Thousands Lose Heat, Hot Water In E Harlem NYCHA Complex

EAST HARLEM, NY — Thousands of residents at an East Harlem public housing complex unexpectedly lost heat and hot water on Monday morning as a winter storm — which could dump eight inches of snow on some parts of the city — began to hit New York.

Unplanned outages were first reported around 7 a.m. at the New York City Housing Authority's Lehman Village development, a five-building complex located between Madison and Park avenues from East 107th to 110th streets, according to NYCHA's outage dashboard. Outages affected all five of Lehman's buildings, 622 apartments and 1,443 residents.

A malfunctioning boiler room switch was identified as the cause of the outage, a NYCHA spokesperson said. The switch problem led to an automatic shutdown of power, according to the spokesperson.

Crews are on site at Lehman and expect to restore power sometime in the early afternoon, a NYCHA spokesperson said.

Landlords such as the New York City Housing Authority are expected to provide consistent heat and hot water for tenants from Oct. 1 through May. The housing authority has struggled with widespread heating failures in recent years, one of the many problems that a federal monitor has been tasked with tracking.

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