Meet Your Tenant Leader: Cynthia Tibbs, NYCHA’s West Side Urban Renewal Brownstones

Tibbs is the leader of one of 218 active resident associations across the city’s public housing system, according to NYCHA, where she’s worked to install new intercoms, host community events and support tenants with issues ranging from leaks to trespassers.

“Meet Your Tenant Leader” is a new series that profiles the work of tenant and resident association leaders across New York City. If you’re a tenant leader interested in speaking with us about your role, or want to suggest someone we should talk to, email: [email protected]

On the corner of West 90th Street and Columbus Avenue, Cynthia Tibbs scanned the Upper West Side street to see if she could find one of her tenants—Larry, a man in his mid-80’s who was affectionately known as “the mayor of 91st Street.”

He was supposed to be home that morning to get repairs done in his apartment, but NYCHA called Tibbs—the tenant association president at the housing authority’s West Side Urban Renewal (WSUR) Brownstones—to let her know he wasn’t there.

“He’s roaming the streets,” Tibbs said with assuredness. She told City Limits that the man followed the same routine every day: he would greet passersby “at the crack of dawn,” wishing them a good day. He would then collect bottles before getting something to eat at a nearby senior center.

When she spotted Larry a few minutes later, Tibbs reminded him that he’d missed the appointment, and that NYCHA would be there again the next day—he would just have to be at the door to let them in. After making sure he’d had eaten lunch, the two parted ways.

Tibbs had a full schedule ahead of her that day, when a City Limits reporter first met her in the fall of 2023. After a severe rainstorm—the heaviest downpour the city had seen in two years— three tenants had a partial ceiling collapse, and Tibbs watched as neighbors’ furniture was picked up for disposal. “Rain is my biggest problem,” she said.

But as a tenant association president, Tibbs takes pride in being part of solutions. Exactly a year later, she is now working to get the brownstones in WSUR new roofs and heating system upgrades (Larry, she told a City Limits reporter, sadly passed away a few weeks ago).

Tibbs is the leader of one of 218 active resident associations across the city’s public housing, according to NYCHA. In her time as TA president, she’s worked to install new intercoms, hosted community events and supported tenants with issues ranging from leaks to trespassers.

“I might as well run for the position,” Tibbs recalled thinking when she first took on the role in 2019. “It seemed like I was able to communicate with management and people were telling me problems they were having and I was getting them fixed.”

City Limits recently sat down with Tibbs to talk more about her role, and how tenant association leaders like her help keep the nation’s largest public housing system running. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What does an average week look like for you as a TA president?

I call Monday “Monday Madness.” Monday is all the things that went wrong over the weekend that I have to discuss with management and how it wasn’t handled properly. Now that we have the [roofing] project going on, Tuesdays I am very involved with the contractors. We do bi-weekly Zooms every Tuesday and even when I’m not doing them, I’m always in constant contact with them.

Residents call every day. I get at least four calls from residents a day with severe issues, whether it be someone kicked in the lobby door or they’ve been waiting for a refrigerator for almost a year to come to their apartment.

If it’s raining, it’s really bad because anyone in the top floor apartment [that] has a leaky ceiling is going to be calling me. Doors are getting broken into a lot more frequently and that’s an issue I’ve had to deal with the police.

Each day, I’m presented with something. There’s at least four different things each day. There’s never a day where I have to myself where someone is not calling with a problem. It’s very rare.

What is something you want people to understand about being a TA president?

For the most part, what we’ve had to keep reminding [tenants] is that we do this because we are trying to improve our developments. We live here. We want to be proud of where we live. We are people who come from different ethnic backgrounds, we have been here longer than most people have been here on the Upper West Side.

I was born and raised on the Upper West Side. I’m not going anywhere. So when new people come in and look down at us, our goal as a TA and for myself is to let them see that we are an asset to this community. We’re not a hindrance.

We don’t get paid under the table. There is no one buying us to get things done. Anything I get is either donations from my councilwoman or my assemblyperson or a nonprofit that wants to give us something because they see the work we do for our tenants. That’s how I get things done. There is no magic buddy buddy system with NYCHA where I’m getting paid under the table.

We don’t have any access to any of the money. For instance, on the roofs. We have no access to roof money. We don’t pay contractors. We don’t pay anybody. Therefore, to make assumptions that I am getting paid off with roof money is ridiculous and I find it offensive. It’s been said ‘Oh, Cynthia stole the roof money,’ if I stole the roof money, then why am I still here? Why am I still here living in NYCHA, living with the same issues everyone else is? If I stole millions of dollars, I wouldn’t be here anymore. I’d be gone.

Everything I’ve ever done is just for my community. I live here with them and I want to live as comfortably as possible and get what’s due to us.

This is not a 9-to-5 job. I’ve had people calling me at one in the morning hysterical because a part of their ceiling just fell in. They’re scared and they’re upset and who gets up and goes over there? I do.

I do this because these are my neighbors. These are people I’ve grown up with my whole life. This is my neighborhood. I’ve been Upper West since day one and I do it because I’m driven to do it.

Sometimes I will get a call before they call a cop. Sometimes I will get a call before NYCHA is called. That happens all the time. It’s a 24-hour job.

You mentioned being an advocate for the community before officially becoming a TA president. What are some ways you’ve supported neighbors outside of the scope of repairs?

I give Ensure to seniors and tenants that need it, for either chemo or if they’re just a senior and they can’t afford it. I’ve been doing stuff like this all my life. I’ve always stuck up for the underdog.

We never had intercoms before. In all the years these buildings were built, we had the original buzz up, buzz down system that came with the building. It was a button in our apartments and all you could do was to press the button to open the door. It had no intercom, it had no telephone, it had no nothing.

We teamed up with housing conservation coordinators and they were doing things, like they adopt a building or they adopt a development, so they adopted the brownstones and they supplied all the intercoms into our buildings.

There was one year I got a nonprofit to donate coats to the seniors. I’ve had coat drives, backpack giveaways and if I’m limited in what I can get, I always make sure that the seniors who are now raising their grandchildren get the supplies first. Those are the ones who are living off a severely limited income. 

Are there any projects currently taking place at WSUR?

We’re getting the roofs done, brand new gutters, roof fans. We’ve been having monthly meetings with the tenants explaining to them that scaffolding is not only going to be in the front but in the back of the building. The contractors had agreed to pay for a security guard and be settled in the backyards at night so that your average criminals can’t run up the scaffolding to the roofs. They’re doing the offset roofs too, so it’s actually a total of 72 roofs in three years.

While all that all happened, we had a problem with the heating system that supplies heat in 18 of our buildings. It’s been there since the beginning and all the parts fell apart but it’s not a boiler, it’s from the street, from ConEd. The pipe cracked and of course, the pipe cracked just like with the gas lines, the steam pipe cracked on the housing side, not the ConEd side, so they refused to pay for the pipe.

NYCHA moved all the tenants out of one building, deemed it unsafe where the pipe cracked, and with no notice, relocated them. There were crying, hysterical people that were being moved out of their apartments…uprooted because there was nowhere else to put them over here. Even though tenants have the right to come back, we don’t know if or when that will ever be.

I made a phone call and [Councilmember] Gale Brewer shows up on a Zoom call with me and NYCHA and says, “Okay, so how much do you want for the pipe, would a quarter of a million do it?” And look, she’s paying for our pipe. 

They [the relocated tenants] want to come home. They don’t want to be where they’re at. They got no notice. I literally got the call at one in the afternoon that, “We deemed one of your buildings inhabitable and everyone is going to have to move.” We’re going to get them back home.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact [email protected]. To reach the editor, contact [email protected]

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.