1,000 NYCHA Tenants Lose Heat On Christmas In Brooklyn

CONEY ISLAND, BROOKLYN — More than 1,000 New York City Housing Authority tenants lost their heat and hot water Christmas morning in Brooklyn, records show.

A problem with an old boiler at the 2925 West 27th St. building in Coney Island cut off the heat and hot water for 376 apartments around 8 a.m. Dec. 25, according to the city and their online dashboard.

The unplanned outage left more than 1,000 tenants without heat and hot water for several hours until the housing authority restored services around noon.

It was the only outage on Christmas Day, according to the dashboard.

Three other buildings throughout the city were without heat or water on Thursday, including at the Justice Sonia Sotomayor houses in the Bronx, the Linden houses in Brooklyn and the Upaca houses in Manhattan. Those residents each lost heat or water between 9 and 10 a.m. and were still without the services around 11:30 a.m.

It comes after several unplanned outages around the city's housing developments the past few months caused alarm among advocates, including a heating outage for more than 5,000 tenants on a frigid day in November.

Advocates with Legal Aid said they worried that the service cuts would continue into the winter months.

NYCHA also drew criticism from the organization when it planned repairs at five buildings in Manhattan, The Bronx and Brooklyn during a forecasted snow storm last month. Those repairs would leave more than 1,600 residents without heat.

NYCHA's persistent heat failures were part of the reason the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development appointed an independent monitor to oversee the agency this year. About eight in 10 public housing tenants lost heat from late 2017 into early 2018, failures that led Legal Aid to sue for rent breaks.

Update: A NYCHA spokesperson said the Coney Island outage was caused by a flame failure on the boiler. It was the only heat and hot water outage on NYCHA developments on the holiday, the spokesperson said. They added that there have been 268 outages since the "heating season" began on Oct. 1 with an average restoration time of eight hours. Last year, there were 463 outages over the same time with an average of 10 hours to restore service.