Winter Is Coming, NYCHA
Winter hasn’t yet arrived and the city’s public-housing agency is already struggling to provide heat and hot water to its tenants. If this keeps up, the need for radical reform will become utterly undeniable.
Records compiled by the Legal Aid Society show that 34,475 City Housing Authority tenants have lost heat or hot water since Oct. 18. NYCHA’s own records show 70 outages for heat and 161 for hot water at 22 different projects.
Some 320,000 of NYCHA’s 400,000 residents went without heat and hot water at some point last winter. The agency hopes to do better, with 16 new roving teams to jump on crises, and 50 new heating technicians to tackle boiler problems.
Yet on the very day that Mayor de Blasio was crowing about heating improvements for NYCHA residents, including five new mobile boilers that can be deployed for emergencies, two projects saw heat and hot water outages.
As The Post reported, a sewage blockage caused the heat to go down at the Sterling Place Rehabs in Crown Heights last Friday. Then the boiler’s motherboard failed — and a temporary heating hookup went down thanks to a gas outage at a neighboring heating plant. It was one snafu after another for an agency on the fast-track to FUBAR status.
Beleaguered NYCHA chief Stanley Brezenoff has promised to implement a modern data system to track maintenance complaints and repairs in real time. That may at least reduce the length of outages.
On the other hand, NYCHA’s unions are on the march to stop the agency from saving money via the federal RAD program, which allows for private contractors to manage buildings.
Prior to Wednesday’s City Council oversight hearing, 32BJ SEIU held a noisy rally demanding that RAD projects pay “prevailing wages” to maintenance workers. The union’s clear goal is to saddle private managers with the same featherbedding rules and built-in overtime that plague NYCHA.
Which would leave a lot more tenants sitting in the cold.
Brezenoff is trying mightily to turn NYCHA around. If he can’t, then the only decent way forward is to replace the whole agency before everything falls apart.