At Jackson Houses, maintenance is too little, too late
One bright spring day a year ago, Ivis Rosado opened her kitchen windows to allow dust to escape from her fifth floor apartment in the Andrew Jackson Houses, while her father Fernando chipped layers of plaster from her hallway walls. The patchwork of plaster piled on over 30 years by New York City Housing Authority maintenance workers was coming off.
For three weeks, Rosado’s Mott Haven apartment was turned upside down as she and her father worked. By the time her father finished, Rosado had amassed 16 contractors’ bags full of debris.
Do-it-yourself repairs have a way of turning any home upside down. But they’re especially traumatic when they have to happen because a landlord has failed to maintain an apartment in livable condition. For Ivis Rosado and thousands of other tenants, that landlord is the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA, the biggest residential property owner in New York City.
Across the city, NYCHA tenants have decided to take repairs into their own hands, as the authority staggers under a massive backlog. Among its 178,000 apartments, more than 700,000 work orders await completion and another 300,000 are in the pipeline. Leaks, cracked walls, rodent infestations, broken cabinets and appliances and other deterioration demand the constant attention of work crews.
The Housing Authority has a backlog of $7 billion in needed repairs. Meanwhile its capital budget, which pays for big investments such as roofs, plumbing and elevators, faces a $13 billion gap through 2015, and NYCHA expects a $138 million cut this year to its $3 billion operating budget, which includes salaries for maintenance staff.
The agency has cut one in 10 of its maintenance workers over the last six years, even as the number of work orders coming in has soared.
In the face of tenant frustration, last year NYCHA created a special repair team to target 10,000 apartments in buildings with the heaviest load of backed-up work orders. That effort is already yielding results, says authority spokeswoman Sheila Stainback.
“In just six months, the repair teams that include carpenters, plumbers, plasterers and maintenance workers successfully completed nearly 40,000 repair work orders,” she said.
A new City Council initiative aims to funnel $10 million to the Housing Authority to allow it to hire 176 residents to complete some repairs. But in the meantime, tenants like Rosado are taking the DIY route.
Nearly 30 years ago, Rosado remembers, green painted walls greeted her as she moved into her new home in the Jackson Houses on Cortlandt Avenue. From an early age, Rosado learned what it meant to be self-sufficient as she watched her mother Carmen fix up the apartment when she got tired of waiting for repairmen.
The most persistent problem, which to this day still affects tenants who live in the B and C line apartments, is a leak from a broken pipe on the 16th floor of Rosado’s building. For more than 30 years, the leak has caused the plaster on the bathroom ceiling and adjacent hallway walls of her 5th floor apartment to chip and fall.
Over the years another leak, in Rosado’s son’s room, produced a gaping hole in his closet, exposing the hollow interior between his room and the apartment next door. It also gave waterbugs a portal into the apartment.
Stainback of the Housing Authority says that inadequate funding from the federal government has fueled delays and deterioration. Without additional capital funds, she says, “Ultimately, whatever we’re trying to do is patchwork.”
Part of the problem may be of the authority’s own making, tenants say, as workers turn to provisional fixes, like plastering over a hole, instead of tackling the cause, like the leak in Rosado’s building.
A neighbor of Rosado’s, Danny Barber, has stepped into the breach. He is the tenant association president, and each week he conducts a vertical tour through every building in the complex. If he sees that a doorknob is missing or a light fixture is broken, he makes a note of it and puts in a work order for the repair.
Like Rosado, Barber, 42, is a lifelong resident of Jackson Houses. He is also the most formidable voice for the tenants at Jackson, having turned his volunteer duties as president into a full-time if still unpaid job.
In his eight years in the position, Barber has become a thorn in the Housing Authority’s side, using the high-level contacts he’s made in the authority and in the mayor’s office to advocate for tenants. Whenever an elevator is out of service, a call from Barber to the local management office usually gets it back in action within the hour.
But he is powerless to address NYCHA’s budget deficit, which has allowed crucial structural problems at Jackson to go unaddressed.
That’s why Rosado’s father took on the repair job. Plastering and painting the apartment took three weeks and cost $1,200 for materials. But because the leak from the apartment above persists, he still must return every few weeks to patch-up the plaster above the showerhead.
Barber applauds Rosado’s father for stepping in. “He’s willing to sacrifice his time,” says Barber, “and he’s willing to give up all his money to fix the problem in the building to help the Housing Authority.”
Not every tenant has the means and the resources to do their own repairs, however. Jeanette Otano, another Jackson resident, who has lived in the development for nine years, is also battling a leak in her bathroom ceiling.
Maintenance workers did not come soon enough. Moisture from a leaky toilet caused the plaster to break off in large chunks. Once parts of the ceiling fell, the Housing Authority sent a worker to inspect the damage.
Then, though, the urgency vanished. Three months later, a soggy layer of plaster and paint, created by the continuing leak, fell onto the floor. When Otano reported it, on November 20, 2010, she learned that her ceiling would not be fixed until May 2012. Like Rosado, Otano reached out to Barber, who was able to help speed up her appointment.
Otano, however, is bracing to repeat the ordeal. Until the upstairs leak is fixed, her ceiling will keep accumulating moisture, making it likely to fall once again.
Some tenant advocacy groups around the city have begun to pursue other strategies to generate results for tenants who can no longer endure the long wait for repairs to be made. They have been taking cases to Housing Court. Some tenants also withhold rent to force action.
Danny Barber looks for solutions closer to home. He is convinced that regular tenant involvement and participation in Jackson Houses tenant association meetings, which usually see the same 20 or so loyal residents, could curb some of the persistent problems plaguing the buildings. He is disappointed when tenants compound existing decay by vandalizing buildings and elevators, breaking the glass panes from building entries or dumping trash in the hallways.
Frustrated at the apathy that he sees, Barber often thinks of quitting his post. Rosado jokingly threatens to kill him if he ever seriously considered stepping down.
This story is adapted from a longer version in The New York World. It was produced in the Jack Newfield urban investigative reporting class at Hunter College.
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