Polo Grounds Tenants Want Improvements

Water leaks in Peggy Valoy’s apartment in the Polo Ground Houses and paint bubbles up on the living room and bathroom walls.  “I called Housing and waited and I missed a day of work because they didn’t come,” she said. “Even when they do come, they fix the paint and the same thing happens again.”

Peggy’s apartment is one of 1,600 in the sprawling Polo Grounds complex in Upper Manhattan. Many residents in this New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) development have similar complaints. Maria Fernandez showed us her kitchen with broken tiles that haven’t been replaced in the seventeen years she has lived there.

The floor underneath is cracking, too, and the cracked window in the bedroom of her twenty-seventh-floor apartment lets the wind blow in.  “It’s cold,” she said. “I have to cover it with plastic.”

We saw garbage piled up outside and in the lobbies as we walked around the housing development. Three tenants told us that the mailman doesn’t like delivering to the complex because of the trash and the rats it attracts.  Dora Lopez said she has to go to the post office to pick up her mail and other tenants told us the same thing.

Roberto Evangelista has lived at the Polo Grounds Houses for nine years. He said, “People from outside come in and sleep on the stairs or in the hallways.  That’s because the doors are not secure and even when Housing fixes them, people break in easily.”

The stairs are a problem for another reason. Maria Fernandez said, “Sometimes they are full of water, human poop, and trash.” Tenants are frequently to blame. Maria told us, “People throw trash out of the windows, diapers, cans and other things.”

And the stairs are overused because the elevators are often out of service. Of the six elevators in the thirty-floor building at 2937 Frederick Douglas Blvd., only two worked one day recently. Maria described the issues she’s encountered: “Once I was in the elevator and it dropped from the twenty-first floor to the seventeenth floor. Another time, I was stuck in the elevator for more than five minutes. And sometimes the doors don’t open, or the elevator will take you to the wrong floor.

We contacted NYCHA for a comment. A spokesperson emailed us to say, “NYCHA is committed to ensuring safe, clean environments for residents. We ask that all residents continue to use the MyNCHA app or call the Customer Contact Center at 718-707-7771 to create a work order ticket for any maintenance needs.”