Judge calls NYCHA a criminal landlord...then he vanished

  

 

NY Daily News

That was the message from a Queens Housing Court judge outraged by the agency’s failure to provide hot water to as many as 300 tenants in a Rockaway apartment building since November, the Daily News has learned.

“If this was a private small landlord he [the landlord] would be in jail by now,” Judge Kimon Thermos said during a Jan. 20 hearing. “He would have been in jail by now and the fines would have been $500 per day, per apartment. So he would have been in jail and he would have been losing his building too.”

As a city-run agency, the New York City Housing Authority is not eligible for the same penalties as a private landlord who neglects its properties and tenants.

“Why is your crime shielded this way?” Thermos asked a NYCHA lawyer. “NYCHA is dropping the ball big time here.”

Tenants in Carleton Manor say NYCHA did little for months to fix the water problem that makes taking a shower a major undertaking. Dozens of tenants have filed a petition in Housing Court seeking to force NYCHA to make repairs at the 174-unit building on Beach Channel Dr. and Beach 74th St. in Arverne.

“This is the dead of winter,” said Alisha Robinson, 42. “We need this corrected. We need some attention on fixing this.”

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “I have to go to a hotel to take a decent shower.”

 

The legal fight began Nov. 29, when one tenant, Shaniya Callender, filed a petition to get the water problem fixed. That yielded no progress, so on Dec. 28, 45 tenants signed a petition threatening housing court action if no repairs were made by Jan. 10.

That deadline came and went, so the tenants took NYCHA to court. At the Jan. 20 hearing, Judge Thermos was outraged that NYCHA’s work on the building was being overseen by an unlicensed plumber.

The judge said he was considering issuing a subpoena demanding NYCHA Chairman Gregory Russ appear in court. But before he could, Thermos was replaced on the case by a different judge, for unclear reasons.

 

A tale of two Astorias

 

Queens Patch

Volunteers are helping Astoria Houses tenants get cooking as they approach nearly two months without gas in their kitchens.

Queens Together, a local organization dedicated to restaurant advocacy and community service, led a team of volunteers and elected officials distributing crockpots and grocery items Sunday to the dozens of families in the NYCHA complex who have had no cooking gas since Sept. 23.

The outage is affecting 48 apartments, a NYCHA spokesperson told Patch last month. It's unclear when gas service will be restored.

"Where NYCHA has let residents down, the Astoria Houses community has stepped up," City Council Member Costa Constantinides said in a statement. "A gas outage should not take away our neighbors' ability to celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday rooted in family recipes and celebration."

Since the outage was first reported, NYCHA provided residents with hot plates and is making unspecified "additional contingency measures," the agency said.

  Queens Patch 

 Fourteen apartments in a new Astoria building have hit the city's "affordable" housing lottery, but prospective tenants must make at least $70,000 a year to be eligible, records show.

Applications are open through Dec. 4 for a mix of one-bedroom and two-bedroom units in a new residential building rising at the corner of 31st Avenue and 21st Street, according to the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

The one-bedroom apartments will rent for $2,050 a month, and the two-bedroom apartments will cost $2,500 in monthly rent.

Apartments come with in-unit laundry, and building amenities include an elevator and gym. Parking will be available for an additional fee.

The developer is slated to receive tax breaks in exchange for building the "affordable" units.

HUD apartment building's LLC landlord is putting elderly tenants at risk of contracting coronavirus

AM New York

Some residents of Astoria’s Bridgeview II Co Apartments were left without hot water and heat for more than 55 hours over the weekend, one tenant’s son told QNS.

Although the hot water went back on for a few hours on Monday, March 16, it is off again as of Tuesday morning, according to Dannelly Rodriguez, a student at CUNY Law and a community activist who’s mother lives in the building. He said the heat never went back on.

“On Saturday at like 8:30 a.m., there was no hot water or heat, and the day before there was brown water,” Rodriguez said. “This is especially problematic because a lot of the tenants are elders who are most susceptible to COVID-19, so I felt like something needed to be done immediately.”

Rodriguez’s mother, who he says has serious health conditions and receives Section 8, is one of those tenants. When he went to visit her on the eighth floor, he realized the issue and that a number of other people in the building also didn’t have hot water and heat. He then started encouraging neighbors to file complaints with management and call 311.

Bridgeview II Apartments, located at 26-45 9th Street, is a low income, HUD apartment building with 110 units. It is currently managed by Axion Management LLC, according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) website.

Rodriguez, a former tenant of the building, said this is not an “isolated incident.” He recalls filing a lawsuit a few years prior in order to have the building fix his mother’s leaking roof.

“They have had these kinds of incidents in the past, including boiler, heat, mold issues, broken appliances and windows issues,” Rodriguez said. “The building has a host of violations. The culture of this building is that they’re actively negligent and fail to make repairs for the people who live there. Having this boiler issue now is a manifestation of everything that’s happened throughout the years.”

An HPD spokesperson told QNS that inspectors assessed the building on Monday, and found the hot water and heat were “adequate.” They said heat was at 68 degrees (the high yesterday was 45 degrees) and the hot water was 120 degrees, OSHA’s recommended temperature for domestic hot water.

Rodriguez said the hot water was working after complaints were filed, but the heat still wasn’t working as of Monday — for several apartment units, not just his mother’s apartment.
HPD said they will work directly with tenants who need hot water and heat.

Over the weekend, Rodriguez took to Twitter to document what was going on — knowing that he’d get more responses that way.

My mother’s who has serious health issues & many other tenants at 26-45 9th St. Astoria Queens are without hot water for 24 hrs due to the negligence of Wavecrest Management. How is this acceptable in the 21st century & amidst this Corona virus pandemic? @NYCHousing @HealthNYGov

— Dannelly Rodriguez (@DR0DRIGUEZ) March 15, 2020

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal energy plan for public housing will leave tenants hanging longer for heat and hot water

Progress New York

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY 14) has unveiled a green “New Deal” to “invest” up to $180 billion over ten (10) years in America’s public housing stock. The plan, unveiled two weeks ago, would offer public housing residents jobs in addition to funding capital repairs that have long been ignored by the Government. A central focus of the plan aims to reduce the carbon footprint of public housing, according to a report moved by the news Web site CityLab.

But there are concerns over the plan, according to public housing residents, who are advocating for a plan to fully-fund the Local public housing agency in New York City.

Although residents of public housing in New York City face immediate public health crises, like exposure to toxic mold and poisonous lead paint, high levels of lead in drinking water, and lack of adequate heat in the winter, U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s green “New Deal” plan makes residents wait ten (10) years for full-funding, but that’s only after her plan becomes law and takes affect, something that is not assured.

In recent days, surrogates for U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez have bristled whenever critics have noted that the green “New Deal” plan ignores the current the public health crises facing public housing residents. (On a recent Facebook post, U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s supporters attacked a grassroots advocacy group for highlighting shortcomings in the green “New Deal” plan. A member of thegrassroots advocacy group is a staff member of Progress New York.) When coupled with the fact that U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s legislative proposal ignores the stated plan by Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-New York City) to put one-third (1/3) of public housing into the hands of private landlords, there appears to be no urgency to the green “New Deal” plan. The Mayor’s intention is to demolish public housing apartments in order to rezone empty lots for 70-30 luxury rental buildings and to sell air rights owned by the Local public housing agency, the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA. Media reports have raised concerns about increased rent hikes, rescreenings, and higher eviction rates from the centerpiece to the Mayor’s plan, known as the Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD.
 
But the conditional nature of, and the years of waiting required by, U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s green “New Deal” plan mean that the dangers public housing residents face as a result of public health crises and Mayor de Blasio’ on plans for NYCHA will not be countered by the ambitious environmental bill.

Bronx landlord menaced and is now evicting tenant for trying to report uninhabitable conditions at her apartment

NY Daily News

Keep your mouth shut, and you can stay put.

That’s the loud-and-clear message a social services provider sent to a Bronx mother of three when it made her promise to stop calling the city’s 311 help line with gripes about her heat-less, rodent-filled subsidized apartment.

Iesha Poindexter told the Daily News that since she moved into her 4453 White Plains Rd. unit in 2013, it’s been one nightmare after another, with spotty heat and hot water and a near-constant sprinkling of rodent droppings on her family’s clothing.

When management failed to remedy the issues, she complained to 311 — which irked staffers so much, they told her to stop calling, or go.

In August, Poindexter was presented with a form that stipulated she must stop contacting the city helpline with complaints, or she’d get the boot. The form said she must “refrain from calling 311 in regard to any complaints or repair work that needs to be completed in your apartment or on any of Five Stars Management property.”

Poindexter, afraid she’d find herself on the street with her three sons — and the two kittens she adopted as a form of rodent control — reluctantly signed.

But now, she told The News, management is going to kick her out anyway when her lease expires in March.

“They just gave me a lease ... but said there’s no way they’re renewing it,” she said. “They evil.”

The building she lives in, Poindexter said, houses tenants who receive a mix of rent subsidies, including supportive housing and welfare money, which she receives, as well as other sources of funding like Section 8 vouchers and veterans assistance.

She pays rent out of her own pocket through supportive housing subsidies from the Acacia Network — the entity that provides social services in the building and whose letterhead appears on the form she signed — and with welfare money she gets through the city Department of Homeless Services, she said. All of it goes to the building’s property manager, Five Stars Management.

Ah, that scalliwag Acacia Network, which all you long-time Crapper readers should be familiar with.

Stringer subpoenas NYCHA

From CBS 2:

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer is putting NYCHA’s feet to the fire, alleging the city housing agency is stonewalling efforts to investigate why so many residents have been left without heat or hot water.

Stringer’s office announced that a second subpoena was issued to NYCHA on Friday, demanding they turn over information about multiple outages last winter. On Saturday, the comptroller said the city housing authority had “purposely done everything they can” to delay a year-long audit into the embattled agency.

DeBlasio criticized for downplaying NYCHA heat issues

From the Daily News:

On WNYC, de Blasio was asked how NYCHA was handling its pervasive heating glitches, and downplayed the issue.

“As the problems have been occurring, we've been getting the heat back on in each development. There are still a few, for sure, that we have more work to do,” he said.

The mayor conceded there were “some developments right now that need heat restored,” but that usually NYCHA can fix the problem in a few hours.

But over the holiday weekend and throughout the frigid week, entire developments across the city found themselves without heat, some for days at a time.

Woodside Houses without heat during storm

From the NY Post:

Around 3,000 public-housing residents in Queens were forced to ride out Thursday’s blizzard in units with little or no heat — prompting some to risk carbon-monoxide poisoning by cranking up ovens and stoves.

The latest suffering inflicted on hapless tenants of the New York City Housing Authority led Mayor de Blasio to blame “decades” of past neglect, just days after he was sworn into his second, four-year term.

A NYCHA spokeswoman said they were told about radiators going cold in all 20 buildings at the sprawling Woodside Houses around 11:15 a.m. Thursday.

Spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said the problem was caused by a drop in the pressure of natural gas supplied to the complex’s steam boilers by the National Grid utility company.

Blake said NYCHA maintenance workers adjusted valves to provide some heat to the lower three floors of the six-story buildings, and a National Grid spokesman said it restored full pressure in the gas line by clearing “debris around the strainer around the gas meter” at around 1:30 p.m.

The heat was back on in all 1,300 apartments around 5 p.m., NYCHA said.

City Hall wants you to paint your roof white

From AM-NY:

City Hall will be painting the city white this summer to protect people from the risks of high heat.

City officials, and other private and nonprofit partners launched The Cool Neighborhoods program Wednesday with paint brushes in hand. Under the initiative, the city will be working to lower building temperatures by painting their roofs a reflective white paint, planting trees to provide more shade and urging neighbors to check in on the elderly, poor and disabled when temperatures spike.

Daniel Zarrilli, the city’s chief resiliency officer, said the $106 million initiative is imperative because studies show the number of days New York City thermometers hit at least 90 degrees will double by 2020. Such hot conditions can lead to dehydration, heat stroke and other ill health effects.

“We need to be better prepared for that,” Zarrilli said.

One of the program’s largest components is the expansion of the city’s CoolRoofs service, where roofs are covered with the heat-reducing paint, at no cost to the owner.

What it's like to live in de Blasio's homeless hotels

From PIX11:

For much of this year, PIX11 has been focusing on Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Steven Banks' increasing reliance on commercial hotels, but on Wednesday, we spoke to a homeless mother who has the experience to talk about the subject – she's already been in three this year.

Things were so bad in some of those hotels, the DHS transferred her to a hotel in the Belmont section of the Bronx, where the conditions we found are not much better.

Aventura Lopez has been languishing in the New York City homeless hotel shelter system. She has stayed in three so far since January of this year.

Based on what she told PIX11, her situation has gone from bad to worse. In her words, "miserable."

Lopez credits the Department of Homeless Services led by embattled Commissioner Banks for her misfortune. She blames them for putting her and her two daughters into a shelter on Crotona Avenue with no heat.

These chilly conditions are an example of what many homeless shelter residents say they've been living with for months. In other words, simply taking homeless families off the streets in order to fulfill their legal obligation to house them but providing questionable or in some cases absolutely zero social services to get out of the shelter system and back on their feet.

Lopez said she's been contacted "zero" times by the city to help her find a job.

"Not at all," Lopez said. "The case work is there but as far as helping, no. No housing specialist, nothing."

The comptroller released a report detailing the poor conditions in these shelters.

Unhappy Valentine's Day for Maspeth family

From PIX11:

Imagine what it's like if your apartment inside is as cold as it is outside, just as New York City is experiencing the coldest temperatures and wind chills in 20 years this weekend.

One Maspeth family knows firsthand.

"We keep the heater going nonstop and we keep bundled up at all times," Dawn Stahl told PIX11 News.

Dawn, her husband Michael and 16-year-old daughter Ashley have been living in the second-floor apartment at 54–66 46 Street with no heat and hot water for three months.

Her Con Edison bill is over $2000.

And to make matters worse, her oven and stove don't work because she said National Grid removed the gas meter in the basement because her landlord didn't pay his bills. She's now using a hot plate for cooking.

The family stopped paying rent months ago and took the landlord to court.

And now they're moving out in April, but, in the meantime, they have to deal with this weekend's arctic blast.

Playground equipment gets burning hot in summer

People in glass houses really feel the heat

From the Wall Street Journal:

The skyline of New York is dotted with new glass condominium towers featuring some of the most expensive and sought-after apartments in the city.

But a new study is warning that there could be a price to pay for the grand views: Some high-rise apartments could become as overheated as a hot yoga studio in a prolonged summertime blackout, similar in duration to the one that followed superstorm Sandy.

In the winter, the study found that in a prolonged cold wave interior temperatures would plummet in glass towers during a blackout to a low of 35 degrees over seven days, but would fall even more in single-family homes and older brick apartment towers built with little insulation.

The study is part of a campaign by the Urban Green Council, a building industry group that worked on post-Sandy planning, to push New York developers to meet higher performance standards in the future. The council has called the glass-walled construction "a major step backward" environmentally; instead, it favors less exposed glass in new towers as well as expensive triple-pane glass and other improvements.

How is this possible?

From DNA Info:

Residents of an affordable housing building in Bed-Stuy say their management company has only just begun restoring heat to their apartments— eight years after taking over the building.

Residents of 305 Decatur St., a Section 8 building in Bed-Stuy, say they've lived without heat since before their management company, Shinda Management Corp., took over the building in 2005, but that the company has dragged its feet in fixing the problem after gaining control, while also locking their laundry and public rooms.

Even neighbors who have had their heat restored with baseboard heating, like Collette Wright, have had to fight, the 55-year-old resident said.

"For me to have a decent place to live, warm, secure," Wright said. "That's a basic human right, and Shinda deprived me of that right over and over."

After years of complaints, Wright's new heating system was finally installed in August. Three other residents of 305 Decatur St. confirmed to DNAinfo New York that they were told by Shinda their heat would soon be installed, though as of Tuesday the tenants still did not have baseboard heating.

Wright, a tenant activist who has lived in the building since 1996, said this will be the first winter she's had heat since moving in.

Beware of shoddy Rapid Repairs work

From Eyewitness News:

A licensed plumbing inspector says he was fired by Rapid Repairs after confronting his boss about unsafe installation of heating systems.

"I was fixing heating contractors mistakes left and right, things that would get people killed," the whistle blowing plumber said.

In talking to Eyewitness News, he requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

While at Rapid Repairs he documented what he says is shoddy and potentially deadly work such as this faulty boiler flue.

Chilly nights in Hamilton Beach

From the Daily News:

Many southern Queens homeowners whose belongings and houses were destroyed by the wrath of Superstorm Sandy are still living without heat.

Some residents of Hamilton Beach, a community of one- and two-story homes bordering Howard Beach and JFK Airport, said Wednesday that water gets into their National Grid gas lines every few days — knocking out the service they need for heat, hot water and cooking.

“We’re very frustrated,” said New Hamilton Beach Civic Association President Roger Gendron. “We just feel that after all of these months, a solution should have been reached by now.”

Gary Robertson, 36, said that since the storm he often wakes up in the middle of night “freezing.”

“Every two or three days, I have water in my gas line and my heat kicks off,” said Robertson, whose home flooded with about five feet of water during Sandy. “I’ve had days where my house was 35 degrees.”

He said he calls National Grid several times a week, is on hold for 15 to 20 minutes and then someone is sent to his home to confirm there is a problem.

But it can take days before the utility sends a truck out to pump bottled gas flush into his line to flush the water out of it, he said.

“It’s disgusting,” he said. “I’ve had so many hardships from this storm ... and to have to deal with this, as well as everything else, is extremely frustrating.”

City sends Sandy victims to unsafe housing

From CBS 2:

Victims of Superstorm Sandy who are staying in temporary housing aren’t expecting room service, but some say that they are living in shocking conditions.

“We’re victims of Sandy but we shouldn’t have to be punished because of that,” a man who identified himself as Monroe, told CBS 2′s Steve Langford.

Residents of these temporary lodgings have complained of a lack of heat and problems with infestation.

“The roaches, and a lot of it has to do with, the mice,” said one man.

Some Sandy victims have been lucky enough to be put up in hotels like the Holiday Inn and the Double Tree, but more than two dozen former residents of the Rockaways are living in a pair of run down rooming houses in the Longwood section of the Bronx.

Those two buildings have reportedly received dozens of housing code violations and have numerous fire safety problems. When CBS 2 stopped by, a smoke alarm appeared to be running on a low battery; the building’s super said that he would replace it.

And the rapid home repairs aren't what they're cracked up to be.

Don't take heat and power for granted

So much for that

From the Daily News:

Two-thirds of the storm-ravaged buildings whose owners sought help from Mayor Bloomberg’s Rapid Repair program are still not fixed — two months after Hurricane Sandy hit, the Daily News has learned.

With registration set to end Monday, Rapid Repairs has completed work on only 4,216 of the 12,555 buildings enrolled in Rapid Repairs — just one in three.

“Work has begun on another 2,506, with another 5,833 remaining,” Peter Spencer, spokesman for the Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery, said Friday.

Eleven days after the storm, Mayor Bloomberg announced Rapid Repairs — a $500 million, first-of-a-kind effort to quickly restore power and heat to homes devastated by Sandy. “In the neighborhoods hardest hit by Sandy, homeowners need help fixing their homes — and they need it now,” the mayor declared.

The city agreed to pay contractors to assess the damage and get power, heat and hot water back up and running right away. Within 10 days, 6,000 homeowners had enrolled.
More than two months later, thousands of homeowners are still waiting. The city hired Tishman to assess damage, but many homeowners complained the firm wound up doing repeat assessments and losing paperwork while no actual work was done.

Damaged homes causing illness

From NBC:

Patrick Zoda has been working nonstop for a month, trying to save his Staten Island home after it was badly damaged by Sandy. As he works, the debris cloud filling his house has also been filling his lungs.

“I feel totally drained, tired," Zoda told NBC 4 New York. "Every morning I wake up coughing."

Dr. Brahim Ardolic, chairman of Emergency Medicine at Staten Island University Hospital, says he has seen a greater number of patients with respiratory issues in recent weeks, mostly in people with pre-existing conditions. The combination of flu season and Sandy cleanup -- which has brought unhygienic conditions, dirty water and mold into homes -- is a perfect storm for sickness, he says.

"Which of these factors actually cause these people to come in is very difficult to say, but clearly, there is an increase in the number of people that are coming in with these conditions," Ardolic said.

Zoda, who lives in Midland Beach, says this cough is different from anything he's had before.

“It is a very dry cough that I have. It's not a normal cough,” Zoda said.

And doctors say it’s not just mold that could irritate residents, but also dust and insulation.



From Eyewitness News:

Volunteers on the front lines of the recovery in the Rockaways see a health threat spreading through hundreds of water-soaked homes.

"We have senior citizens in their homes who are sick in their homes and can't get out."

Like so many homes in the Rockaways, Calvin Turney's home from the outside shows little damage. It's inside where Sandy's surge has left its mark. He says the first floor is filled with mold. The Turneys are also living without heat, electricity and water.

"No heat is a problem. How much can a body take," Turney said.

The mold and cold nights have taken a toll on Mr. Turney's wife, who days ago was diagnosed with bronchitis and given powerful inhalers to help her breathing.

The Health Department says it has no guidelines as to how bad the mold problem must be before considering evacuation.

And one month since Sandy, neither the city, the state, nor FEMA has a concrete plan for alternative housing for those displaced by mold, lack of heat, or a myriad of other problems making homes inhabitable.

Meanwhile, NYC claims it is fixing 300 homes a day.