NYCHA Bland Houses residents have been without gas for five months
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Bland Houses tenants and elected officials, including City Councilmember Sandra Ung, Rep. Grace Meng, State Senator John Liu and Assemblymember Ron Kim demand that NYCHA restore gas service to residents on Thursday, Oct. 4, 2022. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
It’s been five months since James Proctor, a resident at NYCHA’s Bland Houses in Downtown Flushing, has been able to cook a meal on a stove inside the home he lives in.
He and every other resident in one of the NYCHA complex’s five buildings has been without cooking gas since May. A portion of the residents at 133-20 Roosevelt Ave., have also been without gas to heat their homes during the same time period, and many of them are alarmed about what will happen once the city enters into its coldest months, tenants say.
Despite the impending holiday and winter season, residents of the Bland Houses have been given no assurances their building’s gas system will be repaired and turned on anytime soon, according to a number of lawmakers and tenants.
“Someone dropped the ball,” Proctor told the Eagle. “And it really sucks because most of the people here are retirees or working people. It’s sad.”
Proctor, around a dozen other tenants, and elected officials including Rep. Grace Meng, State Senator John Liu, Assemblymember Ron Kim and City Councilmember Sandra Ung stood outside of the Bland Houses on Tuesday, with rain falling and temperatures dipping below 50 degrees, to demand the housing authority expedite the process for restoring gas and be more transparent about the repairs.
“We shouldn’t have to call a press conference to get results,” Proctor said. “We shouldn’t have to go through this.”
In early May, NYCHA officials found a leak in the main gas line to the building, a NYCHA spokesperson told the Eagle. Additionally, a broken stack in the basement, where the gas line is held, flooded the floor with sewage.
“Gas service interruptions and restoration work are a matter of public safety, involving multiple partners and steps, including shutting off the gas service and making the necessary repairs and inspections,” a NYCHA spokesperson told the Eagle.
The NYCHA spokesperson said that asbestos work in the basement had to be completed before the gas line could be restored – that work was completed in early September.
The housing authority is in the “permitting phase of restoration prior to construction.” Lawmakers on Tuesday said NYCHA officials said the agency, which amounts to the largest landlord in the five boroughs, told them they are in the fourth of 10 phases of gas line restoration.
“Five months later, there continues to be a lack of gas and a lack of transparency about what is going on,” Ung said. “There's a lack of timeline about what is actually going on here.”
In all, 80 apartments and a daycare center on the site are currently without gas service. The repairs are expected to cost $500,000.
“We have been keeping residents informed of the restoration timeline through weekly meetings and have distributed hot plates and slow cookers to residents,” the NYCHA spokesperson said.
The spokesperson did not respond to further request for comment about the timeline of the repairs when asked by the Eagle.
Around 80 apartments inside NYCHA’s Bland Houses complex in Flushing have been without gas for their stoves for five months. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
Lawmakers and tenants said communication from NYCHA has been sparse and that the hot plates and slow cookers often malfunction. Even when the stove top replacements work as intended, tenants said they cook food poorly, leading to a lower everyday quality of life for those who live in the building.
Brena Bracy is the main caretaker for her 94-year-old aunt, a longtime resident of the Bland Houses building affected by the outage and who recently entered into palliative care, a type of care offered to terminal patients focused on making their final moments of life more comfortable.
“I'm prepared to move forward with a class action suit or individual suit, because it's affecting my aunt’s quality of life,” Bracy said.
Though residents in attendance Tuesday said they had continued to pay rent despite the lack of gas service, several said they’d consider withholding their rent payments in escrow until the service is restored.
“Our residents here, they pay rent,” Liu said. “The city goes after bad landlords when those bad landlords don't do the job, when they don't turn the gas on. Here, the city is the landlord and it's been the worst landlord ever. Get the gas back on.”
Kim said that despite the public housing authority’s funding woes, he chalks the five-month delay up to “incompetence.”
“They made it very clear, this wasn't about the money, this was about finding a vendor to actually do the job,” the assemblymember said. “How many months does it take to find a vendor to actually do the job? This is ridiculous.”
While the five month outage may seem unusual, it’s not the first time Bland Houses residents have been without gas for an extended period of time.
In 2020, two buildings in the NYCHA complex had their gas service interrupted in March, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began. Service had yet to be restored in early July, when a group of elected officials, including many who protested outside of the housing complex on Tuesday, demanded the agency work quickly to ameliorate the issue.
Service was restored by the end of July 2020.
“This is really unacceptable, and the lack of urgency, the lack of a timeline as to when [residents’] needs will be taken care of and gas will be restored is completely unacceptable,” Meng said.
“About two years ago, all of us here…pushed because they had a similar problem and we had to pressure them also until we were able to get the gas back,” Meng added. “This is no way to treat our hard-working, rent-paying constituents here in Flushing.”
NYCHA, which has been under federal monitorship since 2019, has recently found itself dealing with a number of crises internally and with properties around the city.
In mid-September, it was announced that Gregory Russ would be stepping down from his role as NYCHA’s CEO.
It was widely speculated that Russ’ role change was related to a confusing incident at NYCHA’s Jacob Riis Houses in Manhattan, where tenants were told that tests by a third-party vendor revealed arsenic in the water at the housing complex only to be told a week later that the tests were incorrect and there was no arsenic.
Elsewhere in Queens, NYCHA residents face continued service interruptions.
Woodside Houses residents have been relying on mobile boilers to heat their water after the complex’s permanent boilers were intentionally flooded during Hurricane Ida in September 2021 in an effort to prevent flooding on first-floor apartments.
Nearly 3,000 residents in the Woodside Houses have experienced heat and hot water outages in recent weeks, six months after NYCHA missed its self-imposed deadline to install new permanent boilers.
City Councilmember Julie Won and Assemblymember Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas plan to protest the conditions on Wednesday.
