While many New Yorkers prepare for holiday gatherings this week, 34 families in Gowanus Houses face a grim reality due to a gas line shutdown that has plagued three NYCHA buildings for weeks.
To spread some holiday cheer, Council Member Shahana Hanif (D-Brooklyn), her staff, members of the Youth Fellowship Council, and the Gowanus Houses Tenant Association distributed 37 freshly made holiday pies from Four & Twenty Blackbirds bakery.
The pies were purchased with donations raised through a Fifth Avenue Committee fundraiser. Emergency meal kits were also distributed to tenants of the three buildings — 182, 186 and 238 Bond St. — at Hanif’s district office on Dec. 21.
The pol told Brooklyn Paper that her office partnered with CHiPS, a soup kitchen and food pantry in Gowanus, along with Meals on Wheels, People in Need, and Grand Street Settlement, to organize food services for the affected residents. Those residents include families with young children, teenagers and individuals with disabilities.
“Everything about what we’re doing today is entirely driven locally, and it just shows the strength of our community, even in times of despair and when it feels like no one’s there for you, and so that’s the kind of vision that this office wants to emulate and show to our neighbors, our constituents, that we have your back,” Hanif said.
NYCHA, the largest landlord in New York City, oversees 169,820 public housing apartments across 302 developments, housing 360,000 low- and moderate-income New Yorkers. Due to years of underinvestment, interruptions to gas, water, and heat services are common. Gowanus Houses is no exception. Hanif’s office has urged NYCHA to resolve the ongoing gas outages, which have persisted since early November.
“Beginning in the last quarter of the year, we started hearing about gas outages. At the time, 26 families, the first batch of gas outages to then, 17 to now, 34 still affected,” Hanif told Brooklyn Paper. “It shifts from building to building. It shows just what the disinvestment of public housing is doing to these families who are living in some of the most affordable housing in New York City. In this climate of the housing affordability crisis, to know that our existing units are not being taken care of means that these residents are being abandoned and sidelined.”
Hanif acknowledged that NYCHA lacks the capacity to address service interruptions quickly due to years of neglect.
“[NYCHA] is incapable of fast-tracking or being as responsive as we’d like them to be, and that’s unfortunate,” she said. “I know that the representatives certainly care.”
In 2022, Hanif’s predecessor Brad Lander secured $200 million for repairs at Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens as part of the Gowanus rezoning deal. The repairs include new kitchens, windows and bathrooms.
“[The tenants] deserve it [after] years of lack of repair, decrepit conditions; they deserve new improvements,” Hanif said. “They deserve a house that is safe [and] stable and not one where they have to be anxious about whether there’s going to be gas or light or hot water.”
While NYCHA provided affected tenants with a single-burner hot plate and a slow cooker, Teresa Davis, president of the Gowanus Houses Tenant Association, told Brooklyn Paper that such equipment is insufficient, especially for families with children.
“By the time you sit [one cooked meal] to the side and go to put something else up there, that food is cold, and you’re trying to make something else,” Davis said. “By the time you finish cooking a whole meal, it’s cold, and you have to feed your kids, and it’s on a daily basis. You are feeding them before they go to school [and] when they come home from school.”
Some tenants face additional challenges due to medical conditions like diabetes.
“They’re on strict diets, only eat certain things, and some of them bake their food. So now they don’t have a place to bake their food,” Davis said.
Davis urged NYCHA to address the outages, which she said occur regularly. Many tenants feel upset and depressed, especially with the holidays approaching.
“We like to cook a whole lot of food during the holidays. You have your family around; that’s something special. And these tenants do not have that. They cannot do that,” Davis said.
In a statement, a NYCHA spokesperson told Brooklyn Paper that work is underway to restore gas at the Gowanus Houses.
“Gas service interruptions and restoration work are a matter of public safety and involve multiple partners and steps, including shutting off service, making necessary repairs, inspections, and coordinating with the service vendors, in order to safely restore service as quickly as possible,” the rep said. “These processes are currently underway at Gowanus.”
