Thousands Of NYCHA Tenants In Brooklyn Without Heat Or Water

BOERUM HILL, BROOKLYN — All of the more than 1,000 tenants in Boerum Hill's Wyckoff Gardens complex started out the New Year without heat and hot water on Thursday.

An unplanned outage cut heat and hot water for the entire development around 9 a.m. and hadn't been restored yet by early afternoon, the New York City Housing Authority's dashboard shows. The outage left 1,149 tenants at the Third Avenue complex without heat or hot water.

It was one of several unplanned outages in public housing developments across the city on Thursday, worrying advocates who have long spoken out about utility problems.

NYCHA has said that the 263 outages so far in 2019's heating season are far below the 463 outages during the same time period last year, but Redmond Haskins from Legal Aid Society argued this is nothing to brag about.

“Utility outages have already plagued thousands of NYCHA residents this year at developments across New York City,” Haskins said. “263 individual outages is nothing to tout and this rather underscores the need for more funding to address failing boilers and other utility systems.”

Legal Aid has long said that the housing authority should give tenants rent breaks for service outages and has sued the agency for widespread outages in 2017 and 2018.

NYCHA has contended that they are on their way to improving the outages due to 62 new mobile boilers, a 24/7 heat desk and "roving heat teams" that have brought the average restoration time down from 10 hours to eight hours in the last year, a spokesperson said after a Brooklyn outage on Christmas.

That outage, at Coney Island's NYCHA complex, was the only outage on the holiday, the spokesperson said. The same can't be said for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, though, according to the dashboard.

More than 2,600 tenants in buildings across the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens saw hot water, heat or water outages on Dec. 31 or Jan. 1, the dashboard shows.

Those outages were all repaired by Jan. 2, but a new round of unplanned service cuts took their place.

Including the Wyckoff Gardens outage, a total of 2,843 tenants were without one of the utilities in an unplanned outage on Jan. 2. None of the outages had been restored by 12:30 p.m.

Most of the outages seemed to be in Brooklyn developments, including the 1,149 tenants in Wyckoff Gardens and 1,049 tenants in buildings in the Linden Houses.

The unplanned outages joined more than 1,000 other tenants who were without utilities as the result of planned outages and repairs.

Update: A NYCHA representative responded to a request for comment after publication time. The representative said that the Wyckoff Gardens outage was planned, though it was marked unplanned on the dashboard. The outage was posted as a precaution as the agency did work on boilers at the development, which ended up staying on throughout the work on Thursday, the representative said.

At Linden Houses, there was a water main break at the development that led to the water outage. Water was restored as of 5 p.m. Thursday and the cause of the water main break was still unknown, the representative said.