Heat and hot water woes continue at Woodside Houses
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NYCHA employees replace the oil in one of the mobile boilers installed in the Woodside Houses last year. The mobile boilers were supposed to be replaced by permanent ones in April 2022. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
As Hurricane Ida dumped record-breaking rainfall on Queens last September, officials at the New York City Housing Authority’s Woodside Houses made a calculated decision.
Rather than allow the quickly pooling water to flood the complex’s first-floor apartments, where a number of seniors and people with mobility issues lived, they’d divert the water to the Woodside Houses’ boiler room, effectively ruining the heavy machinery that generates heat and hot water for the nearly 3,000 residents who live there.
In the aftermath of the storm – which killed 11 people in Queens – NYCHA placed several mobile boilers throughout the complex and promised to have the permanent machines up and running by April 2022.
But six months after its self-imposed deadline, NYCHA has yet to install the new boilers and Woodside Houses residents forced to rely on the mobile units say they often malfunction and leave them without reliable heat and hot water as temperatures drop in the city.
“All I want is to keep my bones warm,” said Jean Chappelle, the corresponding secretary for the Woodside Houses Tenants’ Association. “[NYCHA] wants their rent – when we don’t pay, they’re hounding us – so why can't we have what we’re supposed to have?”
Chappelle is a longtime resident of the public housing complex and, at age 79, is battling cancer.
“This has gone on too long,” she said. “We want heat.”
On Wednesday, Chappelle and a number of her neighbors were joined by State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris, City Councilmember Juile Won, State Senator Jessica Ramos and State Assemblymember Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas in front of one of the Woodside Houses mobile boilers. They called on NYCHA to not only restore the heat for some tenants who were currently without it, but to expedite their efforts to install the permanent boilers.
“Winter is coming, get the heat on and let these people live a dignified life like they deserve,” Gianaris said.
Earlier this week, when temperatures hovered around 50 degrees, all 2,900 tenants were without heat for several hours.
“It is freezing in these apartments,” said Woodside Houses Tenants Association President Ann Cotton Morris.
City Councilmember Julie Won, State Senators Michael Gianaris and Jessica Ramos and Assemblymember Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas joined Woodside Houses tenants, including Jean Chappelle (center) in calling on NYCHA to install permanent heat and hot water boilers in the complex on Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022. Photo by Jenna Laing/Won’s office
Won said her office has received dozens of complaints from tenants about service interruptions to the heat and hot water in the months since the mobile boilers were installed.
“We start to hear complaints as soon as the weather starts to get cold, that there is no heat and hot water,” Won said. “We told NYCHA, ‘Do not wait until the next winter to replace the heating plant.’”
“We're here yet again, to make sure that the biggest slumlord in New York City provides heat and hot water,” the councilmember added. “If it was any other landlord, they would have had too many fines to even be a landlord.”
A spokesperson for NYCHA responded to the Eagle’s request for comment but did not expand on the reasons behind the delay in installing the new boiler or about the timeline for its installation going forward, which they said cannot be provided because “it is dependent on various test results.”
“NYCHA has spent more than $1.4 million dollars to repair the boiler at Woodside Houses, which was compromised by decades of deterioration and flooding caused by Hurricane Ida,” the spokesperson said. “Our staff installed three mobile boilers after the hurricane, which have been providing heat consistently, and have since been working with the Department of Buildings, Con Edison, and several heating and plumbing teams to ensure that our boilers are fully operational.”
The NYCHA spokesperson added that even brief service interruptions are elongated by safety tests required to be conducted before service can be restored. These include gas line, chimney and combustion tests.
But officials said Wednesday that the heating issues plaguing the complex are nothing new.
“I am old enough to remember my play dates here in Woodside Houses wearing sweaters and jackets inside of my friend's apartment because they did not have heat,” Ramos said. “This is a tale as old as time in Woodside Houses and it's a damn shame that the city does not take the well-being, the safety of our neighbors seriously.”
Tenants and officials said communicating with NYCHA has also proven difficult. Several officials said representatives from the housing authority have “lied” to them about what work has and has not been done on the new boilers.
A mobile boiler unit installed in the Woodside Houses last year following damage to the permanent boiler following Hurricane Ida. The units were supposed to be replaced in April. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
“Our offices get lied to on a daily basis,” Ramos said. “They tell us that [tenants] are fine, that they have heat, and then we get phone calls from [residents], and they don't.”
The Woodside Houses was recently targeted by the city to pilot a new heating technology that is expected to be rolled out in NYCHA complexes throughout the city in the coming years. Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul announced together in August that 500 electric heat pumps will be installed in apartments throughout the complex. The heating units, which can only heat one room at a time, are expected to improve NYCHA’s energy efficiency and give residents control over the temperature of their homes.
“That's simply not enough,” Won said. “We’re going to need more than 500.”
Woodside Houses residents are not the only NYCHA tenants in Queens facing prolonged service outages.
Officials rallied at the Bland Houses in Downtown Flushing on Tuesday to demand the housing authority be more transparent and expedite its process for replacing one of the complex’s building’s gas service, which has been broken for five months.
NYCHA, the largest landlord in the city, has been under federal monitorship since 2019 and has often been accused of inefficiency repair work, big and small.
In mid-September, officials 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.
