When a local tenants association showed up at NYCHA’s Marlboro Houses in South Brooklyn last Wednesday to give away free turkeys, they didn’t have many takers. With no gas lines running in their kitchens, residents couldn’t cook them anyway.
“Right now we have no gas, and we’re cooking on hot plates,” said Carolyn Spivey, a Marlboro Houses resident. “How much can you cook on a hot plate? Not no turkey for Thanksgiving.”
On October 14th, NYCHA shut down the gas in Building 28, due to a gas leak call. After a “freezing weekend,” as one resident described, the building manager turned the heat back on.
But gas lines to the kitchens have remained shut. And residents have been told by management that it will stay that way until the new year.
“They’re saying that the gas may not be on until the end of January or February,” said Venice Gaddy, another resident. “Who’s to know? They’re not telling us anything.”
Problems at Building 28 began this summer, when residents noticed a bad smell outside of the building. After complaints to building management, NYCHA workers shoveled dirt around the edge of the building, which confused residents further. Later, a building manager explained the smell was a gas leak in one of the units.
In a statement, a spokesperson for National Grid said that NYCHA had yet to actually fix the leak. “Once the property owner makes the necessary repairs National Grid can restore service—which can be done within one to two days.”
Property owners, including NYCHA, are mandated by law to immediately restore gas for cooking, heat and hot water once any of those services are disrupted.
Marjorie Simmons, who lives in 28, said she complained to the building manager, but that NYCHA refuses to reimburse tenants. Instead, management sent workers to Building 28, where they delivered residents of its 56 units an electric hot plate to use while the gas lines were shut.
The deliveries were made on October 17th, at 1 a.m., said Simmons, who lives on the first floor.
“A lot of us work, a lot of us have education, a lot of us are retired,” said Simmons. “Just because we live in NYCHA [housing] does not make us less than anybody else. We pay rent. There’s people in here that pay $1,400 dollars a month.”
Simmons, a retired worker for the New York Board of Education, has lived in the building for 39 years. She said she’s never experienced treatment like this by NYCHA before. Another resident, Linda Rodriguez, said it was a shame that this happened to 28, one of the “good buildings” in Marlboro.
In 2013, then-Public Advocate Bill de Blasio identified the Marlboro Houses as one of the city’s worst housing projects, due to a backlog of maintenance requests. The Marlboro Houses will also be one of the first housing projects to receive desperately needed new boilers from NYCHA, part of a $450 million investment. As the Times reported in October, more than half of boilers in NYCHA buildings have outlived the companies that made them.
Lisandra Renta points to mold growing on the ceiling of her apartment in the Marlboro Houses.
Residents of other buildings in the Houses also registered long-standing complaints. Lisandra Renta showed Gothamist around her apartment in Building 26. Paint was peeling off her walls and mold had spread across most of her ceiling.
“All this part of the kitchen, they haven’t done anything,” said Renta in Spanish, pointing to the spotted ceiling. “I’ve asked for paint so long now—it’s chipping off the walls where my granddaughter crawls.”
Renta’s daughter said she was worried about her son, who has chronic asthma.
“I just want my home fixed,” Renta said.
“It is devastating to learn that after multiple inquiries to NYCHA, Marlboro Houses residents will not have gas service to cook their Thanksgiving meals this year. This is unacceptable," Councilmember Mark Treyger, whose district includes the Marlboro Houses, told Gothamist. Treyer said he was working on legislation to create a food accommodation plan for families during these kinds of outages. "I will continue to monitor the situation at Marlboro Houses until gas service is fully restored," Treyger said.
In Building 28, the only response residents have had came in the form of a note from National Grid, posted in the building lobby. The note read, “Warning: hazardous condition notice.”
“If this building is hazardous, why are we living here,” said Simmons. “And why aren’t we being reimbursed?”
NYCHA’s press office has not yet responded to requests for comment.
Gesturing to the fresh dirt around building 28, which sticks out oddly from the grass, Rodriguez added that “not knowing what’s going is what really upsets people.”
“If we had an answer, like why exactly this happened, what’s being done to fix it,” she went on. “But we get no answers.”
