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March 1,
2012, Brooklyn, NY— Tenants and advocates from Families United for Racial & Economic Equality (FUREE) gathered today in front of Brooklyn Housing Court to demand that NYCHA stop forcing residents to live in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, stop misusing capital repair funds for other programs, enhance its Centralized Calling Center (CCC) to prioritize backlogged repair tickets and make repairs in a timely manner, and to use Section 3 funding to train and hire unemployed residents to make repairs. Following the event, attorneys from South Brooklyn Legal Services (a program of Legal Services NYC) filed a group lawsuit against NYCHA to force repairs for tenants of three Brooklyn NYCHA properties.NYCHA residents who make repair requests through the CCC often wait months or years to have those repairs made. Citywide, thousands of repairs for NYCHA’s units are back-logged. Families, youth and elders are forced to live with conditions that threaten their health and safety, including serious leaks, mold, disintegrating plaster on walls and ceilings, electrical outlets that spark and sizzle, and unsecured front doors.
Sharon Davis-Night (left, speaking) is a tenant of the David G. Farragut Houses and a member of FUREE. In May of 2010 she contacted the CCC and asked NYCHA to repair the conditions that were causing mold and mildew to form on her walls. At that time, she was given a repair ticket and was told that a contractor would contact her within 30 days. Almost two years have passed and no one has contacted Ms. Davis-Night. “I’ve called several times to ask about the repairs,” said Ms. Davis-Night. “The last time, I was told that I could not request a new ticket because the ticket from May 2010 is still open. Meanwhile, I am still living with mold and mildew. I now have a respiratory infection and I am worried that the conditions are beginning to affect my 21-year-old son.”
Advocates called on NYCHA Chair John Rhea to heed the recommendations of a report card issued in 2011 by FUREE, Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), Community Voices Heard, Mothers on the Move (MOM), CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities and the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center. That report card gave poor grades to NYCHA’s repair system, highlighting problems with the timeliness and quality of repairs. Many of the organizations came from around New York City to support the resident-litigants.
FUREE Member John Saulter said, “NYCHA needs to expedite repairs, especially the ones that are causing dangerous health conditions. But they keep telling you that they don’t have enough money though they have enough to pay millions to the police department for services we already pay for through our taxes. Why not take that money, train and hire unemployed residents, and make it so that this system works for everyone.” Saulter refers to the Section 3 program, a federal mandate requiring that a portion of new jobs from federal capital funds go to low-income community residents working for NYCHA contractors. Funding to the NYPD from NYCHA is from NYCHA’s capital expense budget.
Cynthia Morgan, also a tenant at the Farragut Houses, had a fire in her apartment on December 11, 2011. While there was limited damage from the fire, the Fire Department had to break two windows in her apartment, break a door, and remove her kitchen sink and cabinets. In January 2012, Ms. Morgan called NYCHA’s Customer Contact Center and asked for repairs to be completed in her apartment.
“NYCHA told me that someone would come to my apartment to complete the repairs on December 26, 2012. By then I will have lived with boarded-up windows for more than a year. It’s unsafe and unhealthy. People shouldn’t have to live like this. NYCHA needs to fix the system so that we can live in our homes with dignity.”
Brent Meltzer, Housing Unit Co-Director at South Brooklyn Legal Services, which is representing the tenants, said “It is unconscionable that NYCHA believes it is okay for tenants to wait two or three years for repairs. What message does it send when a city agency is acting like a slumlord? Hopefully this lawsuit will get needed repairs for the tenants and also be a wakeup call for NYCHA to remember its mission— to provide safe, affordable housing for our neediest citizens.”
Valery Jean, FUREE Executive Director said, “In this economy, it’s even more critical to ensure that our largest affordable housing stock is maintained for generations to come. When budgets are balanced on the backs of low income and working class communities, it is up to those who are negatively affected to make a stand to let decisionmakers know it’s no longer acceptable to be treated as less than a human being.”
South Brooklyn Legal Services Housing Unit Co-Director Brent Meltzer with Councilmember Charles Barron, tenants, and advocates.
SBLS Client Sharon Davis-Night holding the toothbrush she's been using to clean mold and mildew off of her walls since 2010
Group suit against NYCHA forces agency to begin repairs at Smith Houses
Some 320 residents of the Manhattan public housing complex had been trying to get backlogged repairs for their apartments for years. But when they banded together, a judge rejected NYCHA’s motion to dismiss the suit and instead ordered the agency to begin immediate repairs on problems such as exposed wires, crumbling plaster and missing smoke detectors.
Comments (13)BY GREG B. SMITH / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
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SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 2013, 6:58 PM
BARRY WILLIAMS FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Lamont Mosby shows off repair records for his Smith Houses apartment Thursday, many of which NYCHA never dealt with.
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Here's to strength in numbers.
For years public housing tenants have tried in vain to force the city Housing Authority to perform much-needed apartment repairs by filing lawsuits.
Ignored again and again as individuals, 320 residents of the Smith Houses in Manhattan tried a different approach — banding together to sue NYCHA as one development.
Last week, they won.
Manhattan Housing Court Judge Phyllis Saxe on Wednesday rejected NYCHA’s motion to dismiss the suit and ordered the agency to immediately deal with hundreds of backlogged repairs.
BARRY WILLIAMS FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Seen here is cracked and peeling paint in the bathroom of Lamont Mosby and his mother's home in the Smith Houses.
As a result, NYCHA promised crews will be dispatched starting this week to begin handling repairs that have lingered at Smith for months and even years.
“I was always trying to do this on my own,” said Lamont Mosby, 38, whose suit against NYCHA went nowhere. “When we finally got together as a group, when we united as a whole, that’s how we did this.”
Lawyers for the Smith tenants believe this group victory could have implications at aging NYCHA developments across the city.
“I’ve never seen anything like this happen before,” said attorney Harvey Epstein of the Urban Justice Center, which partnered with the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest to craft what he called an “unprecedented” strategy to force NYCHA’s hand.
NYCHA’s notorious backlog of repairs now numbers 244,000, with thousands not scheduled to be resolved until late next year, even though the agency launched a campaign in January to eliminate the backlog by 2014.
BARRY WILLIAMS FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
A significant percentage of floor tiles inside the building were made of asbestos. Seen above are the cracked and flaking tiles in Lamont Mosby and his mother Joan's apartment.
On Friday, NYCHA spokeswoman Sheila Stainback said the agency has closed more work orders at Smith in the first quarter of 2013 than in the first quarter of 2012. “Staff of the New York City Housing Authority continue their dedicated efforts to close the backlog of repairs at Smith Houses as we have all year throughout NYCHA,” she said.
But in the last few years thousands of frustrated NYCHA tenants have found themselves forced to go to court. By mid-March, 8,051 lawsuits demanding repairs were pending against NYCHA, and the agency had “failed to schedule” repairs for nearly one in 10 (857) of those cases, internal documents obtained by the Daily News show.
That included 189 “failed to schedule” cases at Manhattan NYCHA developments, and nine such cases at the NYCHA project named after the legendary Gov. Al Smith. Located on the edge of Chinatown, Smith Houses is one of the biggest and oldest public housing developments in the city, opened 60 years ago and now home to more than 4,000.
In April, 320 Smith residents banded together and filed suit, demanding an immediate fix to long-festering problems from cascading water leaks to roach infestation.
Saxe first ordered the city to inspect the apartments and give her an objective view of conditions there.
Department of Housing Preservation and Development records show what inspectors found when they investigated homes.
In May, city Housing Preservation & Development inspectors began going floor to floor, finding hundreds of adverse conditions that require immediate repair, records show.
At 10 Catherine Slip, where tenants in 24 apartments on nearly every floor had joined the suit, HPD found crumbling plaster, missing smoke detectors, busted up floor tiles, mold, “active” water leaks and exposed wires. In several units, inspectors wrote there were “roaches and mice throughout apartment.”
At 388 Pearl St., Lamont Mosby and his 68-year-old mother, Joan, a former traffic officer, live in a three-bedroom that borders on uninhabitable.
Lead paint flakes off the walls and ceiling, sometimes drifting down into food cooking on the stove. A radiator pipe removed in the 1990s to stop a leak was never replaced, so there’s no heat.
Metal window frames have separated from walls, creating a gap through which the wind whistles. Brown asbestos tile on the floor that dates to the 1970s is crumbling and chipping.
More records from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development calling for fixes in apartments.
After trying for years to get all this repaired, the Mosbys filed suit in 2011 against NYCHA as individuals. Months passed. HPD came and found numerous problems, and on Feb. 19 a Housing Court judge ordered NYCHA to “contain the conditions within 60 days of today.”
Sixty days came and went, and nothing happened. “I followed all the rules I had to follow and they still couldn’t give me a date. And they couldn’t give the judge a date,” Mosby said.
Then the Mosbys learned of the Smith Houses suit and signed on. On Wednesday when NYCHA’s effort to dismiss the suit failed, the agency promised to start fixing up 10 Catherine Slip starting this Wednesday, with the other 11 Smith buildings to follow over the summer.
The Mosbys were promised repair crews starting June 24.
BARRY WILLIAMS FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Residents of the Smith Houses banned together to file a lawsuit against the New York City Housing Authority, which forced the agency to make overdue repairs within the apartments.
“The lawyers said if they don’t do it, they’re going to go to jail,” Lamont Mosby said. “We’ll see what happens.”
***
Housing Court Judge Phyllis Saxe is a fairly new arrival to the bench.
She was appointed in 2010 by the chief administrative judge to serve a five-year term in Brooklyn Housing Court, but is currently on rotation in Manhattan.
A graduate of New York Law School, Judge Saxe worked for years as a lawyer for the city corporation counsel’s office, rising to be deputy chief of the Manhattan litigation unit in 1996.
She then spent years in court-appointed positions, as a mediator and a guardian in estate cases before her appointment to Housing Court three years ago.
She and her husband, David Saxe, a judge in the appellate division in Manhattan, won a $49 million jury verdict in 1998 against Lenox Hill Hospital after alleging medical malpractice there caused their daughter’s cerebral palsy.
Greg B. Smith
NYCHA refuses to make repairs on apartments and is blackmailing tenants: lawsuit
In the suit, the more than 300 tenants alleged that NYCHA officials told them that repair funds would only be made available if they supported its plans to lease land in the complex to developers.
Comments (10)BY EDGAR SANDOVAL , GREG B. SMITH AND GINGER ADAMS OTIS / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
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TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2013, 11:53 PM
Tenants of the Smith Houses are suing because they say NYCHA has refused to make repairs unless they support the agency’s plan to lease land in the complex to developers.
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Residents of the Smith Houses on the lower East Side have filed suit against the city Housing Authority, arguing the agency refuses to make repairs, forcing them to endure dangerous conditions like crumbling ceilings and toxic mold.
In the suit, more than 300 tenants allege that NYCHA officials have told them repair funds will only be made available to fix problems in their apartments if they support the agency’s plan to lease land in the complex to developers.
NYCHA has been aggressively promoting a program to lease land in eight Manhattan housing developments so that 4,300 new apartments can be built, mostly at market rate. The arrangement is projected to pump $46 million per year into authority coffers.
The tenants argue that their rights have been trumped by the all-important real estate scheme.
“We feel NYCHA is holding residents hostage, forcing residents to support their plan whether it’s in their best interest or not,” said Aixa Torres, president of the Smith Houses Tenant Association. “We should not be at the mercy of a real estate deal.”
NYCHA spokeswoman Sheila Stainback denied that repair work was being held back to compel support of the plan. “Our efforts to eliminate the backlog of open work orders are not at all linked to the land-lease plans,” she said in a statement Tuesday.
The Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest filed the suit April 29 in Manhattan housing court.
Last month, Smith residents boycotted a meeting on NYCHA’s development proposal after agency officials refused to meet with the tenant association, plaintiffs said. Since then, NYCHA has stopped roof work that was previously contracted and for which funding has already been allocated, causing extensive damages, the suit charges.
Stephanie Rudolph, one of the attorneys who filed the suit, said Smith Houses residents are really hurting. “The number of times I had to type the phrase ‘Rats present in an apartment’ is absolutely outrageous,” she said.
Stainback said “NYCHA’s land-lease plan, through the revenue it would generate, would directly address these needs at Smith Houses.” She added that more than $200 million is necessary to put the development in a state of good repair over five years.
On Tuesday, NYCHA announced it had reduced its backlog of repairs system-wide to 274,000, from a peak early this year of 420,000. Some of the requests date back four years.
In January, Mayor Bloomberg announced an aggressive campaign to eliminate the backlog by 2014. But the Daily News reported on Sunday that the reduction in work orders systemwide has been accomplished in part by an effort to cancel work orders without doing the repairs, whenever possible. Workers told The News that managers are pressuring them to cancel work orders.
NYCHA responded to The News’ findings by saying the spike in cancellations was seasonal, and that the January figure was “largely in line with the same period of 2012.” But the agency would not provide the number of cancellations logged in January 2012.
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