Andrea Ragland waited three years for new cabinets and other needed work on her New York City Housing Authority apartment.
But it finally took a state elected official to get something done.
The Throggs Neck Houses tenant said she took off countless days of work and called in numerous work orders to the Housing Authority, only to have her requests ignored.
Ragland, 31, a mother and full time nurse at a New Rochelle rehabilitation center, said she waited years for NYCHA to perform a number of different repairs to her apartment, including broken kitchen cabinets, holes in her walls and mold growing in her bathroom.
“May will be three years I have lived here,” Ragland said. “From the first time I walked through the house, I told the housing assistant I was with I was going to need new cabinets, and she said it was not a problem. Almost three years later, I finally got some.”
Ragland said NYCHA sent people to look at all of the repairs that needed to be done, but they never actually did any work.
“I had holes in my wall and in my bathroom ceiling,” Ragland said. “I had to bomb my house because of all the insects that were coming in. Every time I put in a work order request, someone would come out to look at the problem and then tell me to put in another request. It was so frustrating, and I was losing days off of work waiting for people who sometimes never showed up.”
After being fed up with the lack of action from NYCHA, Ragland called Senator Jeff Klein’s office for help.
Klein’s office contacted the NYCHA superintendent of Ragland’s building, Chris Harris, who manages a dozen NYCHA buildings. But according to Klein’s office, Harris told them Ragland’s need for repairs were “unfounded.”
After the senator’s office sent pictures of the broken cabinets and holes in the apartment walls, Ragland scheduled a work order for January 16 — but nobody showed up.
When repair workers finally did show up six days later, they said repair work could not be done on the cabinets unless the holes in the wall were fixed first, but that could not be done until May.
Klein then reached out to Mike Cadise, the assistant superintendent for NYCHA, who had all of Ragland’s repairs completed within two weeks.
“I am very, very thankful to Senator Klein’s office,” Ragland said. “It took him two weeks to get done what I was trying to get done for years.”
Kirsten Sanchez can be reach via e-mail at ksanchez@cnglocal.com or by phone at (718) 742-3394
