A new study examines electrical, elevator, heat, hot water, and water outages experienced by many of the more than half a million New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents. Many of these outages lasted far longer than 8 hours, which past research has found to be hazardous to human health. The new study also finds disproportionately long average durations of elevator, heat, and hot water outages in senior-only developments and an uneven distribution of outages during periods of extreme heat and cold.
The study was led by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who used public data spanning 2020–2022 on service interruptions from NYCHA and NYC311, as well as temperature records. The findings appear in the Journal of Urban Health ; an online interactive data visualization is also available at https://oyb6ek-nina-flores.shinyapps.
io/nycha-outages/ . "NYCHA residents are an integral part of New York City, and yet, they often face unsafe and inaccessible housing conditions—and administrative headaches when attempting to resolve environmental hazards in their homes. Inoperable electricity, elevators, heat, hot water, and water are just some of the hurdles NYCHA residents face on a day-to-day basis," says first author Nina Flores, a Ph.
D. candidate in the Columbia Mailman Department of Environmental Health Sciences. "Given the large numbers of low-income, Black, and Hispanic residents in New York City public housing, eliminating environmental ha.