Sometimes, it takes a lawsuit.
The Housing Authority has finally cleaned up sewage that flooded the basement of Manhattan’s Jefferson Houses for more than a month — but only after residents were hours away from filing a lawsuit.
The suit also charged that the East Harlem development hasn’t had reliable heat and hot water since the weather turned cold in October.
“I think it’s absolutely wrong that NYCHA gets dozens and dozens of tenant complaints about something and [doesn’t] do something,” said Christopher Helwig, an attorney with the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, who is representing the tenants.
“This shouldn’t take a lawyer, it really shouldn’t.”
NYCHA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to court papers, the basement of Building 7 of the First Avenue complex filled with sewage-tainted water following a heavy rain on Oct. 1.
NYCHA allegedly ignored dozens of complaints about apartments filled with flies, cockroaches, mice and rats after the basement filled with a standing pool of sewage water inches deep.
Even inspectors from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development couldn’t get NYCHA to act after they reported on Nov. 15 that the basement was giving off a “strong foul smell.”
The basement finally got cleaned up Tuesday night or early Wednesday, hours before the lawsuit was filed.
“The sewage stinks all the time, anytime it rains, anytime it snows,” said retired legal secretary Jacqueline Davis, 67, who has lived in the development for 64 years. “There’s this intense smell that permeates the whole building and it just makes you sick.”
“This building is extremely old and it needs constant care, which it has not received,” Davis added. “It is horrific, it really is horrific.”
Helwig said the smell hits as soon as anyone walks into the lobby.
“It would almost knock you down,” Helwig added. “It was pretty heinous.”
The sewage mess is just the latest entry in NYCHA’s long list of horrors.
Federal Judge William Pauley declared last week that New York City’s 400,000-plus public housing tenants are forced to endure horrifying conditions of “biblical” proportions — including rat, roach and mold infestations and exposure to toxic lead paint — as he nixed a proposed settlement between federal prosecutors and City Hall over NYCHA, saying it didn’t go far enough.
“This case,” Pauley wrote, “is about the disastrous human toll resulting from a complete bureaucratic breakdown of the largest public housing agency in the United States.”