COLD COMFORT
PLEAS FOR HELP, NOT POSTURING
THE 3,000 PUBLIC housing tenants of King Towers in Harlem suffered without heat during Wednesday’s snowstorm, but they can’t expect much help from either Gov. Cuomo or Mayor de Blasio anytime soon.
In their never-ending quest to outshout each other, Cuomo and de Blasio have promised to spend millions of dollars to replace boilers at a total of 31 NYCHA developments. King Towers is not on their list. About 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, the boilers crashed at King, disabling heat and hot water in all 10 buildings. NYCHA workers were dispatched, and 12 hours later the boilers were listed as back online.
That blast of heat, however, didn’t last.
By 5:40 a.m. Wednesday, the system crashed again. By midafternoon, workers were still trying to restore heat to the development’s 3,080 tenants.
“We lose heat when we need it the most,” said tenant Madeline Ellis, 41, who turned on her stove to warm the unit where she lives with her four children, including 4-month-old daughter Kyrie. “We need more funding here, more repairs — not less.”
During the January freeze, thousands of public housing tenants lost heat and hot water. Responding to a wave of complaints, de Blasio proposed spending $200 million to upgrade boilers at 20 select developments. King Towers didn’t make his list.
In November, seven months after Cuomo put $200 million into the state budget to upgrade NYCHA properties, NYCHA proposed a list of 11 developments for new heating plants.
King Towers didn’t make that list, either.
In its plan, NYCHA conceded that 43% of the authority’s 1,980 boilers “are identified as having failing and/or obsolete equipment which cannot be” repaired and must be replaced “immediately.”
King Towers’ boilers are 30 years old and should be replaced within the next four to nine years, according to NYCHA documents.
NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said King Towers is “not a problematic site,” but confirmed that the boilers were shut down Tuesday morning when a part began shaking dangerously.
The boilers were fixed and restarted, but before dawn Wednesday, the same problem surfaced and they had to be shut down again, Blake said.
Late Wednesday, the wind rattled the windows of Ellis’ second-floor apartment as she explained how she tries to keep her children warm.
“I have the stove on. If it’s too cold, I boil water. Sometimes I use the oven,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know why they treat people like that.”
“This is the worst since I moved here five years ago,” said tenant Tuesday Riley, 52. “We have lost heat twice this winter. We need more help — not less.”
City Public Advocate Letitia James said Wednesday that King Towers should be eligible for an upgrade. “King has 10 buildings with 3,000 tenants,” James said. “Many New Yorkers were without heat and hot water on a very cold and dangerous day.”
De Blasio’s $200 million plan was set to begin in July and not be completed until 2022, but the city has asked Albany to approve a design-build protocol to speed things up by 20 months.
Cuomo’s plan remains a work in progress. State officials say NYCHA has balked at committing to finishing the work within a year; City Hall says that’s an unrealistic requirement.