Housing

Residents of a city-run senior citizen’s housing complex in Crown Heights are fed up with inadequate security after two home invasion robberies this year and three similar incidents in the summer.

Tenants living in the William Reid Apartments, a single large apartment building at 728 East New York Ave., are calling for the New York City Housing Authority and the 71st Precinct to provide additional protection.

“We are very, very vulnerable,” says Hyacinth Forrester, 79, president of the tenant’s council for the past 20 years. “I don’t feel safe, not with what’s happening right now.”

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Water doesn’t trickle down from the right basin of Jeanette Davis‘ sink – it pours.

Puddles have formed under the kitchen cabinet of her W. 135th St. apartment, and the 58-year-old recently used a broom to evict a live rat from her neighbor’s mailbox.

“And this is what I go through every day,” she said.

But starting this winter, her building and its nine six-story companions along a historic row between Lenox and Seventh Aves. will be among the first affordable housing blocks in the country to undergo a green overhaul.

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Built in 1931 in the midst of the Great Depression, 1328 Gates Avenue is a six-unit rental apartment building in Bushwick. It has seen the streetscape grow and change, prosperity ebb and flow, and generations come and go. It survived the Second World War, the blackout and riots of 1977, and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. It took the housing boom of the 2000s to nearly destroy it.

Unremarkable from the outside, a passer-by would have no reason to look twice at the modest structure with a red brick facade. Yet the travails of this one building and its handful of hardy residents encapsulate the rowdy, often ruinous, excesses of this decade’s real estate market in New York City.

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Before their potential new neighbors ever arrived, some tenants at the Astoria Houses, a public housing complex in Queens, hardly planned to roll out the welcome wagon. The 50 mentally disabled homeless people who could move in across the street were inspiring dismay, not acceptance.

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