The number of heat outages in public housing complexes has vastly decreased in the last year, from 1,188 in 2017-18 to 387 so far this season, according to a presentation on Wednesday by New York City Housing Authority officials before the City Council.

Moreover, no outages have lasted more than 48 hours this season, compared to 352 outages lasting over 48 hours two seasons ago, according to NYCHA chair Greg Russ.

The news comes as tens of thousands of NYCHA residents have reported heat and hot water outages this season. On New Year’s Day, 2,600 tenants citywide faced outages on New Year’s Day, and 1,000 NYCHA residents in Coney Island spent Christmas in the cold. When temperatures dipped into the 30s, with windchill in the 20s, in mid-November, nearly 23,000 tenants lost heat or hot water at some point over the course of a week.

Overall, residents of the city’s worst landlord have lodged 130,000 complaints related to heat or hot water so far this winter, according to the Legal Aid Society.

But at the hearing, Russ along with NYCHA’s federal monitor Bart Schwartz, painted a picture of a vastly improved system over a few years ago.

In the 2017-18 heat season, outages took an average of 30 hours to fully restore, whereas in 2018-2019 they took an average of eight hours, and so far this season have taken seven hours on average. 

Average duration of heat outages went down in the Bronx by 19 percent, 21 percent in Manhattan, and 17 percent in Queens and Staten Island combined.

Brooklyn is the only borough where the average duration of heat outages increased this heat season, from 7.6 hours to 7.8 hours, a 2 percent increase.

Nonetheless, heat outage duration times in Manhattan (7.7 hours) and the Bronx (7.4 hours) were roughly equivalent to those in Brooklyn.

According to Council Member Alicka Ampry-Samuel, the committee’s chair, this was the first time Schwartz had appeared before the council since his appointment to the federal monitor post in March, as part of a deal between NYCHA, the city, and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Ampry-Samuel marked the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 91st birthday by noting that he would likely lament the state of NYCHA.

“What would Dr. King think of what is happening to our public housing residents,” she said. “Because he was such a fighter for fair housing.”

In December, Schwartz approved and NYCHA released its “Heat Action Plan.” The plan stipulates that NYCHA must keep an average time for restoration of heat at or under 12 hours, keep 85 percent of outages limited to less than 24 hours, and to not allow any outage to last 48 hours or more.

It also identifies 20 NYCHA properties with high numbers of outages that must develop their own action plans tailored to the specific developments, and outlines stipulations for NYCHA staff to more closely monitor and respond to outages in real-time.

Schwartz said that he and NYCHA are also developing plans to address NYCHA’s problems with mold, lead paint, elevators, pests, and waste.

“These action plans should be viewed as NYCHA’s contract with the residents to deliver services,” he said.