With the city experiencing a dangerous freeze, Congressman Dan Goldman (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn) last week proposed legislation to steer potentially tens of millions of federal dollars to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) for boiler upgrades, declaring that adequate heat is a personal security issue.
Currently the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the agency that provides NYCHA with most of its funding, offers emergency safety and security grants. But HUD caps this funding at $250,000 annually per housing authority and requires that the grants pay only for security items such as cameras and door locks.
Goldman’s bill removes the cap for public housing authorities with 5,000 units or more, and expands the definition of security to include heat equipment such as boilers. The bill would also require $225 million for these emergency grants annually to be distributed proportionately among authorities based on the number of units they manage.
Since NYCHA is the biggest public housing authority in the nation with 175,000 apartments, it would qualify for a significant chunk of that funding.
“More than anything, this is really focused on safety,” Goldman told THE CITY. “And that’s what heating is all about, especially when we’re having such a cold winter.”
“NYCHA is appreciative of Rep. Goldman’s advocacy and efforts to attain additional funding for public housing authorities,” said NYCHA spokesperson Andrew Sklar/ “We explore every available tool to invest in, renovate and address mounting physical needs on our properties.”
NYCHA’s aging buildings have been prone to heat outages in recent winters, particularly when the temperature drops below freezing and stays that way.
This heat season got off to a rough start, with 36 unplanned outages in October, according to a December report by Jenner & Block, the law firm acting as federal monitor overseeing NYCHA. That’s far more than the four experienced in October 2024, and as bad as October 2020, the first year of the pandemic, when there were also 36.
Over the weekend, as the temperatures descended into the single-digits, NYCHA responded to heat and hot water outages ranging from four to 19 hours at six developments housing some 13,000 tenants, according to its online monitor.
NYCHA has so far weathered attempts by the first and second Trump administrations to drastically cut housing subsidies and limit how long tenants can collect them to two years. The House in December rejected the proposed cuts for Section 8 housing subsidies and the imposition of a two-year limit for public housing tenancy.
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