Ramp up the NYCHA outrage, now
Bthe borough, cleaning and scrubbing.
A decade later, it still kills me that thousands of our fellow New Yorkers are going through the same misery.
Adams, a former police captain, says NYCHA needs the kind of reboot that transformed the NYPD in the 1990s.
“They need a Compstat system that’s being monitored in real time,” he told me. “If you don’t wrap your head around a clear definition of the problem, you’ll never get ahead of it.”
He also says that managers need to be called on the carpet, Compstat-style, and forced to talk about how they plan to fix things — and transferred or dismissed if they can’t get with the idea of treating tenants with dignity.
Creating basic decency and accountability should be considered one of the first homework assignments for the crowd of ambitious politicians hoping to get elevated to higher office in 2021. cope with intolerable circumstances — and apparently assumed it wasn’t worth calling for help because none would be forthcoming.
It reminds me of the winter of 2008 when a friend, community activist Taharka Robinson, contacted me with news that tenants in several buildings in the Albany Houses in Crown Heights had been living in filth for more than a week.
I visited and couldn’t believe my eyes. The plumbing system had broken down, so that raw sewage from one building’s toilets turned the basement into a cesspool. The garbage chutes were closed off, and bags of trash were accumulating on every floor. Vermin were everywhere.
That incident never made the papers; I called a high-ranking official at City Hall and begged him to fix the situation immediately rather than wait the two or three days it would take to publish a story and shame NYCHA into action. The next day, agency employees were hustled in from all across rooklyn borough president Eric Adams stepped outside the realm of regular politics to add a much-needed dose of authentic personal outrage, complete with profanity, to the ongoing scandal of substandard living conditions in the New York City Housing Authority.
“The problem is not merely one cleanup person, one office employee, one manager, it is a cesspool of cultural indifference,” Adams thundered before the cameras. “It should not take public pressure to increase the goddamn water pressure!”
He was reacting to the news that a staggering 900 apartments in the Brevoort Houses lost water after the pumping system failed on June 16. According to Adams, NYCHA staff added insult to injury by engaging in a cruel and stupid trick, closing out tenant complaint tickets after restoring the water for a few short hours, so that the no-water problem appeared to be less than a day old rather than several weeks.
Rent-paying tenants, many of them senior citizens, resorted to hauling buckets of water from an outside faucet to their apartments in order to bathe and make the toilets flush. One tenant, Alana Coston, told NY1 News about caring for her disabled son under these circumstances.
“He’s wheelchair-bound. He goes to a day program so I had to come out here in the morning time to get water, go back upstairs, put it on the stove and boil it to wash him up and also put him on the bus at 6:45,” Coston said.
“It is unbelievable what has taken place in the NYCHA residences all across the city,” Adams said. “This is goddamn America, not Afghanistan!”
A lot more of us should be cussing mad about the culture of cruelty, contempt and coverup at NYCHA.
The most damning part of this sorry tale is the fact that tenants have been treated so poorly over the years that they simply struggled for weeks to
A lot more of us should be cussing mad