“This is a game of whack-a-mole,” said New York Assemblywoman Mathylde Frontus. “Every day there’s another issue. Human beings are suffering here in silence.”
This fall marks 10 years since Hurricane Sandy, and public housing residents in the seaside community of Coney Island are still struggling with its legacy on a daily basis.
Hundreds of families in O’Dwyer have been calling for the city to restore cooking gas since construction broke ground on NYCHA’s Resilience and Recovery project in February, according to residents and local leaders. That project aims to replace damaged boilers and generators destroyed by the 2012 hurricane — but has instead broken gas lines. A spokesperson for the NYCHA acknowledged via email that the break at O'Dwyer happened because of the restoration project.
“After Sandy I’ve had a lot of problems,” said Irma Bagan, a retired, disabled resident of O’Dwyer. “What’s going on in here is really crazy, because you pay rent you know you want to live decent. Not like an animal. They treat us like we’re not human beings, they treat us like dogs.” Some complexes, like Sites 4 & 5, are listed as complete, leaving $700 million for additional and future repairs across public housing in the neighborhood. FEMA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development have provided $3.26 billion in total funding for NYCHA Recovery & Resilience construction through the second quarter of this year.
“One by one by one, the gas service is disrupted, and quality of life suffers because of it,” said one second-generation resident of O’Dwyer, who asked for their name to be withheld for fear that they would lose their housing for speaking out. “You know what that does to the human psyche? People get fed up.
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