In the season's first test of the New York Public Housing Authority's fragile and outdated boiler system, nearly 23,000 tenants across New York City experienced a heat or hot water outage at some point last week, according to a count of NYCHA's website outage reports tallied by Gothamist and the Legal Aid Society.
Last Wednesday, as wind chill temperatures dipped into the 20s, a broken mobile boiler left 2,440 tenants in NYCHA's Pelham Parkway development in the Bronx without heat.
On Sunday, an outage affected nearly 4,000 tenants living in the Mitchel Houses, a Bronx public housing complex on 135th Street. According to the NYCHA website that tracks outages, the Mitchel residents were without heat and hot water for eight hours.
The New York Public Housing Authority had been reportedly racing to prepare its boilers, which serve roughly 400,000 low-income tenants across 174,000 apartments, for the colder weather. According to the New York Times, the agency said it was looking to recruit an additional 70 heating plant technicians.
“We’re reading data in a different kind of a way,” Joey Koch, a senior vice president at the authority, told the Times, adding, “We’ve started really tracing the causes of the problem so that we can accurately fix them, thinking strategically about where to invest whatever money we get, whether it’s capital or expense dollars.”
A spokesperson for NYCHA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
With regards to Pelham Parkway, although NYCHA reported that the problem was resolved by the afternoon, tenants in at least one building reported lack of heat through Thursday night. Those affected included roughly 60 students of a pre-K housed in one of the NYCHA buildings.
Parents were informed about the heat outage during the morning school drop-off. They were told they could leave their children, but that they would have to wear their coats and jackets.
Roxanne Delgado, an organizer at Friends of Pelham Parkway, shot and sent Gothamist videos of a school staff delivering the news to parents. One individual is heard advising parents, "I told my class it’s not safe to teach kids in a cold building."
According to a staff member at the school, the heat was still not consistently working on Thursday.
Evelyn Moreira, who lives at 22-15 Bronxwood Avenue, one of the buildings in the complex, said, "There's always a problem with that boiler." Her unit faces the mobile boiler and she said she routinely sees repair crews coming to work on it.
Moreira, who shares the apartment with her three grandchildren, a three-year-old and three-month old twins, said she did not have hot water until 11 a.m. on Friday.
In addition to heat and hot water issues, for the last two years, she has also been trying to get the agency to address broken tiles in her apartment. After reporting the issue several times, she said two contractors informed her that there was asbestos in the floor. NYCHA management has yet to reach out to her, she said.
Dion Coaxum, another tenant, said the lack of heat has become a way of life in the complex. "I've given up," he said.
NYCHA is facing $32 billion in capital repairs. The federal monitor has granted preliminary approval for $450 million in state spending, of which $363 million was allocated for upgrading outdated boilers. However, the process of installing new boilers typically takes three to four years.
In response to last week's outages, The Legal Aid Society, which has called on the city and state to fast-track funding for NYCHA, warned that this does not bode well for the season to come.
“Last week’s heat and hot water outages—impacting almost 23,000 NYCHA residents throughout the city—underscores the need for increased public funding to more quickly upgrade and replace antiquated utility systems. This a responsibility that Washington, Albany, and City Hall equally share,” said Redmond Haskins, a spokesperson. “We hope for our clients and others in public housing that the widespread outages from last week are not a precursor for what to expect this winter.”
