De Blasio Fudges Numbers On NYCHA Heat Failures

NEW YORK, NY — Mayor Bill de Blasio has an optimistic view of the heating crisis in public housing, despite his agency's own figures. De Blasio on Friday said the "vast majority" of New York City Housing Authority's recent heating outages lasted "a single day," belying NYCHA officials' sworn testimony before the City Council last week.

Asked about the city's responsibility to fix NYCHA's systemic heat failures on WNYC's "The Brian Lehrer Show," de Blasio sought to dispel any perception that NYCHA tenants have languished in the cold for days on end.

"I don’t belittle the challenge, but I also want to say the vast majority of those heating outages were for a single day," de Blasio said. "That doesn’t make it good. I don’t accept that, I want to do better. But I don’t want it to be some kind of stereotype of these endless times when people didn’t have heat."

But many NYCHA tenants have gone without heat longer than a day.

The average heat outage from Oct. 1 through Jan. 22 lasted 48 hours, while the average hot water outage lasted 52 hours, Cathy Pennington, the authority's acting executive vice president for operations, told a City Council committee under oath on Feb. 6.

De Blasio's press secretary, Eric Phillips, later said on Twitter that the mayor was referring to last month's "cold snap," which has been "at the center of the media coverage (and the more dangerous period)." But de Blasio's initial comments did not specify a time frame.

NYCHA says it resolved 89 percent of outages within 24 hours from Jan. 4 to 14, a period that started with a massive snow storm followed by an arctic freeze with temperatures near zero degrees. On average, heat outages lasted 16 hours and hot water averages lasted 10 hours in that period, Pennington said last week. NYCHA had a "situation room" active during that time to address heat failures as quickly as possible, spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said.

The 48-hour figure is an average for the entire heating season, which starts in October, Blake said. It "includes outliers – including those we believe to be errors but we cannot cut out of our data," Blake said in an email.

More than 80 percent of NYCHA tenants have lost heat or hot water during this heating season as aging boilers struggle to function in cold weather, Pennington told the Council last week.

Some tenants have had their heat go off and on repeatedly. That was the case in the Redfern Houses, a development in Far Rockaway, Queens, where tenants were left in the cold ahead of the massive storm, the New York Daily News reported.

Kelly Brockington has had the same problem in her apartment at the Tilden Houses in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where she sometimes loses heat three times a week.

Brockington said she and her five kids lost heat and hot water intermittently over an entire weekend in December. The heat went out again Friday but NYCHA staff fixed the problem within an hour and a half, she said.

Brockington has never experienced heat failures like this in the 12 years she's lived in her current apartment, she said. She tapes plastic bags along the windows and turns on her oven to keep warm. She and her kids microwave water to bathe with when the hot water goes out, she said.

The constant problems have pushed Brockington and her family to look for another apartment outside of NYCHA, she said.

"I was assuming that they were coming and changing the boiler by now, but ain’t nothing changed," Brockington said.

De Blasio has pledged $200 million to replace boilers and upgrade heating systems at 20 NYCHA developments over the next four years. He repeated his stance Friday that a lack of federal and state funding is to blame for the city's public-housing woes.

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio gives his 2018 State of the City address on Tuesday in Brooklyn. Photo by Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)