More Than 4K Lose Water At East Harlem NYCHA Complex

EAST HARLEM, NY — Thousands of East Harlem public housing residents went without water for hours Tuesday following an unplanned outage at the Wagner Houses development.

Water outages were first reported shortly after 10 a.m., according to the New York City Housing Authority. The outage affected Wagner's 22 buildings, 2,162 apartments and 4,701 residents.

NYCHA sent workers to the development Tuesday morning to replace a water pump valve, a spokesperson for the city public housing agency said. Water should be restored at Wagner on Tuesday in the mid or late afternoon, the spokesperson said.

The Legal Aid Society is currently suing the city to win public housing tenants rent relief for NYCHA's failure to provide heat and hot water during the winters of 2017 and 2018. Legal Aid's lawsuit accuses the housing authority of failing to maintain its boilers and wrongly closing out heat complaints without ensuring utilities were restored.

The public interest law firm claims that NYCHA should be obligated to provide its residents with rent relief when utilities such as heat and water are not working properly.

"So far this year, water outages have plagued thousands of NYCHA tenants at developments across New York City, with some outages lasting several days," Redmond Haskins, a spokesperson for The Legal Aid Society, said in a statement.

"As the landlord, NYCHA has a legal obligation to ensure that water and other critical utilities are fully functioning for tenants. When NYCHA fails to deliver on that responsibility, the Housing Authority should repay tenants by issuing rent abatements."

Wagner Houses is made up of 22 towers located east of Second Avenue between East 120th and 124th streets. The development is one of the largest public housing complexes in Manhattan. The development opened in 1958.