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.