2/12/2015
By Ivan Pereira
State Sen. Jeff Klein and City Councilman Ritchie Torres, released a report Thursday detailing the decrepit conditions many NYCHA residents have to live in and called on the city to curb the problem.
The 45-page report, titled “Worst Landlord in NYC” documented a host of problems, such as cracked ceilings, leaky pipes, poor heat and graffiti at dozens of public housing properties.
The two elected officials, both from the Bronx, said the state and city needed to invest more in the 179,000 units and create new policies to improve conditions for the nearly 615,000 tenants.
“The city and state’s historic disinvestment from NYCHA represents a level of neglect that no elected official would ever tolerate from a private landlord,” Torres said in a statement.
State Senate staff surveyed Wagner Houses in Manhatta; Bland Houses in Queens; Coney Island Houses in Brooklyn; Richmond Terrace Houses in Staten Island and Marble Hill Houses (in both Manhattan and the Bronx) to gather the information for the report as well as data from the city comptroller’s office and the NYC Housing and Vacancy Survey.
Graffiti, especially gang-related tags, poor lighting and trash spread throughout the hallways and stairs were a common problem in the buildings, according to the report.
The basement at the Coney Island Houses, for example, was littered with garbage and debris from a suspected homeless person. The problems are exacerbated by long wait-times for repairs, which can take as much as two years, according to the report.
In a statement, NYCHA said it recognizes the “urgency and enormity” of the problems noted in the report. “The de Blasio administration has made it a priority to address this since day one… There is still much work to be done.”
The elected officials said NYCHA subsides from the state and city level have been declining for the last decade. They proposed creating $500 million in capital funding for public housing properties and the creation of a NYCHA watchdog.
That watchdog would submit an annual report that details the conditions of the properties and gives updates on repairs.
“I am confident that by working with the city and its new NYCHA commissioner we can make certain that any investment of state funds is spent wisely,” Klein said in a statement.
