Thilo Widder has texted nearly two dozen messages to his super. They’ve all gone unanswered. Since moving into his apartment in Washington Heights in November 2023, he’s struggled with clogged shower drains, leaky windows, moldy walls, and brown sewage streaming from his faucets. But the worst part has been the constant, freezing cold.
“For a while, you would breathe out the air and it would fog,” Widder said.
Widder, 25, said that the frigid temperatures in his apartment have impacted all aspects of his life. He works from home as a sports journalist and describes often trying to write while his teeth chatter.
“It’s incredibly difficult to focus on writing about the New Orleans Pelicans when you can, like, barely feel your hands,” he said. “I’ve written full articles from the gym, just because I don’t want to go home. It’s so cold and the gym is heated, so I’ll just sit in the locker room and write an article.”
Like Widder, tens of thousands of New Yorkers struggle to stay warm. Data from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) shows growing numbers of New Yorkers like Widder trying to find warmth this year. As of March 4, HPD had received more than 227,000 heat complaints, a 24% increase from the same point last year.
The data, compiled from complaint calls to 311, suggest that heat outages are concentrated in a few, mostly lower income neighborhoods in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Manhattan Community District 12 – which includes Washington Heights and Inwood – has registered more than 14,000 complaints, the most of any district. Other areas with high numbers of complaints include Harlem and the neighborhoods of Bedford Park, Mount Eden, and Concourse in the Bronx.
This trend points to a long-standing concern. A 2023 report by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander also found a majority of heating complaints clustered in just a few areas. “On average,” the report said, “these community districts are 93% people of color.”
None of this surprises Jordan Alexander, a tenant organizer at the Metropolitan Council on Housing, a tenant advocacy group. Alexander attributed part of the problem to landlords looking to earn a quick buck. In many cases, he explained, landlords are more interested in buying cheap properties that they can later flip for a profit. In the process, they neglect basic maintenance of the building.
“That leads to the landlord immiserating the tenants by not keeping up with the heat and the hot water or the repairs,” he said.
A 2022 study by the University Neighborhood Housing Program backed up this view. Researchers found that buildings that sold for higher prices and took on more debt had more than double the number of HPD violations than those that did not. One reason, the authors theorize, is because landlords have to spend more money to pay high mortgage interest rates, leaving them with less cash for repairs.
Ivis Rodriguez experienced this first-hand. The 51-year-old has lived in her apartment on West 180 St. for more than 40 years, and since the building changed hands about three years ago, maintenance has gotten worse.
“Before, we would go to the super and things would get done,” she said. But now, she has to go through the management office, and repairs can take months – if she can even get in touch with them at all.
Rodriguez has faced a number of problems, including mice infestation and part of her ceiling caving in. Like others in her neighborhood, she’s also struggled with keeping the heat on, something that’s been particularly difficult for her 74-year-old mother, who also lives with her.
“We had a pretty tough winter. It’s been pretty cold,” she said. “The past month has been better, but in all the years living in this apartment, it has never felt this cold.”
In New York City, landlords are required to turn on the heat in their buildings during “heat season,” which runs from October 1 to May 31. Tenants without heat can call 311 to file complaints with HPD. If the owner does not fix the problem, HPD can impose penalties ranging from daily fines of up to $500 to a mandatory Emergency Repair Program with the city hiring contractors to repair the building and billing the owner.
Many find the system lacking, though. Alexander said that inspectors can sometimes take a day or two to show up, and some tenants report that inspectors never came at all, with phone calls disappearing “into the abyss.”
“The design of it is very much reactive,” he said. “[Inspectors] aren’t proactively checking in on buildings – even problem buildings – to see if the conditions are being maintained.”
Some tenants also face fears of reprisal from landlords for filing complaints. Widder said that after he filed a 311 complaint, his water was suddenly shut off for a day and a half in what he suspects was retaliation. “311 is like a kid reporting another kid to the teacher for bullying,” he said. “The bullying just happens somewhere else.”
Alexander described how landlords have used even more threatening tactics, including threats of deportation, to scare tenants out of calling.
“Landlords have threatened to call ICE on people,” he said. “That’s not just relevant to the current moment, but that’s been happening for years.” He believes this may actually lead to an undercount of the current 311 complaints since some tenants may be too afraid to call in the first place.
All of this has left tenants like Widder feeling hopeless about any change that might be on the horizon.
“I don’t think there’s any way to fix it,” he said. “It’s been bad, I think it’s going to get worse, and I don’t think anything is going to particularly change that.”
