NYCHA Residents Rally As Lawsuit Over Unlivable Conditions Reaches Courtroom
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Fed-up and fired up, public housing residents rallied in lower Manhattan. Tenants are suing NYCHA, saying they're living a nightmare.
A coalition of tenants from two city buildings rallied outside Civil Court on Wednesday before bringing their lawsuit against NYCHA before a judge.
In the lawsuit filed in December, tenants of Isaacs Houses and Holmes Towers list the persisting conditions that make their buildings unlivable -- elevators frequently out of service and leaking pipes that lead to toxic mold growth.
They say NYCHA has also failed to provide basic services, including heat and hot water. To top it all off, residents claim to have regular dangerous infestations of mice, rats and vermin.
At the Upper East Side's Holmes Towers, several residents brought CBS2's Tara Jakeway inside their apartments to illustrate the conditions they say they've endured and begged NYCHA to fix for years.
"He wrote on a piece of paper and he said, 'We'll get back to you,'" plaintiff Lakeesha Taylor said.
Taylor complained of roach infestations for years. Finally, she took things into her own hands, sealing up any hole she could find.
"I have children. I can't live like that. I can't live with roaches all over my house," she said.
"So many years, the same problems," NYCHA resident Jose Cruceta.
Cruceta, Taylor's next-door neighbor, has a roach infestation problem of his own and half-completed projects he says NYCHA started but then disappeared.
"They say they'll come back. They never come back. I make a new ticket for what I want, they never did it," he said.
U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson spoke on the progress of NYCHA on Wednesday.
"I'm hearing a lot less about horrible things going on in the NYCHA apparatus right now and that's very encouraging, but we still have a long way to go," he said.
NYCHA further argued that repairs in the buildings are already underway.
