NEW YORK CITY—The City of New York is investing $200 million to replace boilers and upgrade heating systems at 20 NYCHA developments. This will alleviate chronic outages affecting the supply of heat and hot water.
The renovations are scheduled to be completed by 2022 to benefit approximately 45,000 residents. The city estimates the upgrades will save approximately $5 million per year in energy costs.
With this latest investment, Mayor Bill de Blasio's commitment to NYCHA's capital infrastructure totals $2.1 billion slated for 2014 to 2027 and $1.6 billion for Housing Authority operations from 2014 to 2022. This includes fixing more than 900 roofs, repairing deteriorating brickwork at nearly 400 buildings and improving security at 15 NYCHA developments.
The mayor said similar to the city's replacing aging roofs, the new heating systems will make a difference to thousands of residents. “The record-setting cold this winter has hit these aging boilers and pipes hard. We're coming to the table with real resources to attack these problems, and urge our federal and state partners to do the same.”
Starting in Fiscal Year 2019, the $200 million will be invested over three years to address the following problems at 20 developments.
(1) The funds will replace 39 outdated boilers at 10 developments experiencing chronic failures. Developments comprise multiple buildings with multiple boiler plants. The heating upgrade at the 10 sites will complement federal funds previously allocated for boiler replacements.
(2) Hot water systems at 12 developments will be modernized by separating hot water from the heating boilers to reduce the strain on boilers. This will allow repairs on the boiler system without interrupting hot water services, and will reduce the likelihood of simultaneous outages of both heat and hot water.
(3) New heating controls will be installed at 15 developments to regulate boiler temperature. This will improve system monitoring, detection of possible faults, and the production of more consistent heat.
Other parts of the heating systems in the 20 developments are funded by the federal government or energy performance contracts. Since 2014, NYCHA has committed nearly $300 million in HUD funds to upgrade heating and plumbing at 100 boilers. In addition, more than $100 million of the $3 billion FEMA grant for Sandy Recovery and Resilience will fund replacement of 67 boilers at 17 developments. NYCHA's three energy performance contracts include more than $40 million in heating-related improvements.
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Betsy Kim
Betsy Kim was the bureau chief, East Coast, and New York City reporter for Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com. As a lawyer and journalist, Betsy has worked as the director of editorial and content for LexisNexis Lawyers.com, a TV/multi-media journalist for NBC and CBS affiliated TV stations in the Midwest, and an associate producer at Court TV.
