In her 10th floor apartment in Keith Tower on Southern Boulevard, Marge Marcone wipes her hand across the long windowsill in her living room, and is still amazed by the lack of dust.

It has been more than a year since a local community organization installed all new windows in her apartment for free — a major improvement from her old, faulty windows.

“Those huge windows were monsters for me, they were very difficult to open, but air still got in,” Marcone said. “My window sills would be filthy, even on the 10th floor.”

Created to help low income residents of ailing buildings in the early 1980s, the Northwest Bronx Community Clergy Coalition’s Weatherization Assistance Program was one of city’s first “green” building programs. It received a burst in funding from the economic stimulus package in 2009, allowing it to install new energy-saving boilers, lights, appliances and windows for tenants like Marcone and countless others.

But with funding set to expire in December, the program could be forced to downsize on all sides.

By the late 1970s, decrepit, unlivable buildings were becoming the norm in pockets of the Bronx.

John Reilly, executive director of Fordham-Bedford Housing Corporation, remembers back when they bought their first dilapidated Bronx building for $100.

“The systems [of the building] were in terrible shape,” Reilly said. “There were a lot of old boilers, a few coal burners were still around in some buildings, and the roofs needed insulation. Fuel costs had gone up and the whole weatherization issue was a big one.”

Building owners were faced with both disrepair and the inability to apply for a loan due to the small income base of their tenants, says Fran Fuselli, who runs the Coalition’s Weatherization program.

“In the 1970s, owners made more money burning their buildings down than maintaining them,” said Fuselli.
The Weatherization Program attempted to fill the void left by neglectful owners and banks.

The program only takes on a building project where at least 50 percent of tenants have less than an income of 150 percent of the national poverty line, which is a total income of $33,525 for a family of four.

Installing new boilers, Energy Star appliances, low flow showerheads and faucets, and switching out incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents are among the repairs WAP makes to its buildings. On a building that the Coalition retrofitted prior to the stimulus funding, the building’s owner had a 25 percent savings on his heating bill within the first year, according to Fuselli.

With the stimulus money, they hired and trained 12 new staff members from within the Bronx community, and took on bigger buildings such as the Keith and Kelly Towers on Southern Boulevard. Gone were the days of entering an apartment and choosing what to repair and what to leave as is.

“Prior to the per unit cost increase, we would have to look at a building and sort of triage what we could do there,” Fuselli remarked. “We might have been able to do a pipe wrap, but we couldn’t put in a new boiler.”

Despite the burst of funding, the Coalition has hardly made a dent to the five-year wait list that they have maintained throughout the life of the program. Jumping from completing 300 units per year to 1,800 in a two-and-a-half-year period, the program is now faced with looming budget cuts when the stimulus funding reaches its end in December.

Fuselli painfully says she has already had to lay off trained employees who were recently hired. She likes to think of WAP as one of the few federally funded programs well liked by both political parties, with job creation, housing rehabilitation and energy saving at the forefront of its campaign.

The national WAP receives funding from the Home Energy Assistance Program, the Department of Energy and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), all of which still have undetermined budget’s for 2012, according to Fuselli. “We need to keep weatherization in the forefront and let our elected officials know that this is a program at the direct benefit of the neediest in our community,” she said.

“The improvements should not be stopped,” Marcone said. “We could have become slums too, but the fact that they’re doing so many improvements gives us a lift. It makes us want to take care of the place.”

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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.