Mayor Bill de Blasio’s embattled Housing Authority failed to fix nearly 60,000 of the leak and toxic mold complaints it received from tenants in recent months — roughly three in every five — despite spending six years under court orders requiring rapid fixes, new court filings show.
Tallies based on new data provided by the scandal-rocked agency show the New York City Housing Authority opened 100,760 work orders following complaints about broken pipes and mold between May 1 and July 31 — and fixed just 40,859 of them.
“NYCHA is finally being honest about how they are falling short on mold,” said the Rev. Getulio Cruz, a top clergy leader with Metro IAF, which represents the groups that sued NYCHA over mold back in 2013. “Unfortunately, the vast majority of tenants have seen no real improvement.
The data analysis was provided to the independent watchdog imposed on NYCHA by a Manhattan federal judge because of its continued failure to quickly repair pipes and kill toxic mold in the city’s 174,000 public housing apartments.
The tallies show that a whopping 30 percent of the requested repairs were not completed during the three month period and that NYCHA staffers canceled or closed another 28 percent of work orders without any work being done.
The figures offer new vindication for New York’s public housing tenants who have complained for years about NYCHA’s mold problems — and the agency’s lackluster response to the crisis.
“This report confirms what every tenant knows,” said Bernard Smith, a resident of the Morris Houses in the Bronx who works with Metro IAF. “NYCHA takes too long to deal with mold repairs, and ignores when they do.”
Residents filed a class action against the beleaguered housing agency back in 2013 over its failure to fix leaking building and pipes, leading to widespread infestations of toxic mold.
NYCHA quickly settled the case, promising to get even complicated repairs done within 15 days — but then never hit that benchmark.
Its continued bungling led a frustrated Manhattan federal judge, William Pauley, to impose a watchdog over the agency’s mold effort in 2015 and forced the agency to agree to a revised settlement in 2018 that imposed the independent data analysis.
NYCHA’s continued failure to fix its toxic mold problem was overshadowed in recent months as local and federal authorities revealed the agency lied for years about conducting lead paint checks and mounted a cover-up to hide crumbling conditions across its 316 developments.
City Hall and NYCHA reps did not immediately comment.
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