Astoria Houses lead city in busted boilers
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A NYCHA tenant activist urged the state, city and federal government to increase funding to address public housing needs, including faulty boilers. Photo by John McCarten via City Council/Flickr
By Victoria Merlino
The Astoria Houses suffered the most hot water outages of any public housing complex in the city in the last three months of 2019, with busted boilers affecting nearly 3,000 tenants, according to data newly obtained by The Legal Aid Society and analyzed by the Eagle.
From Oct. 1, 2019 to Dec. 31, 2019, the 22-building Astoria Houses had 35 planned hot water outages that lasted nine hours on average, with 2,980 residents impacted, according to the data, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request.
The NYCHA complex, located a block from the whipping winds of the East River, had four unplanned hot water outages during the same period, down from seven in the same period in 2018.
“NYCHA is clearly still unable to ensure that utility systems seamlessly provide for residents, and these numbers confirm what we hear from our clients on a regular basis,” said Lucy Newman, staff attorney with the Civil Law Reform Unit at Legal Aid.
A total of 217,960 NYCHA tenants were impacted by 1,246 heat, water and hot water outages, from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, 2019, according to NYCHA.
Of the 21 NYCHA developments in Queens, 14 of them faced outages at some point during the period.
In January, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive budget did not include new funding to address critical capital needs throughout the city’s sprawling public housing system, such as toxic lead paint, boiler problems, elevator outages and pest control issues.
“These outages could be meaningfully addressed with the right resources,” Newman said.
The Housing Justice for All Coalition has demanded that the state allocate $3 billion for capital needs in public housing in the fiscal year 2021 budget, including $2 billion for NYCHA.
“After decades of disinvestment from all levels of government, it is absolutely critical that everyone steps up to address the issues of lead paint, aging boilers, mold, chronically broken elevators and overall quality of life,” Councilmember Donovan Richards told the Eagle in January.
At an event in January, NYCHA Chair Gegory Russ estimated that NYCHA would need $42 billion dollars total to rehabilitate the authority’s 326 developments across the city.
“Even NYCHA is fixable. It is a demand on the organization. It will be a demand on the city and the community as a whole. And we have to rise to that,” Russ said at the time.
A NYCHA spokesperson told the Eagle Friday that the public housing system has improved its response time when boilers malfunction and that the unseasonably warm weather at the end of 2019 allowed NYCHA to shut off the hot water to perform needed repairs.. The spokesperson also said the data obtained by Legal Aid counts residents and units more than once.
"NYCHA has made significant progress this heat season by increasing customer service operations in order to respond to outages quickly and restore services in 7 hours, from 30 hours two years ago,” the NYCHA spokesperson said. “We’re using all the tools at our disposal to address the deteriorating conditions and aging infrastructure in our heating plants."
