Residents in NYCHA housing wait over two months for repairs from agency embroiled in bribery scandal: docs
It’s a NYCHA-mare.
New York City Housing Authority staffers allegedly have no problem fixing government contracts, but residents regularly wait more than two months for them to fix clogged tubs, leaky faucets, and broken refrigerators.
NYCHA workers took an average of 65.4 days to complete non-emergency repairs during the fiscal year ending June 30, records reviewed by The Post Show.
The glacial pace is 33% slower than the previous year when it took 49.1 days, and a whopping 242% worse than fiscal 2019, when the average repair time was 19.4 days.
And the latest records for the embattled authority — which saw dozens of past and present staffers busted this week in the largest single-day bribery takedown in the U.S. Department of Justice’s history — show wait times are getting worse for the city’s 528,000 public housing residents, climbing to nearly 66 days from September through October 2023.
“There been a lot of shady business going on for a long time and nothing is getting fixed,” said Glenn Collins, a tenant leader at Redfern Houses in Far Rockaway, Queens.
Collins said he’s been waiting for more than two years for NYCHA to fix at least a dozen problems — including severely cracked walls and a gaping hole inside a shower — in his three-bedroom apartment.
The radiators haven’t worked since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, added Collins, 39.
And for three years, he had raw sewage leaking into the bathroom whenever upstairs neighbors flushed a toilet. NYCHA finally fixed the leak in December, after repeatedly ignoring court orders to act immediately, he said.
“No one should have to live like this,” Collins said.
The average wait time for NYCHA to complete an “emergency” repair — usually no heat or hot water — was 27.8 hours in fiscal 2023, up 27% from 22 hours a year earlier, and 118% slower than 12.7 hours in fiscal 2019.
The agency did see some improvement during the first four months of this fiscal year as repairs were completed in an average of 16.2 hours.
In Mayor Adams’ preliminary management report for fiscal 2024 released last week, NYCHA attributed the poor response times to minor repairs to a “backlog of work orders” that piled up during the pandemic.
The agency’s goal for resolving non-emergency repairs is 15 days — an average it’s failed to meet since fiscal 2016.
NYCHA’s target for completing emergency repairs is 24 hours — which many tenant advocates feel is still too much time.
NYCHA – which is already under partial federal oversight for its longstanding inability to resolve serious problems, such as mold and lead paint – received its latest setback Wednesday when the feds indicted 70 current and former NYCHA superintendents and other middle managers on extortion and bribery charges.
The workers allegedly pocketed more than $2 million in bribes since 2013 by awarding contractors $13 million in small, no-bid repair jobs at nearly 100 NYCHA developments citywide – including Farragut Houses in downtown Brooklyn and Redfern Houses – that long went under the radar because they amounted to under $10,000.
“I’m just hoping that now that these people were caught, I pray that something will change,” said Kimberly Comes, who heads the Redfern Houses Residents Council Inc. “Their [actions] were hurting the poor, people in low-income neighborhoods.”
NYCHA Executive Vice President Barbara Brancaccio said the authority has “zero tolerance for wrongful or illegal activity and will continue to work collaboratively with our law enforcement and oversight partners to rid the authority of malfeasance.
“In the past five years, NYCHA has made transformative changes to our business practices and will continue to do so,” Brancaccio said. “We will not allow bad actors to disrupt or undermine our achievements. While the indictments indicate that work was performed, as we learn more, we will continue to evaluate the services rendered.”
