matter of days. Also, it was like incomplete in the bathroom. We had to complain about missing sealants around the bathtub. Mold also, again, accruing even more than it did with NYCHA.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to play one more clip here because Fanta spoke with someone from NYCHA about this accountability issue. Let's hear 30 seconds.

Fanta Kaba: Jonathan Gouveia from NYCHA told me management companies are required to submit monthly reports, and everything is carefully tracked.

Jonathan Gouveia: If somebody puts in a ticket with a heat outage, for example, are they responding to that quickly enough?

Fanta Kaba: How are they holding these companies accountable?

Jonathan Gouveia: We do, in our contracts, make very clear that we have the ability to replace a PAC partner. We feel like performance is not where it needs to be.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Fanta, my question for you is about your questions to him. Here's a NYCHA rep. He's got a 17-year-old coming in. Maybe he thinks this is going to be easy, a sweet little high school kid trying to play with the radio technology. You came in with these hard-hitting journalistic questions. Was he ready for you?

Fanta Kaba: [chuckles] I would say he definitely was because it took a lot of emails to get the interview set up in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: Carolina, did you go along?

Fanta Kaba: There was like a pre-- oh, sorry.

Brian Lehrer: No, go ahead, Fanta.

Fanta Kaba: We had like a pre-interview before we had the interview on record.

Brian Lehrer: Carolina, were you involved with supervising that? How did that work before she got thrown into the lion's den of a NYCHA official?

Carolina: We work with all the rookies to prep for interviews. Whether you're interviewing your mom or your friend or a NYCHA official, we talk things through. They'll come up with questions and then we'll go over the questions together. Really, it was the same process. As interviewing your mom, you're writing questions, interviewing the NYCHA rep, you're writing questions.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Celeste in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Celeste.

Celeste: Hello, so glad to be with you all. I am a Chelsea Public Housing Preservation 1 LLC resident. I have gone to court. I have mold issues, and I think it will take some time for PAC to work this out. There will be a lot of complaints registered against them. I think it's just going to take some time. We'll all find a way to survive and it's inevitable.

Brian Lehrer: Fanta, you want to engage here and talk to a fellow NYCHA resident?

Fanta Kaba: Yes, I agree. I think that the program definitely needs to evolve, and to ensure that the private companies are doing what needs to be done in order for renovations to be given to residents in an orderly way and without having repairs mess up or for reoccurring problems to happen, that would've happened under NYCHA anyway.

Brian Lehrer: Celeste, thank you very much. Adam, on the Lower East Side, you're on WNYC. Hi, Adam.

Adam: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. Your show is a New York treasure and this subject is so dear. I have friends who live in the Lillian Wald and the Jacob Riis and the Fulton Houses. I want your guests to speak about how the vulnerable and the poor are preyed upon. Those houses are in some of the most valuable real estate. If NYCHA had their way, they would move all those people out to Fresh Kills or somewhere remote and use that real estate for something far more valuable like market pressure. Did your research cover that, and what are your feelings about it? I'll take [unintelligible 00:13:55] off-air.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Adam. We've got about 30 seconds left for you, Fanta.

Fanta Kaba: Our research did include some of-- I can't recall what plan it was. There was something about apartments eventually having mixed apartments. Some apartments would be public housing and others would be market rate. I definitely do think that the way NYCHA caters to residents is by preying on the fact that residents are desperate for repairs. They've been living like this for years.

Some of them have been living like that for decades. They're willing to do whatever it takes to get what they so desperately need. They're showing them pictures of new kitchens and a new bathroom. Obviously, these residents are under the assumption that these things will hold up, but for some people that isn't the case.

Brian Lehrer: Fanta Kaba, WNYC Radio Rookie, and Carolina Hidalgo, the senior producer of the WNYC Radio Rookies Program. Carolina, congratulations on an awesome season of Radio Rookies. For people who have maybe heard a little bit of the conversation with the three rookies here these last three days and want to hear the whole pieces, they can just go to wnyc.org?

Carolina: They can go to radiorookies.org. It'll just be easier to find. All of the stories are there and some of the segments will be there, so that would be the best place to find everything.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Has its own website, radiorookies.org. Fanta, thanks a lot, Carolina. Thanks a lot.

Carolina: Thank you.

Fanta Kaba: Thank you for having me.

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