NYCHA Tenants Deserve Rent Break After Losing Heat: Lawsuit

NEW YORK, NY — Public housing tenants sued the New York City Housing Authority on Thursday demanding a rent break after they were left freezing. The city's biggest landlord is bound by law to offer rent rebates to its thousands of residents who lost heat at some point during the coldest stretch of this winter, lawyers for the tenants argue in the class-action complaint filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.

"The law is very clear: NYCHA is legally required to seamlessly provide these utilities to residents. When that promise is broken, there is a price that must be paid," said Lucy Newman, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society, which is representing tenants with the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

The lawsuit is the latest salvo in tenants' fight for reform at the beleaguered housing authority. It comes about two days after NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye, who is named as a defendant, announced her plans to resign.

As of mid-January, over 80 percent of NYCHA tenants — more than 323,000 people — had lost heat or hot water at some point since October as extreme cold battered their complexes' aging boilers. The average heat outage lasted 48 hours and the average hot water outage 52 hours. A third of all heat outages have lasted longer than a day.

City and state laws require every landlord, including NYCHA, to provide heat from October through May and hot water at all times. The housing authority clearly broke that obligation and owes residents compensation, the suit argues.

The lawsuit seeks a rent rebate for every tenant who lost heat or hot water from Dec. 27 to Jan. 16, a frigid period that included the Jan. 4 "bomb cyclone" snowstorm and the arctic temperatures that followed.

NYCHA's failure to keep the heat on forced tenants to stay warm by wearing extra clothes and blankets, plugging in space heaters or even turning on their stoves — a dangerous tactic that NYCHA's resident handbook warns against, the lawsuit says.

Ruth Britt of the Bronx, one of two NYCHA tenants named as plaintiffs in the suit, tried to keep warm in the "heating bus" the housing authority parked outside her Bronx complex in January but couldn't stay because the yellow school bus lacked a bathroom, the complaint says.

The complaint also accuses NYCHA of failing to maintain its boilers and wrongly closing out heat complaints without ensuring utilities were restored.

"Rather than confront these problems, NYCHA has displayed callous indifference towards the well-being of its tenants, at times actively misrepresenting the scope and magnitude of the heat and hot water crisis," the suit says.

In response to the suit, a NYCHA spokeswoman said the cash-strapped authority's money would be better spent on repairs.

"Every dollar spent on a rent abatement would be one less dollar for staff and repairs that we need to restore and maintain heat service," the spokeswoman, Jasmine Blake, said in a statement. "That is ultimately what our residents need."

The lawsuit is the second tenants have brought in recent months demanding accountability for NYCHA, adding to a wave of scrutiny brought on by the heat breakdowns and a separate scandal over its failure to perform legally required lead inspections.

The Citywide Council of Presidents, a group of tenant leaders, filed a suit in February accusing the housing authority of ignoring deteriorating conditions. The recent uproar led Gov. Andrew Cuomo to order the appointment of an emergency manager who will oversee the spending of roughly $550 million in state funding for NYCHA.

City officials have pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new boilers and other heating upgrades. NYCHA's executive vice president of operations, Cathy Pennington, said the authority is planning repairs and service improvements with the goal of fixing any heat outages within 24 hours next winter.

(Lead image: NYCHA's Forest Houses complex is pictured in the Bronx. Photo from Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Office/Flickr)