Tenants Sue NYCHA For Ignoring 'Appalling' Conditions

NEW YORK, NY — Tenant leaders are taking the New York City Housing Authority to court for ignoring what they call "appalling" conditions in public housing. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, NYCHA's Citywide Council of Presidents asked a state judge to appoint an independent monitor to make sure the housing authority follows laws tenants say it's been flouting for years.

The complaint in Manhattan Supreme Court points to the housing authority's recent failures to provide heat and hot water and perform legally required inspections for lead paint, as well as past problems with mold, rodents and broken-down buildings.

But tenants say the problems go deeper — NYCHA has shut residents out of lucrative jobs and policy decisions while letting them fester in squalid conditions, the suit alleges.

"Hundreds of thousands of NYCHA tenants — many of them voters — are living in squalor, while NYCHA keeps cashing their rent checks," Jim Walden, a lawyer representing the Citywide Council of Presidents, said in a statement. "NYCHA has become an institutional slumlord and, with their suit today, CCOP has said enough is enough."

The lawsuit is the first ever filed against NYCHA by the council, a group comprising presidents of individual tenant associations. NYCHA and the council are supposed to work together to address problems in public housing complexes around the city, according to housing authority's website.

The dispute follows recent systemic heating failures that left more than 80 percent of NYCHA tenants without heat or hot water at some point from October to January. The housing authority has also grappled with city and federal investigations of its false statements to federal officials that it had performed lead inspections when they hadn't been done for four years.

Those are just two examples of NYCHA breaking local and federal rules with much impunity, the lawsuit says. The housing authority has fallen short of federal quotas for hiring public housing tenants and low-income New Yorkers and for giving contracts to businesses owned by those groups, the complaint says.

And NYCHA's meetings with tenants are "often a meaningless show, performed to create the appearance of Tenant participation" despite federal rules mandating residents' involvement in policy decisions, the lawsuit says.

"Despite this very real 'parade of horribles,” corruption and incompetence within NYCHA remain part of its very fabric," the complaint reads. "Many Tenants continue to live—despite the intense media glare on NYCHA’s many failures—in conditions that are simply appalling."

The lawsuit's call for an independent monitor isn't the first. Some city officials, including Public Advocate Letitia James, said NYCHA needs one after the lapse in lead tests became public in November. Mayor Bill de Blasio said that month that federal prosecutors may name a monitor after concluding their investigation into the matter.

NYCHA declined to comment on the lawsuit because it has not yet received it. But spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said the Citywide Council of Presidents' worries about lead and heat problems were news to NYCHA.

"While we work closely with the CCOP, we refuse to limit resident engagement to one group because all tenants deserve to have input in our budget process/priorities," Blake said in a statement. "And, despite briefing the CCOP several times on lead, heat and mold, this is the first time their concerns about lead or heat and hot water have been raised as a collective group."

(Lead image: NYCHA residents and their supporters rally outside City Hall in February 2017. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)