Council questions plan to overhaul aging elevators

The nation's economic tailspin may have global implications, but here in New York the City Council’s subcommittee on public housing is wrestling with how it will affect plans to modernize and replace some 550 elevators.

Council members peppered the managers of the country’s largest public housing authority on Oct. 29 with questions about elevator safety and how the agency expects to finance the replacement of the elevators over the next five years.

The New York City Housing Authority, which manages 2,636 buildings containing 3,335 elevators, has been at the center of a maelstrom of public scrutiny over faulty elevators and claims of mismanagement since the death of a 5-year-old Brooklyn boy, Jacob Neuman, who fell to his death while trying to escape from a stalled elevator at the Taylor-Wythe Houses complex in Williamsburg in August.

“With the Wall Street downturn, the situation could not have come at a worse time,” said City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn. “Budget problems lead to a deterioration of the quality of life for residents, if not tragedy.”

Tino Hernandez, chairman of the housing authority and flanked by his general manager, Douglas Apple, and assistant deputy manager, Bryant Clark, agreed with Quinn. He explained that the authority had only $50 million of its $2.8 billion budget set aside to start replacing the 550 aging elevators.

The project, however, is still in need of $57 million more to complete its first phase, which calls for 200 elevators to be replaced by the end of next year, Hernandez said, but quickly added, “We’re going through the capital budget now, looking at places to cut.”

This essentially means that unless the Council can give the authority the money it needs to do the job, the funding for elevator repairs will come from other maintenance programs, perhaps leaving residents with leaky roofs, broken furnaces and buildings in overall disrepair.

When pressed by Quinn over how much it would cost “soup to nuts to upgrade every elevator,” Apple offered only an estimate.

“These are rough numbers, mind you,” he said. “It will take about $500 million to modernize and replace” all 550 elevators the authority has targeted.

Quinn, who along with other Council members appeared shocked, responded by telling the men that they needed to restore public confidence by creating a well-developed plan so that she could tell “New Yorkers what’s going on” with public housing.

“I fear that you do not have your hands around the entirety of the problem,” she said. “This is something you need to do so pubic housing doesn’t become a euphemism for sub-standard housing.”

But some audience members already see it that way.

“It’s an organization that’s badly mismanaged,” said Joseph G. Garber, who lives in the apartment across from the Neuman family. “Because the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, we end up with a tragedy like Jacob’s.”

Councilman David Yassky, whose district in Brooklyn includes the Taylor-Wythe complex, said he would not be asking questions about Jacob’s death because of a pending Brooklyn district attorney’s investigation.

“I won’t vent the passionate feelings that my constituents have over this,” he said, before asking what standard the authority used to prioritize the replacement of an elevator.

“It’s a process,” Clark said.

Apple followed up by explaining that the authority uses an accepted U.S. Department of Housing formula that takes into consideration the elevator’s age, maintenance record and usage.

Councilwoman Letitia James, of Brooklyn, also questioned the housing agency officials, asking about the 34,186 elevator failures reported so far this year. About 200 elevators stop working on any given day, Clark said.

When informed that an outage takes roughly 10 hours to repair and that senior citizens could literally be trapped for hours in their apartments, her lips drew tight before she said, “That’s just amazing, that’s shocking, and that’s just beyond belief.”

James said that for the richest city in the world, “that this is not a priority is simply appalling.”

Hernandez promised to provide the subcommittee with a comprehensive plan and an updated budget in the next couple of weeks. “This is a defining moment,” he said, “a crossroads where we need to band together to get things done.”

And all throughout New York City, there are 406,000 residents who hope that happens sooner rather than later.