‘Called’ out over NYCHA

2nd tenant rips DeB on air

For the second consecutive week, Mayor de Blasio went on WNYC radio to explain how his administration was working to fix the city’s public-housing developments — and for the second week, a resident of one of those developments called in to complain about its “inhuman” conditions.

A caller named Zisi said she lives at Independence Towers, a New York City Housing Authority complex in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and hadn’t had water since Thursday — a problem she said had been recurring for years.

“What’s happening in the last couple of years and right now is just inhuman. I have two little kids with no hot water since yesterday. No bathing. This goes on, up and down, every day,” the caller said. “It’s like you won a prize if you manage to get a hot bath . . . We’re talking about basic rights of humanity.”

She also said she can’t get answers out of NYCHA administrators about what’s happening and whether a temporary boiler would make a difference.

“No one picks up a phone. It’s as if we don’t exist,” she said.

The mayor called her situation “not acceptable” and promised to get the authority’s general management to fix the issue right away.

He said NYCHA has reduced repair times for heat and hot-water outages from a day or two last winter to about 11 hours this winter.

“Same-day service is what we want to see, and we’re going to make sure that we address the problem at your home,” he said.

Last week, de Blasio said no NYCHA resident would want a federal takeover of the city’s public housing, a possibility that a judge is expected to decide on shortly.

Minutes later, a longtime NYCHA tenant said she would love a takeover because things couldn’t get any worse at her Lower East Side development.

Meanwhile on Friday, Housing Secretary Ben Carson gave the city until Jan. 31 to make a deal with federal prosecutors on how to rescue NYCHA — threatening a federal takeover.

Carson wrote that he “intends to declare a substantial default with respect to NYCHA” if an arrangement acceptable to HUD is not reached by the deadline.