NEW YORK (Sputnik) — The authority in charge of overseeing New York City’s public housing is ignoring requests for major repairs thus putting thousands of lives at risk, New York City’s Chief Financial Officer Scott Stringer said in a statement on Monday.
“The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) makes tens of thousands of New Yorkers wait for weeks, months and sometimes even years before fixing serious problems,” Stinger said.
Some of the housing problems that need to be addressed, he explained, include “asbestos, missing carbon monoxide detectors, broken elevators, leaky ceilings and faulty stoves due to poor management and oversight.”
Stinger warned that the NYCHA is facing a backlog of more than 50,000 repairs and the average time it takes to fix safety violations is 370 days.
“During our audit we learned of one tenant who had a leaky ceiling that so bad that she had to cancel Christmas, and another that who had to deal with a leak for more than a decade,” Stinger said. “We also heard from a NYCHA tenant who was forced to live with mold for eleven years.”
Stringer recommended the NYCHA create a new system to track and monitor repairs in addition to publicly disclosing projects and budgets on a regular basis to increase transparency.
He also recommended that New York City authorities provide approximately $400 million over the next decade to support capital improvements to technology and infrastructure to improve the safety of residents and the conditions under which they live.
The New York City Housing Authority is the largest public housing authority in North America, according its website.
