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| A NYCHA truck with a brick stuck lodged in the windshield. Stefan Jeremiah |
A repair truck belonging to the beleaguered city housing authority has been parked on a Brooklyn street — with a brick lodged in its windshield — for at least the past two months, making it the perfect symbol for an agency mired in probes and complaints about its failure to address tenants’ woes.
“There could be no more apt metaphor for the state of NYCHA’s rehab efforts than a brick through a car-window shield,” said Redmond Haskins, a spokesman for the Legal Aid Society, which is suing the agency on behalf of its tenants over broken boilers.
The authority’s blue GMC pick-up truck has been collecting dirt and rainwater while sitting across the street from NYCHA’s Automotive Shop in Greenpoint, neighbors said on Monday.
“Why not take the truck and fix it or leave it . . . at their shop?” said Karl Villaral, 52, a maintenance worker at a nearby hotel, who added that the truck has been on the street at least two months.
The vehicle had been dumped in a “No Parking” zone, although it had no city-issued parking placard in its window Monday indicating it was allowed to be there. Yet it doesn’t have any open parking tickets, according to city records.
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| Stefan Jeremiah |
The city is “supposed to clean the street, but they cannot because they don’t move,’’ she said of NYCHA. “And it’s just so dirty here. I think they need to move it.”
The truck was damaged in a fire at a repair shop in Queens in September and was towed to the Brooklyn repair yard, a NYCHA spokesman said.
After The Post asked Monday why the vehicle had been on the street for so long, the rep claimed that it is scheduled for repair on Wednesday — and workers hauled it away Monday evening.
The scandal-scarred agency has a history of ignoring problems.
More than 1,000 children living in NYCHA housing have been stricken with lead poisoning since 2012, although the city has repeatedly downplayed those numbers.
The city was forced to pay up to $2.2 billion over 10 years to settle a federal lawsuit after it was revealed NYCHA lied about conducting required lead-paint inspections and intentionally covered up squalid living conditions during federal Department of Housing and Urban Development inspections.
In some cases, NYCHA turned off water to entire buildings to hide leaky pipes, posted phony “Danger: Do Not Enter” signs to keep inspectors out of particularly unsavory areas, and literally papered over holes in walls rather than plastering them.
Some tenants are suing the agency, alleging that it closed out boiler-repair tickets without actually fixing the equipment.
Additional reporting by Nolan Hicks and Lorena Mongelli. Source New York Post
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