In a double dose of danger, some of the city’s most crime-ridden housing projects are the same developments most in need of immediate repairs.
At the Clinton Houses in East Harlem, the front door to a building hung wide open because of a broken spring. It provided a convenient escape for a young man in a blue Giants hoodie who sprinted through the doorway and up a staircase.
A minute later, six cops rushed past a Daily News reporter through the same open door and into the lobby. Some dashed up the staircase. Some jumped into an elevator and raced to the top. Witnesses saw the young man trying to steal a car, and the wide-open busted door allowed an escape. The suspect got away.
That door spotted during a recent visit by The News is emblematic of an alarming problem. NYCHA’s notoriously decrepit conditions make the already disproportionately high crime rate in public housing even worse.
The scenario is a cruel dance — as buildings crumble, crime spikes. Since 2009 major crimes such as shootings, murder, robberies, rape, assault and burglaries in NYCHA’s 334 developments have risen 31%. That compares to a 3% rise for the rest of the city.
Major crimes were down 4% in housing developments this year through the end of August — even as shootings spiked 19%.
NYCHA, meanwhile, has fallen behind in its struggle to reverse the steady deterioration of its aging buildings, 75% of which are more than 40 years old.
While the agency trimmed a huge backlog of repairs last year, officials say they need at least $15 billion to properly upgrade decrepit buildings over the next five years. That includes $1 billion for what NYCHA calls “immediate repairs.”
NYCHA General Manager Cecil House has said the agency is seeking alternative sources of funding to pay for this long laundry list of building upgrades.
Experts say these unaddressed maladies have exacerbated crime at NYCHA, offering criminals opportunities to prey on tenants.
“Systemic building repairs are the silent accomplice to violent crimes in NYCHA developments,” said Leah Goodridge, an attorney with the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project, which has sued the authority repeatedly to force long-awaited repairs.
On Friday NYCHA boss Shola Olatoye said the agency is developing a 10-year plan “to fundamentally change and adapt how we operate, look and how we are funded. This includes new sources of public and private funding and operating more sustainably.”
A News analysis of NYCHA data clearly connects dismal conditions to rising crime.
Starting in July, the NYPD targeted an anti-crime campaign at 15 developments it says account for 20% of NYCHA’s crime. NYCHA’s data show that nine of these 15 are in the top 30 developments the agency says are most in need of immediate repairs.
All told the high-crime 15 need nearly $2 billion in repairs by 2019, records show. And at some of these troubled developments, the numbers are staggering.
Queensbridge South, a huge development next to the Queensboro Bridge that was built in 1940, is one of the oldest developments in the city. It needs $26 million in “immediate repairs” — more than any other development in New York — and a stunning $102 million more within the next five years.
Since 2009, Queensbridge South has experienced a 47% spike in major crime. Even after the NYPD flooded it with more cops in July, the crime rate continued to rise by 25%.
This nagging problem plays out in real life for tenants every day.
At a Howard Houses apartment in East New York, Tanya Miller says she fought for two years to get NYCHA to fix a front door lock that was tampered with during a burglary.
Burglars pushed in an air-conditioner on Dec. 29, 2011, and ransacked the home she shares with her two children, Jordan, 4, and Ernsto, 10. She reported to NYCHA that locks on her front door and the window where the burglars entered no longer worked properly.
She ultimately went to Housing Court in January where a judge ordered NYCHA to fix the locks and several other code violations in her two-bedroom apartment.
Since then burglars have twice tampered with the front door lock trying to get in, to the point where her key broke off in the door in March. On Sept. 9, NYCHA finally fixed the lock.
“I didn’t feel safe at all,” Miller said. “I slept downstairs for the last year and a half. I needed to hear if someone was at the door.”
Of particular concern are the 40 miles of sidewalk sheds erected at NYCHA projects across the city that sometimes stay up for years for no apparent purpose. Police say the sheds provide cover for illicit activity, are convenient places to stash weapons, and sometimes block security cameras.
This year NYCHA for the first time began dismantling many of the sheds where no work was ongoing, vowing to have all these “legacy sheds” down by next spring.
The agency has also been installing so-called layered access doors with computer-code entries that bar non-residents. To date 28 developments have them with seven more expected by early next year, officials said.
Busted lights are another big problem. In 2012, Red Hook Houses tenant Wilma Matthews, a 59-year-old bus matron, was assaulted outside her apartment in a hallway darkened by a non-working ceiling light.
Controller Scott Stringer released a report in August that found in 2011, 65% of tenants surveyed said intruders could gain easy access to their buildings because the door locks don’t stop anyone. With elevators often breaking down, 45% noted they felt unsafe in their buildings’ staircases.
Even tenants who haven’t become crime victims live in fear.
Goodridge says a Clinton Houses tenant she calls Mary Green braces herself each time she exits the subway for the brief walk home with her 6-year-old son after work.
Goodridge said Green — who asked that her real name be withheld — tells her son, “Talk time is over,” then they walk briskly past a group of loitering young men hanging out under the sidewalk shed that’s been up for months.
At the lobby the entrance door is — once again — wide open, the automatic closing device busted. Inside the lobby stands a man she doesn’t recognize who asks for a dollar.
She pushes past him toward the elevator, but discovers — once again — it’s out of service. Into the dark staircase reeking of urine she and her son trudge, passing more loiterers on her way to her ninth-floor apartment.
In some parts of the fetid stairwell, the lights are out or barely working.
Once inside, Green slams the door shut and takes a deep breath. Another day, another harrowing journey home through the obstacle course of unrepaired problems.
“Those 10 minutes of Mary’s life are an indelible reality for many NYCHA residents who are more vulnerable to violent crime due to shoddy conditions on the premises,” Goodridge said.
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