BY SAM SPOKONY | After tension and complaints nearly boiled over into a rent strike, residents of a Lower East Side affordable housing complex will get rent refunds for the weeks they’ve spent without power, heat or running water following Hurricane Sandy, the development’s ownership announced on Tuesday night.
At a public meeting attended by hundreds of tenants, as well as elected officials and emergency relief agency staff members, a representative for the owner of Knickerbocker Village — a 12-building, 1,600-unit complex that takes up two blocks along Monroe St. — also provided vivid details about why it took so long for maintenance workers to act on the massive basement flooding that shut down the buildings’ boilers and electrical equipment.
Around 140 apartments remained without electricity as of Wednesday night, but many Knickerbocker Village residents had been without all essential utilities since Sandy struck on Oct. 29, and a lack of elevator service forced them to walk up and down the stairs of their 13-story buildings in the dark.
About half of the apartments still lack heat and hot water, but management said that it believes those services will be restored by the end of this week. Ten of the development’s 12 elevator banks were functioning as of Wednesday night, and management said that it believes that all of them will have at least one working elevator by week’s end.
AREA Property Partners, which owns Knickerbocker Village, agreed to provide the rent refunds after a recent intervention by state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the city’s Division of Community and Housing Renewal.
“We will ensure that not a penny of rent will be paid for the days on which you didn’t have essential services,” Jim Simmons, a representative for AREA, told residents on Tuesday night, although he didn’t specify how soon the refunds would come, or how they would be handled.
Without explicitly apologizing, Simmons also responded to criticism that building management was, for two weeks, virtually unresponsive to tenants who were looking for answers about when the utilities would be restored. He explained that the owners had — for better or worse — been more focused on dealing with safety issues regarding the basement flooding than they were on communicating on those issues.
“Should we have been more communicative and said to the residents this is exactly what’s going on? Yes,” Simmons said. “You’re 100 percent correct. We were 110 percent focused on assessing the situation correctly, and it was our mistake to not be as forthright and communicative as you deserve.”
He went on to paint a harrowing picture of the unprecedented flooding, claiming that, in some cases, it put maintenance workers in mortal danger.
“The force of the water did some things to the building which, quite frankly, I’ve never seen before,” Simmons said, adding that the surging waters dislodged 4-inch-thick steel doors, as well as 20,000-gallon oil tanks from their moorings in the basement.
The toxic oil spills that resulted from that havoc, he explained, forced management to wait more than a week before pumping the massive volume of water out of the basement, since it needed to be treated by specialists before being flushed out into the East River. Amid that flooding lay the complex’s boilers, electrical panels and copper wiring, which were all severely corroded by the saltwater.
Gesturing to the dozens of maintenance workers who stood behind him as he addressed the crowd, Simmons said that, once the boiler rooms were drained of water, they still had to be evacuated several times so that workers didn’t succumb to dangerous fumes — as he said, “so that they could continue to live and breathe.”
And even as he acknowledged the immense hardships faced by Knickerbocker Village residents — many of whom are elderly — as they lived without light, heat or water, Simmons recognized the workers for their own toils and sacrifices.
“To the people who have been working tirelessly around the clock on behalf of this building, I give you my personal thanks, because I know that you all have families too,” he said.
After explaining those background details, as well as the management’s resulting lack of responsiveness during those initial weeks, Simmons added that daily meetings are now being held and daily fliers are being published to inform residents about important updates to the buildings’ condition and essential services.
Even as they welcomed the rent refunds, some Knickerbocker Village tenants who attended Tuesday’s meeting were not impressed by what they heard.
“The speech was a lot of hot air,” said Manuela Kruger, 73, who has lived in an 11th-floor apartment at the complex for the past eight years. She was more concerned with the difficulties she and other residents continue to face, even as so many buildings throughout the city have recovered from Sandy’s impact.
Kruger explained that, since the elevators in her building still didn’t work at that point, she’d been forced to walk up and down the stairs every day to get to her job at a major book publishing company — only to come home at night to an apartment without heat.
“It’s dispiriting, and the quality of life is just very poor” she said.
Kruger went on to say that while she never planned to join a rent strike that many angry tenants attempted to organize over the course of the past week, she made the choice to continue paying mainly because she believes that funds shouldn’t be withheld when they’re needed for the building to keep repairing and functioning.
Another resident, who has lived in Knickerbocker Village for 40-plus years, said that he found Tuesday’s meeting informative, but added that it should’ve happened at least a week earlier.
“And it probably only happened now because we inundated our elected officials and ended up getting all this media attention,” said the resident, who declined to give his name because he works for the city.
When asked about what the living conditions within the complex have been over the past couple of weeks, he only said, “It’s worse than being in the Army — and I’ve been in the Army.”
Ann Valentino, 64, a 35-year resident of the complex, also said that she took issue with the fact that the building’s ownership was coming out with so much information now, after withholding the details for so long.
“We never saw them for the first two weeks, and now all of a sudden they’re coming with all these fliers and updates,” Valentino said. “It’s just because we stuck out, and now everyone’s watching.”
She said that her knees have been killing her after walking up and down the stairs to her 10th-floor apartment each day, but added that she and many of her neighbors were able to band together throughout the crisis in order to help those who needed supplies.
“I must’ve given away 15 flashlights,” Valentino said. “It was tough, but this is still a neighborhood, so we stick together.”
One person who was, in fact, impressed by Simmons’s speech on Tuesday night was Victor Papa, president of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, which has supported thousands of area residents — including those at Knickerbocker Village — with donations and deliveries since the storm hit.
Papa acknowledged that Knickerbocker’s ownership had initially been too tight-lipped. But he gave Simmons and AREA credit for finally admitting to their communicative shortcomings, as well as explaining the severe problems that forced them to wait so long before pumping out water from the basement.
“They redeemed themselves,” he said. “They regained my respect.”
