Here’s to strength in numbers.
For years public housing tenants have tried in vain to force the city Housing Authority to perform much-needed apartment repairs by filing lawsuits.
Ignored again and again as individuals, 320 residents of the Smith Houses in Manhattan tried a different approach — banding together to sue NYCHA as one development.
Last week, they won.
Manhattan Housing Court Judge Phyllis Saxe on Wednesday rejected NYCHA’s motion to dismiss the suit and ordered the agency to immediately deal with hundreds of backlogged repairs.
As a result, NYCHA promised crews will be dispatched starting this week to begin handling repairs that have lingered at Smith for months and even years.
“I was always trying to do this on my own,” said Lamont Mosby, 38, whose suit against NYCHA went nowhere. “When we finally got together as a group, when we united as a whole, that’s how we did this.”
Lawyers for the Smith tenants believe this group victory could have implications at aging NYCHA developments across the city.
“I’ve never seen anything like this happen before,” said attorney Harvey Epstein of the Urban Justice Center, which partnered with the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest to craft what he called an “unprecedented” strategy to force NYCHA’s hand.
NYCHA’s notorious backlog of repairs now numbers 244,000, with thousands not scheduled to be resolved until late next year, even though the agency launched a campaign in January to eliminate the backlog by 2014.
On Friday, NYCHA spokeswoman Sheila Stainback said the agency has closed more work orders at Smith in the first quarter of 2013 than in the first quarter of 2012. “Staff of the New York City Housing Authority continue their dedicated efforts to close the backlog of repairs at Smith Houses as we have all year throughout NYCHA,” she said.
But in the last few years thousands of frustrated NYCHA tenants have found themselves forced to go to court. By mid-March, 8,051 lawsuits demanding repairs were pending against NYCHA, and the agency had “failed to schedule” repairs for nearly one in 10 (857) of those cases, internal documents obtained by the Daily News show.
That included 189 “failed to schedule” cases at Manhattan NYCHA developments, and nine such cases at the NYCHA project named after the legendary Gov. Al Smith. Located on the edge of Chinatown, Smith Houses is one of the biggest and oldest public housing developments in the city, opened 60 years ago and now home to more than 4,000.
In April, 320 Smith residents banded together and filed suit, demanding an immediate fix to long-festering problems from cascading water leaks to roach infestation.
Saxe first ordered the city to inspect the apartments and give her an objective view of conditions there.
In May, city Housing Preservation & Development inspectors began going floor to floor, finding hundreds of adverse conditions that require immediate repair, records show.
At 10 Catherine Slip, where tenants in 24 apartments on nearly every floor had joined the suit, HPD found crumbling plaster, missing smoke detectors, busted up floor tiles, mold, “active” water leaks and exposed wires. In several units, inspectors wrote there were “roaches and mice throughout apartment.”
At 388 Pearl St., Lamont Mosby and his 68-year-old mother, Joan, a former traffic officer, live in a three-bedroom that borders on uninhabitable.
Lead paint flakes off the walls and ceiling, sometimes drifting down into food cooking on the stove. A radiator pipe removed in the 1990s to stop a leak was never replaced, so there’s no heat.
Metal window frames have separated from walls, creating a gap through which the wind whistles. Brown asbestos tile on the floor that dates to the 1970s is crumbling and chipping.
After trying for years to get all this repaired, the Mosbys filed suit in 2011 against NYCHA as individuals. Months passed. HPD came and found numerous problems, and on Feb. 19 a Housing Court judge ordered NYCHA to “contain the conditions within 60 days of today.”
Sixty days came and went, and nothing happened. “I followed all the rules I had to follow and they still couldn’t give me a date. And they couldn’t give the judge a date,” Mosby said.
Then the Mosbys learned of the Smith Houses suit and signed on. On Wednesday when NYCHA’s effort to dismiss the suit failed, the agency promised to start fixing up 10 Catherine Slip starting this Wednesday, with the other 11 Smith buildings to follow over the summer.
The Mosbys were promised repair crews starting June 24.
“The lawyers said if they don’t do it, they’re going to go to jail,” Lamont Mosby said. “We’ll see what happens.”
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Housing Court Judge Phyllis Saxe is a fairly new arrival to the bench.
She was appointed in 2010 by the chief administrative judge to serve a five-year term in Brooklyn Housing Court, but is currently on rotation in Manhattan.
A graduate of New York Law School, Judge Saxe worked for years as a lawyer for the city corporation counsel’s office, rising to be deputy chief of the Manhattan litigation unit in 1996.
She then spent years in court-appointed positions, as a mediator and a guardian in estate cases before her appointment to Housing Court three years ago.
She and her husband, David Saxe, a judge in the appellate division in Manhattan, won a $49 million jury verdict in 1998 against Lenox Hill Hospital after alleging medical malpractice there caused their daughter’s cerebral palsy.
Greg B. Smith
