NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — New numbers released Monday show just exactly how bad last winter was for those who live in the city’s public housing developments.
The statistics show that NYCHA developments suffered head and hot water outages over 3,500 times, leaving over 339,000 residents in the cold.
The Legal Aid Society filed a FOIL request to uncover the truth that about four out of five NYCH residents went without heat or hot water at some point between Oct. 1, 2018 and May 31, 2019.
“NYCHA, the previous year, said that this would not happen again, but it happened again,” said Redman Haskins, of the Legal Aid Society.
“We found that, there are close to about 2,000 unplanned outages which impacted about 133,000 units,” he said.
The outages were reported in 87% of NYCHA'S developments across the five boroughs.
Haskins adds that all levels of government deserve blame for the outages.
“Federal government, state government, and the city government. It's been decades since the investment,” he said.
NYCHA leadership in a statement said they are making progress with response times getting quicker and outages getting fixed faster.