Hell houses
Council pols eye sickening conditions at project
POLITICIANS CONTINUED their public housing tour in Brooklyn on Monday, this time with members of the City Council taking in the deplorable sights.
On display were Canarsie’s Breukelen Houses, where teedoff tenants griped to anyone who would listen about everything from mold to mice.
“Look, it’s ridiculous,” said Norma Concepcion, 30, who has lived at the housing complex for 12 years.
She was pointing out the cracked paint in her bedroom to Councilwoman Inez Barron.
“I have an 11-year-old son,” Concepcion said. “He can’t stay here anymore. I sent him to live with my grandmother because he gets asthma. He came to visit me two weeks ago, and he came out the shower — he couldn’t breathe.”
Concepcion’s roommate Claribel Figueroa, 29, is a nursing student, but she doesn’t need a medical degree to know their place is a health hazard.
“You come out of the shower and you can smell the mold,” Figueroa said.
She said there were bubbling, mold-infested walls in every corner of the one-bedroom apartment.
As she touched one of the walls of the kitchen, dozens of cockroaches and waterbugs ran from under the cracked paint.
“I’m really scared of them,” Concepcion said. “I cry every time I see them.”
Concepcion has called NYCHA countless times to come and repair the problems, but she always gets the same response.
“I’ve been putting in tickets for two years,” she said. “They do nothing. They want me to keep signing, but I notice that every time I sign, they close my ticket. So I stopped.”
She said said enough is enough.
“We’re humans,” Concepcion said. “We should not be living like this.” Barron agreed. “Obviously this is long-term neglect,” Barron told the Daily News. “This is not something that happened overnight. The bathroom, there’s mold there. The ceiling is falling down. There are leaks from the toilet above, which come through and down into this apartment. It’s unacceptable. Band-Aids — literally taped — have been used to address this situation. That’s inadequate.”
Barron said it appears that NYCHA inspectors are having residents sign off forms to show they came, but they’re not fixing the problems.
The City Council tour followed public housing trips by Gov. Cuomo and his gubernatorial rival, actress Cynthia Nixon.
In March, Nixon visited the Albany Houses in Crown Heights to witness firsthand the decrepit conditions, admitting it was her first time in a public housing complex.
Her tour followed several visits by Cuomo, who railed against city officials after walking through a bug-infested apartment at the Jackson Houses in the Bronx.
Cuomo’s visit there and to other complexes paved the way to an executive order he signed creating a new independent emergency manager who will oversee much-needed public housing upgrades.
The authority’s 400,000 residents have long endured declining living conditions as NYCHA struggled with a mountain of repair requests and backlogged maintenance needs.