Strangle the gangs that plague NYCHA public housing — send in the dads

When 7-month-old Kaori Patterson was shot to death in her stroller in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last week, even those inured to violent crime in our cities were shocked.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani was quick to blame the weapon fired in the drive-by shooting, calling the tragedy “a devastating reminder of just how much more work there is to be done . . . to combat gun violence across the city.”

The New York Police Department provided a more accurate explanation.

“We’re looking to see the possible connection (with) a beef between the Marcy Houses and Bushwick Houses, meaning the gang MOE,” said NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny.

Kaori’s death wasn’t just “gun violence,” but part of the daily dysfunction of the New York City Housing Authority.

It’s almost taken for granted that each project has its own dominant gang claiming it as its turf — which undoubtedly contributes to the fact that the areas in and around public housing, with 4% of the city’s population, account for 20% of its violent crime.

To understand the East Williamsburg shooting, we have to focus on the roots of public-housing gang culture: The fact that two-parent families and fathers are a rarity in the projects, and too many fatherless teenage boys turn to gangs as a result.

Other than those over age 55, single-parent families comprise the largest population group in NYC’s public housing.  

Only 2% of all households are made up of two adults with their children.

We don’t yet know about the family background of the shooter who killed baby Kaori, but statistically speaking, young males in public housing are highly likely not to have a father in the home — and in fact won’t see many adult males at all.

They also won’t see many adults going off to work in the morning: Only a third of New York public housing households report wages as a source of income.

That’s a feature of the system, not a bug — top priority goes to the lowest-income households.

That means single parents.

The current rules that qualify New Yorkers for public housing have created isolated islands of fatherlessness, ideal for gang control.

We’ve long known that fatherless boys disproportionately seek companionship in gangs. 

Sociologist Stanley Taylor in 2013 cited “frustration and anxiety stemming from family problems such as fatherlessness” as a top driver of gang recruitment.

You’ll hear that at the Andrew Jackson Houses in The Bronx, where teenage boys fear to venture a few blocks away because of gang activity in a nearby public housing complex.  

“There are quite a few single households, predominantly women,” tenant leader Danny Barber has told me. “The young men develop an anger toward their own (absent) father and they take it out on the world.”

Yet there was a time, as Hunter College professor Nicolas Dagen-Bloom has explained, when NYCHA gave priority to two-parent working families. 

We should return to that very approach for new tenants — even if it gives a leg up to those who may earn more — and change the rules of who’s admitted to the projects in the first place by putting households with both mothers and fathers at the top of the NYCHA waiting list.

This would be no quick fix; it’s too much to expect responsible young fathers to confront gangs directly — though some might.

But a stronger network of two-parent families would help more sons resist gangs in the first place, reducing the new recruits that fuel them.

A 2022 Journal of Development Psychology study of black fathers and sons in Chicago found that strong father-son communication, as well as the regular presence of father figures, helped “keep sons safe from violence involvement and victimization.”

Priority for two-parent families should come with work requirements and a limit — five years, say — on subsidized-housing stays for new tenants, as the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed.

Those changes would transform NYCHA’s culture from one of long-term, entrenched poverty (averaging 20 years) to one of upward mobility — and could even discourage the formation of new single-parent households in the first place.

In the short term, New York needs the NYPD gang unit to identify gang members, confiscate their guns and arrest them for their criminal acts.

Mamdani, who urged an end to the NYPD’s gang database during his campaign, has since evinced a change of heart.

Let’s hope he means it; a gang crackdown remains essential. 

But long-term, New York needs to create a new public housing culture — one that no longer provides the toxic soil from which gangs grow.

Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.”