Residents of some public housing developments will have more options when scheduling appointments for repairs and maintenance. It's an expansion in service hours that the city says the overwhelming majority of tenants have wanted. NY1's Michael Herzenberg has the story.
Esther Rodriguez says she called the Housing Authority four times Friday, complaining that her heat didn't work, and continued to call Saturday.
As the snow fell Sunday, Rodriguez says she used her stove to heat her apartment, something that is not safe.
"It's very awful when you have to go to sleep at night," Rodriguez said. "You have to throw like two and three quilts on your body. Especially me: I'm an epileptic."
Rodriguez lives in the Isaacs Houses, one of 12 initial public housing developments in which the Housing Authority is expanding service hours.
For almost 50 years, Housing Authority staff worked on a single shift, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Now in those dozen developments, caretakers cleaning common areas and maintenance workers making routine repairs will stagger shifts from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on weekdays, and staff will hold Saturday property management office hours.
"It sounds good," Albert Bravo said. "It sounds better because right now we need a lot of things to be done in the apartments."
Public Housing residents are hopeful that the additional five-and-a-half hours a day will help fix a long-standing problem.
In 2013, there was a backlog of more than 400,000 repair work orders.
Last year, the Housing Authority announced it cut that down drastically, but the City Comptroller countered that the reduction was a result of a change in the way the city categorized requests.
And just last week a federal judge ordered the Housing Authority to comply with a Department of Justice probe into whether the city lied to the feds about repairs and living conditions of public housing residents to get federal money.
"This is ridiculous," Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez worries that extending weekday repair hours won't improve the response time for what should have been an emergency.
"Once Friday comes and they leave, that's it; we don't get service until Monday," she said.
The Housing Authority cancelled NY1's interview with its CEO after we said we would include a question about the Department of Justice investigation.
The following developements are included in the FlexOps plan:
Bronx
· Forest Consolidation (Forest Houses, McKinley Houses & Eagle Ave – East 163rd Street)
· Marble Hill Houses
· Mott Haven Houses
· Pelham Parkway
Brooklyn
· Glenwood Houses
· Wyckoff Gardens Consolidated (Wyckoff Gardens, Atlantic Terminal Site 4B, & 572 Warren Street)
Manhattan
· Chelsea-Elliot Houses (including Chelsea Addition)
· Dyckman Houses
· Isaacs Consolidation (Isaacs Houses, Holmes Towers & Robbins Plaza)
· Murphy Consolidated (Murphy Houses & 1010 East 178th Street)
Queens
· Hammel Consolidated (Hammel Houses & Carleton Manor)
· Ravenwood Houses