NYC has record number of heat complaints as frigid temps drag on: ‘It’s very stressful’

New York City tenants are making a record number of complaints to the city about lack of heat and hot water in their homes, as a stretch of frigid weather is set to continue through this weekend with subzero wind chills.

Nearly 80,000 such complaints were filed to the city’s 311 system in January, according to the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which enforces heat regulations for rental units. The agency said about 37,000 of those complaints remained when duplicates for the same reported heat and hot water outages were excluded — the highest number ever for a single month.

This beat the previous record in January 2025 by some 3,000 complaints, according to HPD. Officials said 98% of last month’s complaints have been closed out as of Wednesday. City Limits first reported the record numbers.

Natasha Kersey, a spokesperson for the housing agency, cautioned not all complaints become violations and said the department is treating access to heat and hot water as an “all-hands-on-deck situation,” amid the freezing temperatures.

“To effectively manage the increase in complaints, we are maximizing our staffing by adjusting inspector schedules as needed," she said in a statement. "In the past two weeks alone, we have successfully closed over 12,000 complaints citywide related to heating issues."

But for some residents, the extreme cold has only compounded longer-term troubles.

Angelette Waring, who lives in a mixed-use building on Webster Avenue near East 180th Street in the Bronx, said the building’s residential and commercial tenants have been dealing for months with inconsistent heat and hot water as well as gas outages.

“ It just feels like, at this point, harassment,” Waring said Thursday. She and other residents are calling for the building management to fix the issues.

Public records show the building is owned by a limited liability company whose lender sued to foreclose on the property in early 2024. A Bronx judge appointed a receiver that spring to oversee the building and address chronic problems. A judge approved the receiver's request to appoint a property management company in October 2025, according to court records.

The receiver and management company, JLP Metro Management, said they are working to improve conditions at the building, and management has given out hot plates for cooking while the gas is off, pending required approvals to turn it back on.

“I’ve been doing everything to be in compliance with the law,” said Lou Popovic, who heads the management company. “If there are life and safety issues, they will be addressed immediately.”

Meanwhile, more than 300 residents were unexpectedly without heat and hot water Thursday at NYCHA’s Amsterdam Addition development on the Upper West Side, the housing authority’s outage tracker showed. The tracker also showed nearly 6,000 residents across six other complexes had their heat or hot water restored after unplanned outages in the past day.

“I have on an undershirt, a shirt, another shirt, a sweater and my bathrobe,” Amsterdam Addition President Patricia Ryan said Thursday morning, estimating her apartment was around 40 degrees.

She said she felt frustrated that she couldn’t make any promises to her neighbors who were calling her nonstop to ask when the services would be turned back on.

“I  called everybody that I knew to call in NYCHA,” Ryan said. “It’s very stressful, because they don’t know nothing.”

NYCHA’s outage tracker stated that crews were working to restore the heat and hot water at Amsterdam Addition.

NYCHA spokesperson Michael Horgan said it takes “a proactive and coordinated approach to all extreme weather events” and fixes heat and hot water disruptions in less than seven hours on average. He said NYCHA, whose portfolio needs roughly $80 billion in capital improvements, has added after-hours teams to address complaints 24/7 during the current cold stretch.

Horgan said the agency — which has been operating under federal oversight since 2019 to deal with a catalog of infrastructure problems — has made "substantial progress in heat service reliability and outage response."

Landlords groups say fixing these issues — often in decades-old buildings — requires a bevy of agencies, utilities and professionals, meaning the process can be slow.

“Turning the heat back on quickly is not something a building owner can just do,” said Michael Johnson, a spokesperson for the New York Apartment Association, which represents property owners and managers providing most of the state’s multifamily affordable housing.

Repairing a broken boiler, Johnson added, usually necessitates coordination between plumbers, city inspectors and utility providers, who can all create logjams in the process. He said the high number of heat-related complaints this year hasn’t surprised him, since especially cold weather leads more tenants to speak up.

Bone-chilling conditions have gripped the city since mid-January. A winter storm two weekends ago dumped about a foot of snow on local streets, encased neighborhoods in ice and disrupted commutes and trash pickup.

In more than a dozen cases, the consequences have been lethal. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Wednesday that 17 New Yorkers have been found dead outdoors in the past two weeks, and authorities believe at least 13 of the deaths were hypothermia-related.

City Hall has yet to release the official causes of death in all the cases, pending determinations by city medical examiners.

Forecasters are warning that this weekend could bring the coldest temperatures so far this year in the five boroughs, with a low of 6 degrees expected in Central Park overnight Saturday.

“Even though lows will be in the single digits Saturday night, the feels-like temperatures, the wind chills, will be around negative 10 to negative 15 degrees,” National Weather Service meteorologist Bryan Ramsey said this week.

Officials are urging residents to look out for their neighbors and people living outside as dangerous conditions persist. Residents can call 311 to request homeless outreach assistance or report heat and hot water issues.

Landlords in the city are required to provide heat from Oct. 1 through May 31, known as heat season. If the outside temperature falls below 55 degrees from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., the inside temperature must be at least 68 degrees. Overnight, the inside temperature must be at least 62 degrees, regardless of the outside temperature.

This story has been updated with additional information.