At Queens’ first “NYCHA in Your Neighborhood” event, a small but passionate crowd of Queens NYCHA residents shared their struggles and their thoughts on Mayor Mamdani.
BY COLE SINANIAN | cole@queensledger.com
LONG ISLAND CITY — Residents of Ravenswood, Woodside Houses, Queensbridge, and other Queens NYCHA developments mingled with Mamdani Administration staffers in a Long Island City high school gymnasium on Wednesday evening, bringing their grievances, questions and pride to the fourth installment of the mayor’s “NYCHA in Your Neighborhood” series, a new initiative meant to better connect New York City’s public housing residents to government services.
All told, approximately 75 Queens NYCHA residents showed up to the event — according to NYCHA Press Secretary Michael Horgan — while nearly as many NYCHA and City staffers filled the gymnasium alongside them.
The September 16 event saw NYCHA tenants wander between “resource tables,” where staffers from agencies like the Department of Social Services (DSS), the Department of Youth & Community Development (DYCD), the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants (MOPT) and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), as well as NYCHA agencies like Elevator Services and Repair, Property Management, Capital Projects, and others sat waiting to connect them with the necessary resources to address issues in their building. Some tenants came to air building grievances like heating outages and faulty doorknobs, while others came seeking to halt eviction proceedings or expedite what would otherwise be arduous bureaucratic processes.
“All the people you need to speak with are here, which is very good,” said a Ravenswood resident named Linda, who came to get agency contacts who can address heating and cooling outages in her building, which she said have seriously affected her quality of life. ”So you can kill all of this in one night, as opposed to calling each different agency.”
It was the first of such events to take place in Queens, and marks a major component of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s sprawling housing plan, which promises to reverse the decay of the city’s vast public housing portfolio over the next several years via a $5.6 billion investment in NYCHA — the largest in recent memory — and programs like the controversial Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT), and the Public Housing Preservation Trust.
With a population nearly the size of the city of Atlanta spread across 335 developments, NYCHA is by far the largest public housing authority in the country and New York City’s most distressed housing portfolio, with a $78 billion repair backlog — the cumulative result of decades of federal, State, and City disinvestment. In places like the Queensbridge Houses, this has recently brought widespread gas outages, leading some residents to protest the City’s perceived inaction. At a June rally at Queensbridge, some residents told the Queens Ledger they had not had gas since the prior March.
The plight of NYCHA has brought Mamdani criticism from his detractors — despite the mayor’s historic funding pledge — who’ve read his focus on holding private landlords accountable through his “Rental Ripoff” hearings and revitalization of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants (MOPT) as bias towards private tenants over public housing residents. Activists protesting on the behalf of NYCHA residents interrupted a Rental Ripoff hearing — an event tailored to private tenants — in Downtown Brooklyn earlier this year. One held a sign reading “The mayor don’t care about NYCHA,” while a performance artist known as Crackhead Barney took the stage to shout “Protect public housing!” and “There’s no tenants association without NYCHA!”
Queens NYCHA residents at Wednesday’s event, however, struck a different tone, with several praising the Mamdani Administration’s initiative, calling the event informative and expressing optimism that their buildings’ repair needs would finally be taken seriously.
“I think he’s listening more,” said 20-year Ravenswood resident Rosalind Jones, of Mayor Mamdani. She praised a new batch of younger hires on her building’s maintenance crew, who she said have helped speed up lead paint remediation and keep the premises clean.
“A lot of other ones don’t want to listen,” continued Jones, who learned about the event in an email from NYCHA. “They want to say what they’re going to do, or they say they listen and don’t do. But a lot of things are being done. You can see it.”
Speaking to the Queens Ledger, NYCHA CEO Lisa Bova-Hiatt, questioned criticism of the mayor’s NYCHA policy, and pointed to his funding pledges and the material improvements made under his watch.
“The proof is in the pudding,” said Bova-Hiatt, who’s led the authority since 2023. “The proof is in the fiscal support and the actual support that we receive. There are public housing authorities across the country that get no support from their cities or states.”
Tammy Reyes, a 30-year Woodside Houses resident and recently elected President of the Woodside Houses Residents Association, explained that she faces a constant battle in getting her neighbors to attend resident association meetings. With more than 2,600 residents spread throughout the complex’s 20 buildings, Reyes said she’s lucky if she can get 100 to show up.
Bova-Hiatt added that while outreach is a constant challenge, NYCHA leadership has worked to make the agency’s services as accessible as possible, working with tenants association presidents like Reyes to door-knock and flyer their buildings in preparation for the event, as well as providing virtual services to those who can’t attend.
“As with any New Yorker, they have work, they have childcare responsibilities, they have family responsibilities,” Bova-Hiatt said. “So our goal is to make sure that as many people come out as possible. We have so many staff members, so many resources, and we want to make sure we’re connecting our tenants to those resources.”
But as far as the new mayor, Reyes couldn’t complain.
“I really have nothing bad to say about him,” Reyes said. “He came to Woodside. He was so welcoming. He was so hands-on.”
She added that she did not see a discrepancy between the City’s treatment of NYCHA and private housing tenants, and that supporting the rights of both are necessary to achieving housing justice.
“You got slumlords everywhere,” Reyes said. “You got tenement buildings with slumlords. You got brownstones with slumlords. You got public housing with slumlords. There’s no such thing as no slumlords.”
For Linda, an older woman who wore a nametag but refused to give her last name, mayors and government officials are only to be trusted insofar as they show up when things go wrong at Ravenswood. She described an incident during a heatwave a few summers ago, when the heat in her apartment would come on despite the high temperatures for four days straight.
“I was begging them to do something,” she said. “I was sleeping with the air conditioning and three fans going in my room. I almost had a nervous breakdown, crying.”
Now, it’s gas outages that have been ongoing since last spring, leaving her to cook her meals on a hot plate.
“I’m optimistic,” she said of the Mamdani Administration. “But I don’t know if I can judge him really realistically yet. I’m still waiting for him to do something about the gas.”
