New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) workers start their day early. By 8 a.m., they’ve clocked in and are settling down for the morning muster. A local supervisor goes over the day’s schedule, details any major concerns, and answers urgent questions.
Then NYCHA workers are sent out on their assignments: maintaining the city’s 2,411 affordable housing buildings.
It’s a hard job, one that requires care and concern about what you’re doing—and oftentimes about your own physical safety.
Alicia Knox says she is trying to finish up with her Heating Plant Technician (HPT) classes so she can move on to operating hotwater boilers in NYCHA buildings. Becoming an HPT, or Caretaker H, would remove her from her current Caretaker J role, where she cleans buildings and does minor maintenance repairs.
“Honestly, my opinion is what we do now is a lot: The buildings, the complex—it’s a lot of work. Trying to keep up the building behind the tenants, it’s a lot of work,” she said.
Knox and other workers spoke of the Sisyphean efforts in trying to keep NYCHA grounds and buildings clean and then watching as tenants, particularly unsupervised kids, come along and throw garbage and trash in the hallways and on the outdoor grass.
Caretakers complain that while they are cleaning up, some residents are dirtying up the place at the same time by throwing objects out of windows. Several times, caretakers have been hit in the head by garbage thrown by residents.
Many workers enter NYCHA on the janitorial track, at the Caretaker J level. Janitorial workers are responsible for cleaning hallways and elevators, compacting and stacking garbage, and sanitizing public areas.
Caretaker G is a grounds-level worker whose job often includes emergency snow removal; raking and packing up fallen leaves; operating and maintaining Bobcat machines, sweepers, lawnmowers, tractors, and plows; and keeping the grass clean and maintained. “I don’t have a lot of guys, so I do most of the work really,” said Craig Rogers, supervisor of grounds at Manhattan’s Elliott-Chelsea Houses. “They say I work miracles, despite the amount of staff I have. They tell me every day, ‘You do a good job, you work miracles every single day.’”
Other caretaker career levels offered by NYCHA are pest control technicians, plasterers, emergency service aides, and housing supervisors.
NYCHA has a janitorial and groundskeeper training center for its prospective workers. There, trainees are shown a mannequin model that shows how to dress for the job—with a daily uniform, equipment supplies, and a hardhat, which most workers tend not to use.
“My son worked for [about] six months at Marcy Projects, and he literally got hit in the head with a bottle,” said Juan Santiago, a long-term caretaker at Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s Taylor-Wythe Houses in Brooklyn’s WIlliamsburg. “Luckily, he had his helmet on, but he still got cut on his ear. When he got hit with that bottle, he decided not to go work in housing anymore, and that kind of worked out because he got a better job, and he’s doing much better now. But…wow, he’s around this building, and somebody’s right [at] the window, pouring the garbage, throwing stuff out the window. They don’t care.”
Santiago said he loves his job, especially now that the Taylor-Wythe Houses are under the management of Iason Carter and Rachel Cerebro. Having the ability to get the equipment he needs, when he asks for it, has made work less stressful, he said.
But not all NYCHA property managers respond to requests made by NYCHA caretakers, and that can lead to low worker morale.
Keeping NYCHA properties from deteriorating
Vanessa Edmonds, the Taylor-Wythe supervisor of grounds, leads herself and two other Caretaker Gs. Edmonds believes the mix of ethnic groups at Taylor-Wythe is another plus that helps to keep the property from deteriorating. “It’s because it’s mixed…over here, they care about where they live. That’s all it is.
“See, over here, my manager enforces the rules. When residents throw stuff out the window, we see what line it’s coming from. We get letters and we stick notices underneath their doors to show that we are aware, we know that it’s coming on this line and that it needs to stop. And when we put the letters under the door, they stop throwing stuff out the window.”
Joelle Garcia’s job means dodging outside debris and being ready to confront any surprises when he’s indoors. After ensuring the lobby of the building he cleans is taken care of and has no hazards, he travels to the top floor and works his way down, cleaning up and dispatching of any tripping or slipping hazards. He’s constantly having to clean urine and feces in the building—that’s a normal day. On other days, he might have to clean up blood or food waste that’s been left in the hallways or elevators. On designated days, he deep-cleans the floors and stairwells.
When Garcia wraps up trash that has been sent down the building’s garbage chute, he’s constantly confronted with glass and metal. Tenants have been known to throw anything and everything down the chute—even dead animals. While Garcia is in the basement, using the garbage compactor to separate the trash for disposal, he’ll come across a used mouse trap and dead rats, cats, snakes, hamsters, sometimes even puppies. He’s dealing with hundreds of residents who create hundreds of pounds of garbage every day.
Rushelle Paige, a Caretaker J for 20 years, came to work at NYCHA when she was living in the Linden Houses. A tenant association president had written her a recommendation letter for the job, and she was called to come work for NYCHA in the year 2000.
“Most of the residents have respect, but some of them are just lazy,” she said. “Some of them just don’t have home training. Most of these people are coming from shelters; when you get the ones with bags from the shelter, they’re mostly homeless and when they come out here, they still want to tear it up because they’re not used to the cleanliness, the discipline. It depends on where they’re coming from.”
Numerous NYCHA caretakers are themselves NYCHA residents—they were encouraged to apply to become NYCHA workers. Residents applying to become workers take classes with the NYCHA Resident Training Academy (NRTA), which is funded by the anti-poverty Robin Hood Foundation. Academy classes teach janitorial, construction, and pest control methods that will be used on the job.
The job itself is union-repped: Members join and form part of Teamsters Local 237, where they gain healthcare benefits, a pension plan, access to a college savings plan, dependent care assistance, and other perks. The perks help because the job can be tiresome.
Iason Carter, property manager at the Taylor-Wythe Houses, has received citations applauding his managerial style, which has made Taylor-Wythe one of the nicer places to work, NYCHA workers told the Amsterdam News.
“It’s the culture. Unfortunately, and I hate to say it, but in our development, which is about 60% Hasidic, we, for some reason, don’t have that epidemic of the trash out the windows like we do in other developments…or feces,” Carter explained. “It’s far and few between. Occasionally, we’ll have some homeless people venture into the buildings, but that’s far and few people: That’s not from the residents doing it.”
Carter insisted that it’s important to use his role as property manager in partnership with his onsite caretakers. “It’s important to listen to people, have a conversation,” he said. “As a property manager…it’s about listening to people. [If a caretaker] sends me an email, I’m right on it. Rachel’s right on it. You know what I’m saying? People––I’ve learned––when you brush them off, they become antagonistic, so even when folks want to tell you something and you don’t want to hear it, give them the forum.
“Most people here have worked in other developments with a lot going on so, when they come to Taylor-Wythe, they don’t want to leave, because we don’t have a lot of problems going on here.”