NYC Promises a New Approach to Heat Complaints After Tenants Were Left Waiting

Starting Oct 1, landlords are required to turn the heat on when the temperature drops below a certain threshold. Here’s what you need to know, including changes to how the city handles 311 calls about lack of heat.

That crisp in the air means New York City’s “heat season” is starting.

Each year from Oct. 1 to May 31, landlords are required to provide tenants with heat, keeping apartment temperatures above 62 degrees at night and 68 degrees during the day.

But hundreds of thousands of tenants complain each year that their landlord hasn’t turned on the heat, or left it too low.

Last winter was the most demanding heat season on record, with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) responding to over 188,000 heat and hot water problems, according to the city’s latest management report. During a prolonged cold spell in January, New York City tenants broke records for the most calls about “no heat” in a single month. Several people passed away in the cold.

If your heat is not on when it should be, you can follow these steps to get help.

But last year, some tenants were asking for help and not getting through, City Limits found. The city closed out tens of thousands of complaints without conducting an inspection, due to a process where officials grouped multiple complaints from the same building together and cleared them all at once—without checking if the issue in each individual apartment was resolved.

“They would reach one person and ask them how the heat was, and if that person had their stove going or their space heater, they might say, ‘Yeah, I think it’s fine.’ And everyone else was shivering, but they just closed down the complaint with no inspection,” explained Ellen Davidson, a staff attorney with Legal Aid Society’s Civil Law Reform Unit.

“So even though there might be 100 people in the building who were freezing, if they reached the one person who was fine, that was the end of the inquiry,” said Davidson.

After City Limits’ report, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration announced in its housing plan that it would overhaul how it responds to heat complaints. 

Starting this heat season, HPD will attempt to inspect every apartment that files a heat and hot water complaint, even if there are complaints of a building-wide outage.

“It’s so important,” Davidson said of the change. 

Heat and hot water violations are considered emergency violations in the city’s housing code, requiring immediate follow up.

Last year, the agency expressed some capacity concerns about the additional inspections needed if they were to de-duplicate heat complaints. But HPD said it has since updated its real-time inspector routing technology to provide inspectors already visiting a building with information about additional complaints at the property.

The Department said it would be conducting a multi-point inspection in every unit it sees, looking not just at the heat but also other health and safety issues, like smoke detectors and self-closing doors.

“In the past, tenants have felt really frustrated when reporting heat problems in their buildings because it felt like it wasn’t getting listened to, or they would call 311 and then nothing would happen,” said Sumathy Kumar, director of the housing advocacy group Housing Justice for All.

HPD also said that they now have 321 inspectors on staff, an 11 percent increase since 2021.

Landlords have expressed concerns about the high cost of home heating oil expected this winter, inflated in part due to the United States’ war in Iran. 

“Last season was so brutal that many of these buildings just barely made it through,” said New York Apartment Association CEO Kenny Burgos in a video released Thursday. 

The group represents the owners of buildings that contain rent stabilized apartments, where they say the recently enacted rent freeze for those units will make it harder for them to cover those costs this year. Home heating issues tend to be concentrated in neighborhoods with high concentrations of rent stabilized housing.

“Now we’re heading into another winter, except this time owners are paying war prices for heat while the rent is frozen,” Burgos said.

Complaints about lack of heat have been a persistent issue each New York City winter for years, and enforcement can be difficult. If a building owner fails to address the problem, advocates recommend tenants document the cold conditions with the city and check in with neighbors to see if they’re also having issues.

“Always report it. Always call 311. Talk to your neighbors. Because a heat problem is a building-wide problem, usually, and an organized building is going to help,” said Kumar.

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