COLD TRuTH
Staff shortfall fueling NYCHA heat woes
THE WAVE OF heating system breakdowns that have left public housing tenants shivering in recent days followed a drastic reduction in the number of NYCHA workers fixing boilers, records show.
Over the four years of Mayor de Blasio’s first term, the number of in-house boiler technicians dropped from 345 in 2013 to the current 250, according to Teamsters Local 237, which represents 8,000 New York City Housing Authority staffers.
That means one in three heat management staffers are no longer at NYCHA servicing its aging boilers — a steady attrition Local 237 President Greg Floyd flatly blames for last week’s heating disaster during a record cold snap.
“They don’t have the staff to go around and do the repairs and do the preventive maintenance during the summer when it should be taken care of,” Floyd said. “They’re not doing the work.”
In recent days, thousands of tenants all over the city have felt the results.
Pipes have frozen. Boilers have died. NYCHA tenants have found themselves waiting sometimes for days for help to arrive. City Controller Scott Stringer says he’s fielded no-heat calls from 55 developments.
By late Monday, 11 developments were enduring problems, including entire complexes without heat.
At the Sotomayor Houses in the Bronx, tenant Kimberly Abrams, 50, had two bedrooms with zero heat. “We still have to wear two pajamas, three socks, two T-shirts and a hoodie,” she said. “My next-door neighbor is 93, and she has to sleep with three parkas on.”
NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake contested the union’s time line, and said the authority’s boiler unit was fully staffed until October, when it lost about 100 boiler technicians who took other Civil Service jobs.
But she insisted that “97% of NYCHA apartments have consistent heat. We are seeing chronic issues at certain locations, but the majority have been sufficiently heated throughout this cold spell.”
The number of no-heat calls spiked dramatically as the mercury plummeted, with 15,039 calls from Dec. 29 through Jan. 2. That compares with 3,659 during the corresponding period last year and 5,838 the year before.
“This is the longest stretch of below-freezing days since 1961, and it has pushed aging equipment to the extreme,” Blake said.
NYCHA officials said in the last week they increased staff to address heat issues, but acknowledge that they’ve lost the skilled workers who know how to fix busted boilers quickly.
De Blasio said it would take $18 billion to deal with all of NYCHA's outstanding needs, and argued the temperatures that led to the heat outages were a rarity. “We had six days in a row of subzero temperatures, or subfreezing temperatures," he told NY1. IT’S NOT JUST NYCHA residents suffering with busted boilers. The city was forced to install an emergency mobile steam unit to heat a five-story building at 27 Grace Court in Brooklyn Heights. The residents there were without heat for days after a boiler on the building’s roof conked out. Initi ally, the city Housing Preserva tion and Development Department’s emergency repair unit was blocked from installing the unit by the landlord, who has since agreed to pay $10,000 in civil penalties. Separately, many residents of a building without heat at 1362 Gipson St. in Far Rockaway, Queens, continue to be holed up in a Brooklyn hotel. Housing Preservation and Development plans to take emergency action to repair the boiler. That’s little solace to one resident who vis ited the building Monday morning. “The entire building feels cold,” said the 64-year-old woman, who declined to give her name. “I’m staying with relatives. They have heat.”