Klein proposes millions for Marble Hill Houses, other NYCHA buildings

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Marble Hill resident Beverly Camejo says after coming home to her 11th-story apartment one night in mid-November, her husband “all of a sudden” noticed the smell of smoke. The couple could not see anything through their front door’s peephole. Ms. Camejo then told her husband not to open the door, but it was too late.

“You don’t forget the smell of smoke,” she recounted on Monday. “It’s like we’re afraid. We don’t know when it will happen again.”

Ms. Camejo said after firefighters extinguished the November blaze and gave the all-clear, she and her husband, who both have asthma, suffered from aggravated symptoms for at least a week.

The FDNY did not immediately answer a request to confirm details of the blaze. But Ms. Camejo attributed it to a garbage fire on the ground floor of her building at 2831 Exterior St. — where blackened concrete walls still give testimony to the resident’s account. The library assistant at New York Law School added that she has lived through three to four such fires since moving to the Marble Hill Houses in 2006. 

A recent proposal from two Bronx officials aims to make experiences like Ms. Camejo’s a thing of the past.

State Sen. Jeff Klein and Councilman Ritchie Torres have proposed a massive fund to make changes and improvements to the city’s 334 housing developments. They called for $250 in state funding plus an equal contribution from the city, along with restoring a $12 million state subsidy to NYCHA that was eliminated in 1998.

Other measures in the officials’ “NYCHA 2020 Public Housing Revitalization Plan” include giving managers of individual sites more power to implement fixes on their own, instead of rely on NYCHA’s central offices; overhaul the authority’s request-for-proposals system to cut wait time for projects in half; and the creation of an independent watchdog to produce annual reports on the percentage of units in good repair, among other issues. Mr. Klein also called for advisory commissions that include tenants who would track repairs.

NYCHA, Marble Hill Houses, Jeff Klein, Ritchie Torres, Paulette Shomo, Beverly Camejo, Shant Shahrigian
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