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Housing Authority Is Sued Over Slow Pace of Repairs

The Alfred E. Smith houses in Lower Manhattan comprises 12 apartment buildings.Credit...Michael Appleton for The New York Times

To fix a water leak last month, workers cut out a piece of wall behind the stove in Pian Tam’s apartment at the Alfred E. Smith houses in Lower Manhattan. Then they covered the opening with plastic and told her that they would come back later to plaster the wall.

By later, they meant January 2014. At the earliest.

“I said, ‘My God, I have to wait until January?’ ” recalled Ms. Tam, 47, a mail processor who lives with her husband and two young sons. Already, she said, roaches are scrambling through the hole, even after she blocked it with a steel plate. “That’s too long to live with this.”

Repair delays have long plagued New York City public housing. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio says they constitute the top complaint to his office, with 1,188 logged last year. In January, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the New York City Housing Authority announced steps to speed up repairs and tame a backlog that still stands at roughly 300,000 work orders.

But in a sign of growing frustration, hundreds of other residents of the Smith Houses banded together and filed lawsuits in Housing Court on Monday, demanding repairs or civil penalties against the Housing Authority if the problems are not fixed.

The authority — with more than 400,000 tenants, the city’s largest landlord — declined to comment, saying it did not discuss pending litigation.

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A crumbling wall in the apartment of Marlene Gardenhire in the Alfred E. Smith houses.Credit...Michael Appleton for The New York Times

More than 300 tenants at the Smith Houses who are suing the authority listed numerous repairs needed in their complex of 12 buildings, including leaks, flooding, mold, warped floors, holes in walls, and broken stoves, toilets, doors, windows, buzzers and mailboxes.

Aixa O. Torres, president of the tenant association, said residents were often left without gas because pipes needed to be replaced. She said that in her 60 years in the project, the situation had never been so bad.

Mayor Bloomberg has blamed reductions in federal subsidies over the last decade for the state of disrepair of the city’s 178,000 public housing apartments.

In a contentious proposal, his administration is seeking to lease land within eight housing projects in Manhattan to private developers to help pay for repairs and $6 billion in unmet long-term needs.

But the plan is opposed by many tenants, who fear it is a prelude to selling their buildings and moving them out. At a mayoral forum this month, the candidates, including the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, spoke against the proposal and said one way to cut expenses was to end the authority’s payment of $98 million a year to the city, mostly for police services.

That is also the recommendation of a recent report by the Community Service Society, which warned that the number of units of subsidized affordable housing in the city had shrunk by 7 percent over the last two decades and that “chronic underfunding” now threatened the survival of public housing.

The chairman of the Housing Authority, John B. Rhea, responded last week that safety was a priority and that the Police Department, which patrols inside buildings in the projects, spent “substantially more” on public housing than what it was paid.

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Workers told Pian Tam that the hole in her kitchen wall could not be replastered until January 2014 at the earliest.Credit...Michael Appleton for The New York Times

In any event, he added, “that’s cutting an expense; I haven’t heard any recommendations to generate revenue.”

In addition to the litigation over repairs, a major environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it was also preparing a lawsuit against the city, to be filed in federal court, on behalf of public housing tenants with asthma.

The group said leaks and moisture had caused rampant mold in public housing, sickening people and violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The law calls for accommodations for the sick, as it requires ramps for people in wheelchairs, the group said.

“Many tenants already live in areas with poor outdoor air quality,” said Albert Y. Huang, a lawyer with the group in New York. “Your home should be a place where you should breathe easier.”

He said the authority did not understand how to address mold. Moisture comes from leaky pipes or roofs, he said, but instead of fixing leaks, workers clean off mold and paint the spot.

“If you decide to bleach and paint it,” Mr. Huang said, “you’re going to have the problem over and over.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Housing Authority Is Sued Over Slow Pace of Repairs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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