NYC NOW - Midday News: NYC Urges Tenants to Report Heat Issues Amid Cold Snap, Blood Donations Drop to “Alarming” Lows, and Police Data Show Gun Violence at NYCHA Buildings Persist

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

As we get a blast of winter, New York City’s housing department reminds tenants to report heat and hot water issues to landlords or call 3-1-1. Meanwhile, the New York Blood Center calls for donations after an “alarmingly low” turnout over the holidays. Plus, police data shows a 7% drop in citywide crime in 2024, but gun violence remains high in public housing complexes. WNYC’s Brittany Kriegstein has more.

Welcome to NYC now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Tuesday, January 21st. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. New York City's Housing Preservation Department is reminding tenants what to do they don't have heat or hot water. Step one, they say, is to go straight to the landlord or building super. If that doesn't work, you can call 311. By law, building owners must provide heat. during the winter when the temperature drops below 55 degrees during the daytime.

The New York Blood Center is pleading for blood donations after it says people made an alarmingly low number of donations over the holidays. The group says all blood types are urgently knitted and you can make an appointment on the center's website. 18 and mostly cloudy now in the big city, mostly cloudy today and cold. 24 high, but feeling as cold as the single digits. about the same, and we warm up to near 30 on Thursday and Friday with sunshine freezing again on Saturday.

Stay close. There's more after the break. Police data show shootings in New York City declined about 7% last year, but across the city's hundreds of public housing complexes, the data tell a different story, showing that many remain hot spots for gun violence, even as surrounding areas get, quote, safer. Here to walk us through this analysis is W.R.R.R.R. NYC's Brittany Crichtstein. Hi, Brittany. So what exactly is happening with gun violence in public housing? You analyzed recent data from the NYP. What does it show? Yeah, hi, Michael. So it's complicated.

Basically, public housing is divided into about 10 zones called police service areas, which grouped together New York City Housing Authority complexes by geographical region. Each PSA has dedicated housing officers patrolling those developments, and in six of those so-called PSA, guns violence went up this year. In some places, it was just by a few incidents, and I should say that shootings overall decreased just a tiny bit across public housing in general, but this still reflects a very different reality to all the places where gun violence declined this year. Are there specific factors at nighteicides that contribute to gun violence? Right. So to get to the bottom of the solutions to this issue, it's important to understand why public housing in New York continues to be plagued by gun violence in the first.

place. And so experts that I've spoken to say there are a mix of factors. There's aging infrastructure, lack of investment in the surrounding community, beefs between gangs that are associated with different complexes, a high population density, and the prevalence of vacant apartments and unregistered tenants who might have criminal past. Those are just a few of the factors that can really contribute to gun violence at some of these complexes. Brittany, tell us how public housing residents, how they feel about this. Sure. So I spoke to residents across multiple complexes in Harlem and then in Bedstuy in Brooklyn and Clinton Hill. And they say they just don't feel safe in the wake of recent shooting incidents. Up in Harlem at the Polo Grounds Towers, I spoke to a woman named Serena Chandler. She's the tenant association president. And she told me that some residents are scared to leave their apartments in the wake of a shooting that killed a man in his apartment in December. The complex held a safety meeting for residents afterwards, which I went. went to and several dozen people came to express their anxieties and pressure city officials to do

more to improve safety in the towers. At the Lafayette Gardens houses in Brooklyn, I spoke to a woman whose son was killed on the playground in the complex in July, and then just in December, two more men were shot and injured on that same playground. At the nearby Sumner houses also in Brooklyn, I spoke to Charlotte Williams Brown, whose son Dion was shot and killed at the complex in July, and she says the trauma inflicted by gun violence is generational. To me, I look at it like we've forgotten ones. There's nobody trying to put into the community to make it a better place. And it's a reoccurring cycle. It goes from one generation to the

next generation to the next generation. Brittany, what are city officials and police? What are they doing about shootings on NITHA properties? So public housing is police by its own specific branch of the NYPD, as I mentioned, and their job is to monitor the complexes and do things like verticals where they walk up and down patrolling each building. Most people say that they want to see officers doing that. But the NYPD didn't make any housing police officials available for interviews as we were working on this project, even though we tried several times. So we don't actually know where they're concentrating their efforts these days. One of the biggest things, though, that residents were complaining about are doors that don't lock.

And at the Polo Grounds Towers' Tenant meeting, for example, a NACHA official promise to fix the complex's broken doors. But that can cost between $25,000 and $90,000 a job. So obviously it's not something that they can consistently do. So what do residents think will help them? So Serena Chandler, president of the Polo Grounds Towers Tenin Association, says residents have a few simple asks. So what they want is they want cameras on every floor. They want the police to actually do their job.

They're actually asking for security in the buildings. So since the city hasn't gone far enough to provide some of those things, according to Chandler, she's actually taking matters into her own hands to try and make her neighbors feel safer. She's bought more than 50 ring doorbell cameras for residents, which record activity in their hallways and in front of their doors. She says she ordered them in bulk on Amazon for $14 a piece. But Michael Chandler says that won't solve all the problems. She says residents don't feel proud to live in the complexes with their aging infrastructure and the quality of life issues they face.

and she feels that this makes people more likely to engage in violence. And that's something experts tend to agree with. In Brooklyn, where Charlotte Williams Brown's son was shot in July, she says there needs to be more investment in the community and things like community centers, mentorship, and jobs for young people. She says young adults in the community sometimes end up choosing violence because they don't have much else to do. What else does this all mean for the city as a whole, Brittany?

Well, Michael, of course it's good that shootings are going down overall. That's something the mayor touted and other city officials at their end of the year crime stats meeting. But this particular data just means that gun violence continues to be hyper-concentrated in low-income minority areas. Public housing complexes are still what we'd call hot spots of gun violence, even when surrounding neighborhoods are relatively safe. And as we've discovered, there's really no easy fix. That's WMYC's Brittany Cricstein. Terrific recording, Brittany.

Thank you so much for this. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you this evening.