New Yorkers placed a staggering 80,000 calls to 311 reporting a lack of residential heat and hot water in January 2026 — the highest monthly total on record — as private and public housing tenants told The Post they were trapped in unlivable conditions and accused Mayor Zohran Mamdani of failing to act.
The complaints poured in amid a brutal deep freeze, with tenants across the city reporting days without heat, ice-cold showers, and overnight shutoffs as temperatures plunged into the teens.
Alex Hughes, a Williamsburg tenant, said the situation in his building has deteriorated so badly that he recently packed his bags and moved into a hotel.
“We’ve had over 40 days of no hot water over the last 11 months. And we’re now on day eight or nine straight of no hot water,” Hughes told The Post. “I had to walk 15 minutes in the snow and ice to a friend’s house so I could shower.”
In Astoria, Queens, Nicole Pavez, 31, a city planner for the City of New York, said the current cold snap has pushed her building’s already unreliable heating system into crisis mode, forcing her to bundle up indoors and dress her dog in sweaters to keep him warm.
“For the last week, the heat has been going out almost every night,” Pavez told The Post. “You wake up in the middle of the night freezing, and there’s nothing you can do except layer up and wait.”
Public housing tenants have also been frozen in their homes, with one NYCHA resident blasting the authority as “the worst motherf—ing landlord” in a social media video and directly calling on the mayor to intervene as temperatures hovered near ten degrees.
Another tenant, Malik Williams, 27, who has lived at the Lehman Houses since 2009, said his apartment went without heat for most of January, forcing residents to rely on unsafe stopgaps.
“Last month, we didn’t have any heat,” Williams told The Post. “We had to boil water on the stove just to keep the house warm. We also bought portable heaters.” Heat was only restored late in the month. “They just reimbursed us by turning the heat back on,” he said, adding that NYCHA blamed the outage on the blizzard.
Since the start of heat season on Oct. 1, the city has logged roughly 215,045 heat complaints to 311 and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), already eclipsing the 187,775 complaints recorded during the same period last winter, city data tallied by The Post show.
The surge comes as Mamdani has touted the appointment of housing activist Cea Weaver as the city’s new tenant protection czar, positioning her as a champion for renters and a key figure in the administration’s push to crack down on negligent landlords and improve living conditions citywide.
Weaver has previously argued for stronger tenant protections and less reliance on private ownership models, an approach that has drawn renewed scrutiny as heating failures mount across both private buildings and public housing.
Mamdani has also been called before the City Council to account for the city’s emergency response during the cold snap, with lawmakers questioning whether his approach has been sufficient to protect New Yorkers as heat complaints reached record levels.
HEAT REQUIRED BY LAW — BUT NOT ALWAYS DELIVERED
Under city law, landlords are required to maintain indoor temperatures of at least 68 degrees during the day and 62 degrees overnight between Oct. 1 and May 31. But in buildings with financial distress or absentee ownership, tenants say those legal standards can quickly become hollow promises.
In Astoria, Pavez said the problems are most severe overnight, when the heat frequently shuts off during the coldest hours.
“They’ll turn the heat on sporadically during the day, but then it shuts off at night,” she said. “The last several nights, it’s gone off around midnight and doesn’t come back until morning.”
She said she has relied on layers, blankets, and space heaters to get through the cold, despite concerns about safety.
“Sometimes I turn the space heater on even though it stresses me out,” Pavez said. “You’re constantly weighing staying warm against the risk.”
Her dog’s health has added urgency to the situation.
“He got pneumonia one winter,” she said. “During this freeze, I’ve been putting sweaters on him inside the apartment because it just gets too cold.”
Pavez said she has repeatedly contacted building management and filed 311 complaints but believes enforcement gaps make it difficult to hold landlords accountable, especially when outages happen overnight.
“The unfortunate thing with HPD is that they’re not available to do checks in the middle of the night,” she said. “That makes it really hard to catch landlords when they turn the heat off.”
City officials insist enforcement is active. A Housing Preservation and Development source told The Post that since Jan. 22, approximately 12,000 original heat complaints have been closed, many through inspections or tenant confirmation that heat had been restored. That figure represents only a fraction of the nearly 80,000 complaints logged in January alone.
Despite the ongoing issues, Pavez said moving is not financially feasible.
“Even with rent increases, it’s still cheaper than most places nearby,” she said. “It’s close to the subway, it’s convenient, and moving is expensive.”
‘A NIGHTMARE SCENARIO’
As heating problems have mounted over several years, some tenants have banded together to withhold rent and pursue legal action, saying conditions reached a breaking point during the most recent cold snap.
In Williamsburg, at 491 Keap St., Hughes said the deterioration accelerated as building staff disappeared and essential services stopped.
“Essentially, the building was being abandoned,” Hughes told The Post. “There would be no heat for like 15 days one year. No trash pickup. No cleaning. Nothing.”
The situation became especially dire during a prolonged outage last winter, when freezing temperatures coincided with a complete lack of basic services.
“That was when it was like ten degrees outside. Just a complete nightmare scenario,” he said.
Like other tenants interviewed, Hughes said soaring rents in the neighborhood leave residents trapped.
“My rent is $3,600, but equal apartments are $5,500, $6,000, $6,500,” he said. “I can’t afford to move.”
Karlyn Murphy, 31, another tenant in the same building, said residents began realizing the scope of the problem in 2023, when utility shutoff notices appeared and basic services faltered.
“We started having problems with heat and hot water in early 2023,” Murphy said.
She said tenants later discovered the building’s owner had failed to pay essential bills.
“The highest notice we got was around $350,000 in unpaid electricity bills,” Murphy said. “And we were like, ‘We’re paying rent every month. What are you doing with our money?’”
Murphy said conditions worsened when management and staff disappeared entirely.
“The building was officially abandoned by the owner, the Chetrit Group, and Plaza Management,” she said. “Trash piled up to the ceiling. Packages were everywhere.”
Without hot water during the current freeze, Murphy said she resorted to makeshift solutions.
“I was boiling water just to soak my feet after being outside in the cold,” she said. “That’s when it really hit how bad things had gotten.”
PUBLIC HOUSING UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
Public housing residents say they are facing similar failures. NYCHA, which manages one of the nation’s largest public housing systems, has long struggled with aging infrastructure and a massive maintenance backlog, issues that have come into sharper focus during the cold snap.
Juanita Arnold, 61, a Lehman Houses resident since 2008, said she went three months without heat, from October through December, a first in her 15 years at NYCHA.
“When it got cold in October, no heat at all,” Arnold said. “October, November, and then December they got it together.” She said repeated calls for help led nowhere. “I was told you can’t call 311 anymore so they won’t get a fine. You just keep putting in tickets.”
Arnold said she avoided using her stove for warmth and credited her age for getting through it. “My menopause saved me,” she said. “If it wasn’t for that, I probably would’ve froze in there.”
She urged City Hall to act sooner. “We’re paying our rent. We need to live in a better environment.”
While Weaver and other housing advocates have previously argued for strengthening public control over housing, critics point to persistent heating failures in NYCHA developments as evidence that the city can’t even effectively manage existing public housing.
Court records show that during the 2017–18 winter, more than 80 percent of NYCHA residents experienced heat or hot water outages, a level of disruption that sparked lawsuits and federal oversight. More recent analyses have found thousands of unplanned service interruptions, with some apartments colder inside than outside during extreme weather.
Geraldine Williams, 65, who has lived at Lehman Houses since 2009, said her apartment went without heat for about a week during the recent freeze, with service restored only in the past few days.
“I didn’t have heat for about a week,” Williams said. “I put water in the pot for warmness.”
She said NYCHA told her they were “working on it,” but tenants received no compensation. “My rent is never late,” she said. “And nope, nothing” when asked about reimbursement.
NYCHA officials told The Post they operate a 24/7 heat desk and emergency response system and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on heating infrastructure upgrades in recent years. But for residents enduring days without heat in the depths of winter, those assurances often feel abstract.
NYCHA faces an estimated $78 billion repair backlog, underscoring the scale of the challenge confronting City Hall as it pledges to prioritize tenants while temperatures remain unforgiving.
In a statement to The Post, Matt Rauschenbach, Deputy Press Secretary of Housing at City Hall defended their response.
“Through the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, this administration is taking a long hard look at the Housing Maintenance Code and how it’s enforced,” Rauschenbach said.
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