Tuesday, March 24, 2020

NYCHA continues its reputation for negligence even during a pandemic




Curbed NY


Less than a week after New York City announced its first confirmed case of COVID-19, Melanie Aucello reached out to officials with the New York City Housing Authority asking about precautionary measures the agency was taking to protect tenants in her Kips Bay apartment building.

Another week passed before the housing authority announced its cleaning and outreach efforts. By then, the city had 154 verified cases. Still, Aucello, who is president of the tenants’ association at 344 East 28th Street, says she saw little change in the roach-infested lobby and elsewhere in the building as she nervously watched reports of the city’s cases balloon well into the thousands.

Now, with more than 13,000 cases citywide, Aucello and other frustrated tenants have taken it upon themselves to make up for what they claim is a lack of cleaning in the building by sanitizing commonly-touched surfaces with their own supplies.

“We wipe down our own door handles, elevator buttons, mailboxes,” says Aucello, whose 250-unit development is across the street from Bellevue Hospital. “We check in on each other because if we waited for NYCHA we would all get sick.”

As the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases climb, NYCHA says it is aggressively cleaning its 2,200 buildings three times a week through a combination of in-house staff and outside cleaning services. 
These daily cleanings are concentrated in high-traffic areas across the agency’s 361 complexes, such as common area doors, mailboxes, and elevator controls. At its 71 seniors-only buildings, NYCHA hired EastCo Building Services to clean five times a week with “a hospital-grade disinfecting spray that kills viruses” called Smart Touch; those same surfaces are then treated with BioProtect, a water-based protective barrier, that remains on surfaces for up to 90 days. This method will be utilized on a 30-day cycle as an extra precaution in addition to basic cleanings, according to the authority.

These measures are crucial to keeping residents healthy at NYCHA developments, where nearly a quarter of the authority’s 400,000 residents are 62 or older—a group that is particularly susceptible to fatal infection by COVID-19—and where the average household income is $25,007, according to city data.

“Since this pandemic hit New York City, NYCHA has been working around the clock to receive guidance and implement measures to ensure our approach and plans are thorough and responsive to a changing environment,” NYCHA CEO Greg Russ said in a statement, stressing that the authority’s “top priority” is the safety of its residents and employees. “We are prouder than ever of NYCHA property staff, who remain central to keeping our developments clean and sanitary.”

Still, Aucello and the residents of the East 28th Street building are not alone in their assertion that the housing authority isn’t doing enough to properly maintain some of its buildings during the COVID-19 pandemic. A tenant leader in an Upper East Side complex says the elevators and their panels are persistently sordid. “It smells like it was cleaned with a mop of urine,” says La Keesha Taylor, a resident of the John Haynes Holmes Towers in the Upper East Side. In December, tenants filed a lawsuit against NYCHA to force repairs at the complex. “It doesn’t look clean, it doesn’t smell clean,” Taylor says. “But everyone touches the buttons because they have no choice. It’s the same old, same old.” She and other residents have been using bleach wipes to clean elevator buttons and doorknobs throughout the complex.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wash your hands
Cough in your sleeve
Practice social distancing
Stay home
Disinfect your area regularly
And stop reading Fake News !

Anonymous said...

Go to hell, New York: Your kleptocratic mayor and governor have the formation of a hyper-corrupt, entrenched and establishment-rigged 'KAKISTOCRACY' that is so lethally destructive, that even nuclear proliferation doesn't stand a chance against the stranglehold of never-ending corruption, graft and greed. If THIS isn't the ultimate testament to how voting doesn't work (nor has it EVER, when ALL publicly held elections are rigged to fail its ever languishing subjects), then I don't know what EVER will change the minds of the corporate obedient 'SHEEPLE' to STOP BIRTHING THEIR OWN MONSTERS (of epic government, humanitarian, ecological, fiscal and spiritual fail).

We are approaching the third decade of the 21st century, and ALL filthy, crooked and corrupt politicians are COMPLETELY OBSOLETE! Work SMARTER, possums, because the criminal and corrupt powers of New York State (and, by eroding and decaying extension the entire nation, as well as the world-at-large), have already shown you where their loyalties staunchly remain - and, they are NOT invested in YOU!

❝You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.❞ ——Buckminster Fuller

Anonymous said...

No cleaning in Pomonok either. I am here every day to check on a sick relative. Everyday I clean the hallway door knobs, stairway banister, mailboxes and intercom even though I don’t need to press those buttons. I was the hallways outside his apartment, especially near the garbage compactor with a boat deck brush and a bucket of bleach. NYCHA has not cleaned the building thoroughly in decades and I don’t expect them to start again now.

Julie B. said...

Why can't residents clean their own areas? The place was always a toilet even without the virus. They expect NYCHA to clean all the time for them? Our garden apt coop tells us to clean our own common doorknobs and lightswitches--that's not too much to ask.

georgetheatheist said...

@Julie. It is too much to ask the denizens of collectivist housing because collectivist anything operates under the rubric "it's not my job". Everything gets taken care of by somekind of magic wand and wishful thinking. But it doesn't and sainted souls like you have to pitch in and clean up the mess that the collectivist entity had and has to do. Oh, and I bet you're not unionized doing this. If things get worse, the iron fist of a Chicom commissar and his lap dog dacha-dwelling princelings will straighten things out.

BTW, you want to see what applied Sozialismus looks like? Check out your supermarket shelves before the supply truck comes in. I shop at 6am to get my mitts on tp. Not as bad as the 2 so-called Demokratische-Sozialisten AOC's and Sanders' admired Venezuela but you get a foretaste. Medicare for all? Check put the line outside the collectivist Elmhurst hospital. The proof lies in the pudding.

Anonymous said...

Melanie Aucello is a racist p.o.s. All she does is look for photo ops with elected or unelected candidates for office; she hasn’t done jack shit for the tenants at 344 East 28th. The new management company would be doing the tenants a favor if they sent the lunatic packing.
Rumor has it that she is angry with the new management company because they didn’t offer her a job. She was telling NYCHA employees that she’d try and keep them employed at the building. She made promises to them that she obviously couldn’t keep. She’s a nasty piece of work.