by Shlomo Friedman
One day last winter Clara Cortes was strutting around his apartment in the Sheepshead Bay Houses shirtless, windows flung wide open. The odd thing, he recalled recently, is that the temperature outside that day was five degrees.
Cortes wasn’t alone in his sauna-like experience. Many residents of the same public housing development say that intense heat of their apartments, even during the coldest season, has forced them to open windows, turn on fans and, in extreme cases, blast air conditioners to cool down the steam being pumped in from the building’s boilers.
Adding more heating capacity to the housing complex, say those residents, makes about as much sense as installing air-conditioners in the Arctic Circle. Nevertheless, courtesy of the Obama Administration’s economic-stimulus plan, more heat is on the way this winter in the form of a $2.05 million heating upgrade.
A new neon-green, cylindrical Johnson boiler, boiling water like a huge tea kettle, and packing the capacity to blast 20,000 pounds of steam an hour, has been added to the complex’s heating plant. In addition, all the apartment’s radiators are having their valves and traps replaced. The new boiler’s steam output is double that of any of the other seven older boilers, ratcheting up the heating plant’s capacity to produce steam by almost 25 percent.
For its part, the New York City Housing Authority said that Sheepshead Bay Houses had an excessive amount of heating complaints and overran its heating budget by 30 percent.
But the nature of those complaints is not clear. Some residents speculated that the heating complaints logged by the authority were due to too much heat.
Steam heating a large complex is a tricky business, “more art than science,” according to Hershel Weiss, past president of the Society of Plumbing Engineers, and a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s Green Codes Task Force. Even if some residents are cold in winter, Weiss said that the extra boiler would “probably not” resolve the development’s heating issues. “Rarely are heating problems a problem of capacity,” he said.
The tale of the heating upgrade in Sheepshead Bay Houses is the story of many projects funded by the stimulus plan — an attempt to achieve simultaneously energy efficiency, the upgrade of a fraying infrastructure, and job creation. But it is also has elements that have brought the measure criticism by Republicans who argue that some projects have marginal value and fall short of creating the promised number of jobs. Republicans have also condemned the speed with which government agencies were prodded to spend vast amounts of money, saying that the rush to spend contributed to such boondoggles as the $210,000 allocated to study the learning patterns of honeybees or the $390,000 granted to the University of Buffalo to study students who drink malt beer and smoke marijuana.
The money trail of the $2.05 million for the Sheepshead Bay Houses began when Congress first passed and President Obama then signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Feb. 17, 2009. The legislation earmarked billions to the federal Department Housing and Urban Development. The money granted to the housing department was to be used for the nation’s housing projects – upgrading heating systems, replacing roofs, repairing brickwork and elevators.
To determine which housing authorities got what, HUD used a complicated formula that divided up the stimulus package. The biggest variable in the equation was the number of housing units each municipality oversaw: the more units, the larger the piece of the pie. New York City’s 178,000 public housing units dwarfs the amounts of any other city in the nation. The formula would ensure that New York’s housing authority would get a generous slab – the most of any other municipality — of the pie in April 2009: $423 million.
But the money came with bureaucratic strings attached. With the nation’s economic heartbeat faint, Congress required that fund recipients spend the money quickly, hoping to resuscitate a faltering economy with a rapid jolt of cash. For any projects funded by the stimulus, the housing authority had to be able and ready to take bids within a year of the legislation and have 60 percent of the money spent in the second year. One hundred percent of the money had to be spent by 2011.
In May 2009, only one month after HUD granted the city housing authority the funding windfall, the contract for the Sheepshead Bay Houses heating upgrade was granted to two firms. TR Pipe, Inc., of College Point, Queens, was to replace the valves and traps in every apartment in the complex; Kordun Construction Corporation, also located in Queens, won the bid to install a new Johnston boiler in the heating plant on the corner of Batchelder Street and Avenue W.
During that same month, decisions were also made and bids accepted to spend $1.18 million on repairing elevator locks throughout the housing system as well as $4.1 million on a roof replacement for Wyckoff Gardens Houses. Only a few weeks later, in July, STV Construction won a $5.4 million contract to repair brickwork at Middletown Plaza Houses.
Housing authority officials can’t say how much money the investment in the complex’s heating system will save, perhaps because of the pressure to spend quickly. There “was no cost-benefit analysis” done for the Sheepshead Bay heating project, said Myriam Ayala, media relations specialist for the authority. Lisa Roberts, the authority’s deputy assistant director for capital projects, said that the decisions to pick projects for the stimulus money “were done in a very short time frame” by the board. Stimulus projects were picked from a list of that had design plans in place as part of the housing authority’s five-year capital plan.
Weiss, the plumbling specialist, says that heating capacity is usually not the source of heating complaints because engineers deliberately designed the heating systems of New York City’s housing projects with overcapacity. Given the built-in overcapacity and that insulated windows have replaced older single-pane ones, the original complement of boilers in Sheepshead Bay Houses should provide more than ample heat to the complex.
Weiss also said that steam heat follows the path of least resistance so it’s possible that one room in an apartment could be stifling while another could be freezing. That’s the experience of Sharon Retkinski, director of the senior center at the development, who said the facility suffers from “inconsistent heat,” with some rooms too hot and others not heated at all. But uneven heat, Weiss said, would not be addressed with additional boiler capacity, but rather is more indicative of a valve problem.
Since the spring, a white truck bearing “TR Pipe” on its sides has been driving through the complex where workers are unloading boxes of new valves and then installing them in every apartment. TR Pipe has replaced 75 percent of the valves in the complex, receiving $1.2 million for the work. But the replacement has some residents scratching their heads. Eddie Allan, a plumber and 10-year resident at the development, said he worked on replacing the valves five years ago for TR Pipe.
“We changed the valves, the hot water, the return valves,” he said, adding that the current replacement funded by the stimulus was done “just to waste money.” He went on, “If they really want to do something they should work on the brickwork.” There was nothing wrong with the old valves, some residents said. They just had been encrusted with layers of paint, easily removable. The housing authority said it was “unable to confirm” whether the valves had been replaced five years ago. Weiss said that valves and traps should have a lifespan of 15 to 20 years.
The stimulus plan also was geared to fund projects that would be greener, reducing fossil-fuel dependency, but according to Michael Beatty, vice president of ACS, the vendor that sold the boiler to Kordun Construction, the new boiler is only about three percent more efficient than the seven older ones in the heating plant.
Other residents shared Allan’s assertion that the development had more pressing issues than the steam heat. A ring of blue scaffolding surrounds the development since last October, apparently as precursor of a brick repair project, but no brickwork has been done.
At 2952 Avenue W, Richard Johnson, a building resident, pointed to the upper stories of the seven-story building where the brickwork is clearly buckling. “When it rains that water seeps in, bubbles up and cracks the plaster on the inside,” he said. “We had our walls done twice. It’s going to happen again, and again and again,” until the brickwork is done, he added.
Tenants cite other problems that did not receive any stimulus money. Residents complain that the doors to buildings don’t lock, permitting drug dealers to enter at will and peddle marijuana, and that housing police are usually nowhere to be found. In an apartment bathroom in the 4th floor at 2946 Avenue W, dark mold is crowding out the white paint of the shower wall. Holes pockmark the walls, floors, ceilings. The lobby door to the building slams shut with stunning force, as if it’s being pushed close by hurricane wind.
“There are a lot, a lot of things that could be fixed in this development,” Retkinski said. “There are a lot of neglected things. We have overloaded circuits because when this place was built there weren’t fax machines, computers and air conditioners. Right now, my seniors are sitting in the heat without air conditioning.”
With unemployment at his highest sustained level since the Depression, the stimulus plan was touted as a jobs bill, putting millions of Americans back to work on “shovel ready projects.” The Obama administration has claimed the plan has saved or created three million jobs, a number scoffed at by the plan’s critics.
As part of the auditing process of the stimulus funds, the housing authority had to report on how many jobs were to be created per project. The projected number of jobs created or sustained at the Sheepshead Bay Houses heating upgrade was at first estimated at five for the duration of the project. But for any reporting quarter the number of jobs has never exceeded 3.14.
The pattern of predicting far too rosy job creation numbers is true with other housing authority projects. A $21 million roof-replacement project at the Armstrong Housing developments in Brooklyn was initially projected by the authority to create 131 jobs; the most recorded was 4.14. The roof replacement at the Beach 41st development in Far Rockaway, Queens, was calculated to produce 55 jobs; the tally never topped 2.12. A similar project to Sheepshead Bay Houses, a boiler upgrade at Kingsborough Houses in Brooklyn, slated to create 18 jobs, has never created more than 2.65 per quarter.
The housing authority said that it did not verify on its own the number of jobs created or sustained: “The jobs number is derived from information given by the contractors,” Ayala said.
In the case of Sheepshead Bay Houses, Kordun Construction bought the boiler from Analytic for $150,000. That means Kordun had approximately $570,000 for the installation. According to Beatty, the boiler took only three months to install. If four engineers worked on the project, pro-rated over one year, only one job was created for the cost of $570,000.
Shaking his head, Johnson said, “The heat is O.K. People just gotta learn to turn the knob. I would have spent the money on the brickwork and on security.”
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