Mayor Bill de Blasio’s affordable housing plan of 200,000 apartments, 120,000 of which are slated to be in presently illegal city basements, is reminiscent of the 1950 housing program for Moscow of Nikita Khrushchev, the late Soviet premier.
That housing consisted of five- or six-story apartment buildings of prefabricated, reinforced concrete and without elevators or balconies in which 60 million residents of the former Soviet Union still reside.
The public nicknamed them “khrushcheby,” a pun on “trushcheby,” the Russian word for “slums.” So now we have de Blasio, this new Bolshevik, proposing his large-scale housing program of 60 percent of future housing from an existing stock of basements — New York’s “khrushchyovka.”
With 205 subway rail fractures on the E and F lines in Queens, one of which led to a derailment in Woodside recently, I suggest de Blasio research the Soviet archives for the engineering blueprints of a more notable achievement of Khrushchev as superintendent of the construction of the Moscow Metro.
In any event, khrushcheby is a simpler nom de plume for de Blasio’s housing plan than the Italian term for slums: “quartiere miserabile.”
Joseph Manago
Briarwood
