Both elevators inside an East New York apartment building have gone out of service, leaving seniors and residents who use walkers, wheelchairs and canes with no way up to their apartments except the stairs. Residents say the breakdown has made simply getting home a daily struggle, and some are now demanding answers about when, or whether, the building's management plans to fix it.
Residents and their families say the elevators have broken down repeatedly, not just this once, according to News 12 Brooklyn. Tenant Janet Bruce described the stairs as a hazard for people in her building. “It's a risk. You can trip and fall. Anything can happen,” Bruce said.
City records reviewed by the station show more than a dozen elevator complaints at the address since 2020, including five logged in just the past week. News 12 observed an out-of-order sign posted on the first floor, though the outlet noted there were no warning signs posted on the floors above, where residents are left to discover the problem on their own.
Residents Describe a Pattern of Breakdowns With No Clear Fix
Doris, another resident, told the station that her calls to building management now go straight to voicemail. Thelma, a neighbor in the same building, said the situation has become too much for tenants to bear. When News 12 asked building management what was being done to repair the elevators, management declined to comment.
The outages are not new. An earlier report from the same station's coverage found that one elevator had been out of service since a December flood inside the six-story building, while the other had broken down at least a year before that. Repair notices posted at the time warned that the work would not be quick, but the notices gave no completion timeline, leaving residents climbing flights of stairs every day in the meantime.
What the City Requires When Elevators Go Dark
New York City rules spell out what is supposed to happen when a building's elevators fail for an extended stretch. Under a city regulation administered by the Department of Buildings, when every elevator in a building or building section is out of service for more than 14 days, the owner is required to provide tenants with alternative accommodations. Separately, the NYC Department of Buildings says that when an owner fails to restore service after being ordered to and the compliance period lapses, the case gets referred to the city's Housing Preservation & Development agency, which determines next steps based on why the elevator stopped working.
Lawmakers in Albany have floated additional oversight. A bill introduced in the New York State Senate, S9708, would require owners of multiple-dwelling buildings to keep records of elevator repairs and make those records available to tenants — the kind of transparency that East New York residents say they have been unable to get from their own building's management.
East New York Is Far From Alone
Broken elevators trapping tenants on upper floors have become a recurring complaint across the city. In Gravesend, an elevator at a seven-story building on West 1st Street sat out of service for months, prompting City Councilmember Michael Novakhov to contact building management and the Department of Buildings and demand repairs within 48 hours, as reported by CBS New York. In Lower Manhattan, residents of the 59-story 20 Exchange Place tower, home to more than 750 apartments, endured months of prolonged outages beginning in late 2021; building owners there eventually offered some tenants hotel rooms, furnished apartments on lower floors, rent concessions and the option to break their leases, according to The New York Times.
Public housing data shows the scale of the broader problem. Across a dozen NYCHA developments in the Bronx's Mott Haven, Melrose and Port Morris neighborhoods, elevators broke down 274 times in a single month of September, according to the Mott Haven Herald, a figure only slightly better than the 290 breakdowns recorded the month before. The outlet also reported that eight South Bronx NYCHA developments had not yet received funding for capital improvements to replace aging elevators. For East New York tenants still climbing stairs with no repair date in sight, those citywide numbers are a reminder that their building's problem is part of a much larger pattern of elevator neglect across New York's aging housing stock.
