Nearly 1,000 BK NYCHA Residents Left Without Heat

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — Nearly 1,000 public housing residents in Williamsburg spent the night without heat or hot water after an unplanned outage, service monitors show.

Six different buildings in the New York City Housing Authority's Williamsburg Houses had more than 100 residents each that lost hot water and heat around 10 p.m. Wednesday, the city's online dashboard shows. In total, 839 residents across the complex were without the services.

Heat and hot water still hadn't been restored by about 10 a.m. Thursday.

The service outage comes as forecasters predict the coldest front of the season so far in the next few days, with temperatures expected to reach as low as 30 degrees.

Advocates have been speaking out about their concerns for the housing authority's ability to keep tenants warm through winter over the last few months.

In September, more than 7,400 residents of 35 NYCHA buildings were left without hot water. Another 4,000 in Fort Greene were then left without hot water a week later and another 6,000 lost hot water in Bed-Stuy a few weeks after that.

Some of those outages were fixed within a few hours, but others have taken as long as 69 hours for service to be restored.

NYCHA representatives didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the Williamsburg outages.

Some advocates, like Legal Aid, have been fighting to get NYCHA tenants rent rebates for the heat failures. A lawsuit following a freezing winter of late 2017 and early 2018 is pending in court. A Manhattan Supreme Court judge dismissed the case in NYCHA's favor in February, but Legal Aid has asked the Appellate Division court to reverse that decision.