Public housing service outages are frequent and prolonged, endangering residents’ health

A new study examines electrical, elevator, heat, hot water, and water outages experienced by many of the more than half a million New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents. Many of these outages lasted far longer than 8 hours, which past research has found to be hazardous to human health. The new study also finds disproportionately long average durations of elevator, heat, and hot water outages in senior-only developments and an uneven distribution of outages during periods of extreme heat and cold.

The study was led by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who used public data spanning 2020–2022 on service interruptions from NYCHA and NYC311, as well as temperature records. The findings appear in the Journal of Urban Health; an online interactive data visualization is also available at https://oyb6ek-nina-flores.shinyapps.io/nycha-outages/.

“NYCHA residents are an integral part of New York City, and yet, they often face unsafe and inaccessible housing conditions—and administrative headaches when attempting to resolve environmental hazards in their homes. Inoperable electricity, elevators, heat, hot water, and water are just some of the hurdles NYCHA residents face on a day-to-day basis,” says first author Nina Flores, a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia Mailman Department of Environmental Health Sciences.

“Given the large numbers of low-income, Black, and Hispanic residents in New York City public housing, eliminating environmental hazards across NYCHA’s portfolio is a racial equity issue,” Flores continues.

“Making the necessary upgrades to reduce service interruptions while also appropriately prioritizing complaints so that repairs are quick when outages do occur is one way to make public housing safer and push toward climate and environmental justice.”

Overall, outages in NYCHA developments were more common than those in other buildings in New York City recorded through NYC311, including three times as many elevator outages among incidents. Elevator outages were the most common NYCHA outages, averaging 94 per day, followed by outages of hot water (33 per day), heat (11 per day) water (6 per day), and electricity (1 per day). Electric outages averaged 141.6 hours; outages of water averaged 12.7 hours, followed by elevators (11.2 hours), heat (8.4 hours), and hot water (7.9 hours). The number of outages and their duration has not improved over time between 2020 and 2022.

On average, NYCHA developments experienced 12 overlap hours of elevator outages while temperatures exceeded 90 degrees, 5 hours of heat outages in freezing temperatures, and 2 hours of electrical outages during extreme heat. Some developments saw prolonged service outages in temperature extremes, reaching upward of 35 hours of heat outages when temperatures were below 32 degrees. Electrical outages were also more frequent following severe storms.

Heat, hot water, and elevator outages were longer in exclusively senior developments compared to partially senior and non-senior developments even though older individuals are more likely to have cardiovascular, respiratory, and mobility issues—making them especially vulnerable to these outages. Electrical outages can put those reliant on electricity-powered medical devices in grave danger after just 4–8 hours without power. NYCHA residents also bear a disproportionate burden of adverse health conditions, like asthma, that could be exacerbated by outages.

Since the 1980s, federal support for public housing has decreased, resulting in the neglect and deterioration of NYCHA buildings. This has led to persistent environmental health issues including pest, mold, dust, lead, and exposures to extreme heat and cold. Estimated repairs for broken elevators, pipes, and boilers total $78 billion.

Many NYCHA residents welcome the ability to flag service outages through NYC311, yet the ability to do so hasn’t solved the problem of long wait times for repairs. Advocates want to bring more accountability to NYCHA through improved oversight by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).

The study’s senior author is Joan Casey, associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. Co-authors include Diana Hernández at Columbia Mailman; Carolyn A. Fahey at the University of Washington; and Lonnie J. Portis at WE ACT for Environmental Justice.