The only time it's warm is when it's above 35 degrees. It's just ridiculous, the water might be freezing cold. Still, even with the repairs, boiler failures and other problems have persisted at Southern and other developments. By the summer of 1994, the 45 families at the MHOP on Prospect Avenue in Crotona Park East in the Bronx were so fed up with broken security doors and the lack of window grates and laundry facilities that they staged a year-long rent strike. To deal with the complaints, the authority embarked on a repair regimen, but the authority did nothing to adjust its repair bureaucracy to assure the timely handling of new problems.
Residents still say important repairs go undone for months at a time.
My job would be a lot easier if I said, 'Fuck this' to MHOP, but I'll be damned if I'll do that. I'm committed to this. Still, to the tenants, the repair hassles are just one more reminder they haven't been given control. They're so big and we're so small. It seems like they don't even notice we're alive.