HOT WATER WOE UP 15%
Jumaane slams NYCHA’s failure to address complaints
Tenant complaints of hot water outages in the city’s public housing jumped nearly 15% last year, data obtained by the Daily News show.
Complaints about a lack of hot water rose from 1,480 complaints in 2019-2020 to 1,695 during the 2020-2021 heat season. That’s 215 more complaints than the previous year, according to the data shared with The News by the Legal Aid Society.
Under city law, landlords are required to provide heat and hot water during the “heat season” from Oct. 1 to May 31.
“I’m not surprised it’s increased,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams told The News, as he and Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson toured the Fort Independence Houses in the Bronx, where tenants say they’ve lacked hot water and heat this winter.
“We also know people have just stopped calling because they’re tired of calling and not getting anywhere, tickets getting closed, and we’re pretty sure that number is even higher.”
The new data come as politicians like Williams continued to blast NYCHA over water temperature issues Tuesday.
Williams met with tenants at the complex in Kingsbridge just two days after front-page report in The News detailed a monthslong hot water outage Carleton Manor, a NYCHA development in Arverne, Queens.
Fort Independence tenants said their problems mirrored those at Carleton Manor. An entire 344unit building in the Bronx complex had heat going in and out all weekend, tenants said.
“Hot water’s the worst. If you shower between 6 and 9 a.m., you can’t. It’s ice cold,” said Matt Moran, a 37-year-old tenant at the Fort Independence Houses. “That big snowstorm — not this past weekend the weekend before — there was absolutely no heat and no hot water. We were boiling pots and turning on the oven to keep warm.”
Another tenant and mother of three, Tiara Napier, said she also uses her oven on to stay warm when there’s no heat.
“I use the space heaters and then if it’s really cold and I unfortunately have to turn on our oven, which is not a safe thing, so you have to watch doing that as well,” said Napier, who added that her 14-year-old son has caught pneumonia numerous times due to the cold.
While complaints about hot water increased last year, complaints about a lack of heat were down last year, according to the data.
There were 584 reports of heat outages in the 2020-2021 heat season compared to 819 the year before.
“While NYCHA has made some improvements to mitigate utility outages, residents still suffer lapses in service on a daily basis,” said Lucy Newman, a Legal Aid attorney.
A day before Williams’ tour of the Fort Independence Houses, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards visited Carleton Manor to demand that NYCHA not charge tenants rent for all months they did not have hot water.
Mayor Adams was also outraged, calling the lack of hot water since November for residents of the complex in the Rockaways “despicable.”
NYCHA said that it was improving.
“NYCHA has demonstrated significant progress since 2019 in addressing service outages at its developments through improvements to heating and hot water operations and response, including increased staffing, roving teams, mobile boilers, planned preventative maintenance and a 24-hour heat desk,” a NYCHA spokeswoman said. “Deteriorating infrastructure as a result of ongoing disinvestment is still a critical issue, but NYCHA has taken and will continue to take any available actions to address service outages.”