Public Employee Press

Mismanagement at the New York City Housing Authority
Council rips Sandy response
With no plan, NYCHA abandoned tenants

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Hurricane Sandy exposed mismanagement and inadequate emergency planning at the New York City Housing Authority, where the storm left many elderly and disabled tenants trapped in their apartments and more than 80,000 residents went without heat, electricity and hot water for two weeks.

Residents and housing advocates charged NYCHA with abandoning its tenants at a Jan. 17 hearing where City Council members grilled authority officials about their inadequate response to the storm.

"The response was not what it should have been," City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said. "Why did it take so long to understand what was happening in the developments?"

"What happened at the Gowanus Houses shouldn't have happened," said City Council member Stephen Levin, referring to the NYCHA housing complex in his Brooklyn district. "People were stranded on the 10th, 11th and 12th floors of those buildings for 12 days. The authority had an obligation to take care of those people."

Days went by, Levin said, before the authority pumped water out of a building and assisted stranded residents.

Without electricity, a sick young girl couldn't use her nebulizer. Elderly people with respiratory and other problems relied on volunteers, like the Occupy Sandy group, for medical supplies, food and flashlights.

NYCHA bullies tenants

At the hearing, NYCHA General Manager Cecil House acknowledged problems, but was generally upbeat about NYCHA's response.

"We believe the actions we took brought back essential services to residents as quickly as possible given the unprecedented challenges," he said.

But tenants and housing advocates painted an ugly picture.

"NYCHA acted like a bully and did not treat residents and community workers with respect during Sandy relief efforts," testified Beverly Corbin, a 27-year resident in Brooklyn's Wyckoff Gardens public housing and a board member of Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, an organization of low-income families.

FUREE worked right away with hundreds of volunteers to provide food, clothing and medical supplies to NYCHA residents, Corbin said, but NYCHA didn't arrive on the scene for 11 days.

"Sad thing about this was they looked at us like we were dirt and had done something wrong," Corbin said. "Not one of them said thank you to the volunteers.. NYCHA could not help their own residents after the storm and when others come in and do the work they should have been doing, the least they should do is be supportive of that work."

"They had no plan," said Alvin Bartolomey, whose apartment in the Red Hook housing complex in Brooklyn had no power from when the storm hit Oct 29 until the third week of November. "They already had a backload of repairs and now this made it worse."

Sonja Shield of Legal Services NYC said many NYCHA employees couldn't respond to requests for help because their work email was down for at least a week after the storm. She said that instead of focusing all resources to helping tenants sitting in cold, dark apartments, "NYCHA continued to serve tenants with new eviction notices."