Public housing residents will finally be able to see just how far behind NYCHA is in fixing up their buildings.
On Friday, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio will launch the NYCHA Watch List — a “hall of shame” website that lists all of the authority’s backlogged repairs .
Modeled after his popular “Worst Landlords” list, NYCHAwatchlist.com does what NYCHA executives never have — let residents and the public who pay their six-figure salaries see just how deep that backlog is.
“NYCHA is a black box,” said de Blasio, blasting the agency’s bad habit of keeping information from its 600,000 tenants.
The Watch List ranks the worst developments and gives the brutal details — such as how long it takes for an exterminator to go after rats, mice and roaches.
At the Sumner Houses in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the average wait is an astounding 521 days.
“I gave up on waiting for the exterminator and got a cat,” said Evelyn Perez, 54, who has lived in Sumner for 35 years.
Maribel Cuevas, 52, says the building where she’s raising two sons is infested with rats.
“You walk into the building at night and you walk into a rug of roaches,” she said. “Their response is, ‘We’ll get to it,’ but they never really do.”
NYCHA’s backlog reached a peak of 420,000 in January. The authority claims it has reduced that number to 200,000, but de Blasio, who is a Democratic candidate for mayor, doesn’t trust the figures. So he obtained a list of every unresolved repair request through Feb. 15.
Viewers can search a particular NYCHA development by typing in an address or zip code, then clicking “See Details” for a list of all unresolved requests in the development by building.
The results are stunning.
At the Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, for example, where the biggest issues are heat and air conditioning repairs, the average time for a completed job is 398 days.
Blocks away at the Farragut Houses in DUMBO, the biggest headache is paint jobs — a request that takes on average of 380 days to resolve.
