Heat Seek Testimony on Preparing for Heat Season
Committee on Housing and Buildings
October 30, 2023
Noelle Francois
Executive Director
Heat Seek NYC
I want to begin my testimony by thanking Council Member Pierina Sanchez and the Committee on Housing and Buildings for holding this hearing.
My name is Noelle Francois and I am the Executive Director of Heat Seek, the only nonprofit in the city working specifically with tenants experiencing insufficient heat in their apartments in the wintertime. We use smart temperature sensors to accurately and reliably document the indoor temperature during the winter months and enable tenants to prove exactly how often the temperature in their apartments is too low and in violation of the law.
Citywide, heat complaints remain relatively stable year over year, at over 200,000 annually. However, only a small fraction of those complaints translate into heat violations issued by HPD. While some complaints are certainly resolved by the landlord prior to an HPD inspection, or represent instances where a tenant feels cold but the temperature isn’t below the threshold, Heat Seek data demonstrates that many, many legitimate heat complaints are not translating into violations. After specializing in this work for almost a decade, our data makes clear that an exclusively complaint driven system for maintaining the city’s housing stock is ineffective and insufficient.
Heat Seek has served as a neutral third party to provide tenants a resource to adequately document serious and persistent heat issues in their apartments. Last heat season, Heat Seek sensors in just 150 apartments documented over 59,000 hours in which the temperature was below the legal limit. Forty percent received no violations at all. Heat Seek has documented cases in 20 buildings where our sensors collected more than 100 hours of illegally cold temperatures, the tenants called in heat complaints to 311 numerous times, and yet they never received a single heat violation from HPD. That is a quarter of the buildings Heat Seek operated in last heat season.
Heat Seek has proven that there is a better way to investigate heat complaints using technology, especially in instances of a chronic failure to provide heat in accordance with the law. Real time data transmission would make HPD more effective and efficient, allowing them to send inspectors at times when they are actually able to observe and record a violation. Utilizing this technology would conserve agency resources, as either HPD’s workload would be reduced because no violations are found and inspectors can communicate that to the tenant so they understand the temperature is not illegally low, or HPD issues violations and the landlord is compelled to make repairs/remedy the issue, thus also reducing HPD’s workload because the tenant is not continuously calling with a new complaint in an effort to get a violation placed. There is no reason for HPD to continue guessing what the temperature is when widely available technology exists to tell us the answer at any hour of the day. We strongly urge HPD to adopt this technology with the enthusiasm it deserves, and empower HPD inspectors to install sensors themselves to address chronic complaints.
Serious heat violations rarely exist in a vacuum. As our data analysis of the Heat Sensors program demonstrates, buildings in the program benefit from the increased scrutiny of HPD that comes with program enrollment. Because of the bi-weekly inspections, buildings in the program report higher rates of violation for a variety of breaches of the warranty of habitability in the first year of the program, beyond just heat. It is clear that complaint based inspections are a burden on tenants and often fail to surface serious issues to HPD; however, when HPD takes a more proactive approach and visits bad actor buildings consistently, issues are identified and addressed.
The inability of our city government to adequately tackle the city’s heating crisis feeds directly into the city’s inability to preserve affordable housing, fueling and exacerbating the housing crisis. Housing instability and poor maintenance are two sides of the same coin, which disproportionately impact communities of color.
Wholesale failure to maintain the city’s affordable housing stock is not an option, but it is the path that HPD is choosing with its current approach to addressing the most pervasive habitability issue for tenants. We must take a more aggressive approach to adequately maintaining the affordable housing we currently have, because rents are continuing to rise at alarming rates and more affordable housing is not being built at a rate sufficient to meet the need. One of the best ways to address our homelessness crisis is to minimize displacement by keeping people who have housing in their homes. But we cannot do that if those homes are allowed to fall into disrepair to the point that they are unlivable and tenants are forced to relocate.
We live in the 21st century, in the age of technology, and we cannot continue to operate as though these tools are not readily available to us. The city’s refusal to adopt mainstream technology is not only a failure to its mission to promote quality and affordability in the city’s housing, but also a failure to society at large, in a pivotal moment where so many are deeply in need and expect far more from their government.