With the naming of Stan Brezenoff as interim chairman of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), we asked residents at local housing complexes the specific problems in their buildings and solutions to the bureaucracy of living in a city-run housing complex.

The staircases look like crap. I’ve been here 14 years and they were messed up since I got here. We have rats and mice running around. Maintenance is not doing their job and the residents don’t really care as long as they make it through another day. It’s terrible here.
Joseph Liborsi
Fort Independence Houses (Kingsbridge)

They don’t fix anything. First of all, they all say that they’re coming, but they never come. Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday there’s no water. They turn off the water. I don’t know what’s going on, but they say it’s some problem. They don’t know anything, they just want the money. They don’t do anything. You take a day off from work and they don’t come and then they say that they were there and you weren’t home. That’s not true. That’s a lie; we’re always home. The elevator is a mess and people leave the garbage in the hall and the bedbugs come into your house. There’s a lot of problems. When they don’t fix the elevator, I have to walk up 19 floors because there’s no elevator.
Patricia Herrera
Castle Hill Houses (Castle Hill)

First and foremost, I believe the administration isn’t doing a good job as far as maintaining the infrastructure. We have a lot of problems as far as gas leaks. We don’t know when the water is going to be  turned off. Most of the time the doors are unlocked, so we don’t know who’s inside of our building, so we don’t feel too protected. We don’t have any cameras here. A friend of mine was killed in another building, on the 14th floor. Another issue is we don’t have enough of a police presence. They need to come out more in the community, so we know who the police are, so we can communicate with them. One other thing I would say is they need to actually bring in more people with a stable financial background, as far as working and not just collecting a check. They need to bring more people in that have money, just to keep the community’s economy running. I think there are more issues than there are solutions.
Edwin Williamson
Monroe Houses (Soundview)

Oh, there’s plenty of issues here. The first is they don’t respond in time to make repairs. I’ve been waiting for five years for them to paint my apartment. I had holes in my ceilings, holes in my walls–it took them about five years to fix that, they finally fixed it–but they never painted and they refuse to paint. And the holes are already opening again. The building is never cleaned, it’s always dirty. There’s no garbage cans around. Right over there they dug a hole in the dirt and my apartment is right above this hole and it’s brought a bunch of different insects. It’s backup from the sewer. They just started it and I don’t see anyone working on it and it’s been this way for about three months now. Management does nothing, they don’t listen to the tenants. I would tell them they need to make repairs in a timely manner. I had no heat in the winter, from November to March. I didn’t get heat until March 20, just in time for spring.
Taisha Thaler
Throgs Neck Houses (Throgs Neck)

We often have no heat and no hot water. When we try and talk to the manager, they give us the assistant manager and she just says it’s not her problem and we have to wait for the manager. We had no heat for the entire winter and now that it’s spring, the heat just stays on during the springtime. We also have no ventilation in our bathroom. For two years we’ve been  complaining, and it still hasn’t been fixed. We have some loud neighbors. The police come, but they don’t even turn the music down. The music stays on. The heads of NYCHA visit all the other complexes, why not Pelham? We haven’t seen any changes here.
Joselyn Martinez
Pelham Parkway Houses (Pelham Parkway)

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.