Sensors Could Help Stop NYC Tenants From Freezing, Pols Say

NEW YORK, NY — New York City lawmakers want to force deadbeat landlords to track the temperatures in their buildings so their tenants aren't left freezing next winter. City Council members introduced a bill Wednesday that would require building owners who frequently break the city heating law to keep sensors in each apartment that would detect when each home gets too cold.

Supporters say the measure would give the city a powerful tool in enforcing its housing rules and taking on landlords who deprive tenants of basic utilities to force them from their apartments.

"We’ve been playing catch up to these bad actors because we’ve been using an abacus in an iPhone era," Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who supports the bill, said in a statement.

City law requires landlords to heat their apartments from Oct. 1 to May 31. The inside temperature has to be at least 68 degrees when the mercury dips below 55 degrees outside during the day and at least 62 degrees overnight no matter the outdoor temperature.

The city received more than 200,000 311 complaints about heat and hot water issues during the last heating season but issued only about 3,400 heat violations through the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, or HPD.

The new bill would require the landlords of the 150 buildings with the most heat violations per unit to install sensors in each apartment that would report temperatures to an online database that tenants and owners could view.

The sensors would have to stay in place for four years under the rule, which would take effect in 2020.

The measure would relieve tenants of the responsibility to create their own record of heat outages by writing down temperatures themselves, said Noelle Francois of Heat Seek, a nonprofit company that makes sensors like those the legislation would require.

Depriving residents of heat is a tactic unscrupulous landlords often use in a "larger harassment campaign" to force long-term tenants from their homes, Francois said.

HPD is supposed to send an inspector to an apartment within 72 hours of a heat complaint. But landlords sometimes patch up the problem for an inspection only to ignore it in the future, Francois said.

"My hope is that as we become more well known in the city landlords begin to understand that this isn’t something (they) can fly under the radar with anymore," she said.

The city struggled to keep heat on for its own tenants this winter. More than 80 percent of New York City Housing Authority residents lost heat or hot water from October to Jan. 22, officials have said.

(Lead image: A man walks in freezing temperatures in Manhattan in January 2018. Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)