NEW YORK CITY (WABC) — During a housing crisis in New York City, there are thousands of city-run apartments sitting empty, and the number of vacancies has grown since 7 On Your Side started tracking the problem.<\/p>\n
Looking for an affordable place to live in New York City isn’t easy.<\/p>\n
Betty Bernhart has been on the waitlist for a New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) apartment for a decade.<\/p>\n
“It’s frustrating,” said Bernhart.<\/p>\n
“I may not even live until they decide and say, ‘Ok, we got you an apartment,’ it’s not right,” she said.<\/p>\n
NYCHA operates hundreds of buildings full of affordable housing units across the city, but there are more than 150,000 people on the waitlist, like Betty, to get one.<\/p>\n
“I really gave up on them,” said Bernhart.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, there are more than 6,200 NYCHA apartments sitting empty.<\/p>\n
When Eyewitness News first reported the issue in 2023, NYCHA had 4,800 vacant apartments. Last year, the number jumped to 5,912 apartments. Now, the city has more than 6,200 vacant apartments.<\/p>\n
City council members have been trying to get that number to go down, not up.<\/p>\n
“It’s utterly mind-blowing, we’re sending rockets to the moon and we can’t seem to turn around a NYCHA apartment,” said NYC Council member Alexa Aviles.<\/p>\n
It takes NYCHA an average of 340 days to turn around an apartment when a resident moves out and a new resident moves in.<\/p>\n
NYCHA’s Executive Vice President of Property Management Operations took Eyewitness News on a tour of a recently vacated apartment to show the extensive repairs that need to be done.<\/p>\n
“This will have to be fully scrapped and repaired,” said Daniel Greene as he pointed to a bathroom with the ceiling peeling off and damaged.<\/p>\n
The average resident lives in a NYCHA unit for about 25 years.<\/p>\n
The buildings are old, so the first thing NYCHA officials do is test for lead paint and asbestos. It can take months for the results to get back. If lead or asbestos is found, it then needs to be removed.<\/p>\n
“They literally will physically remove the layers of paint that test positive and then we’ll fully remove it,” said Greene.<\/p>\n
City officials said the standards for removal are stricter than the federal government’s standards.<\/p>\n
Once the apartment is free of lead and asbestos, multiple skilled trade workers finish the rest of the renovation.<\/p>\n
“One of the key things is plaster, a lot of our buildings are plaster, plaster is a skills trade we don’t use a lot of sheet rock at NYCA, so we’re laterally rebuilding walls,” said Greene.<\/p>\n
The city has reduced the time to turn around an apartment by 15% this year, it used to take 400 days for a full renovation.<\/p>\n
NYCHA officials said internal transfers are also holding up the process. More than half of the available units go to someone who’s moving from one NYCHA apartment to the next. Once someone moves in to a renovated unit, officials say they then have to renovate the old apartment and the cycle continues.<\/p>\n
“We are working here every day, very hard to keep these apartments online for families,” said Greene.<\/p>\n
But for those looking for affordable places to live during a housing crisis, it’s not quick enough.<\/p>\n
“I understand they have to renovate it because of the repair issues but they have to start pushing people on that list; they’re doing it but not enough,” said Bernhart.<\/p>\n
At a recent city council meeting dedicated to public housing, city council members asked NYCHA to create a list of things they would need to get all the renovations done more quickly.<\/p>\n
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