Long-suffering NYCHA residents disgusted — but not surprised — by housing bribery busts: ‘I’m glad they got caught’

Furious NYCHA residents who say they have been plagued for years by leaky ceilings and holes in their floors were disgusted — but not surprised — by Tuesday’s bombshell agency bribery bust.

“I’m glad they got caught. It’s time they clear out the workers that take advantage of other people — and NYCHA is full of those,” said Loraine, a New York City Housing Authority resident who lives at the Queensbridge Houses complex in Queens, where some of the extortion suspects were hauled away in handcuffs earlier Tuesday.  

She and other public-housing tenants lashed out after learning that 70 current and former NYCHA employees have been busted for allegedly accepting more than $2 million in bribes to dish out small repair-job contracts to contractors.

“I’m not surprised,” Loraine said. “They do anything for a quick buck.”

The residents said the allegations of widespread corruption were a slap in the face especially for those who have been forced to endure “Band-Aid” repairs, or none at all, in their apartments over the years.

“It’s f–ked up,” a fellow Queensbridge tenant, who did not want to be named, said of the dodgy repairs to her leaking toilets and hole-covered floors.

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“I don’t want no contractor that don’t know what they are doing. They get them for a dollar, and they don’t want to do the job right,” she said. “I had to ask them who painted my walls — Ray Charles?” 

In addition to the Queensbridge housing complex, a handful of suspects in the the decades-long corruption scheme were nabbed at Harlem’s Taft Houses and King Houses early Tuesday.

Residents in those complexes also were frustrated to learn workers were allegedly caught up in the scheme.

Alexander Hernandez, who has lived at the King complex for six months, said he has a whole host of unfixed problems in his apartment, including holes in his kitchen floor and leaky ceilings.

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When an apartment above his flooded and caused water damage to his bathroom, the workers contracted to fix the issue just removed the water — and did nothing to repair the damage,” Hernandez said.

“They f–ked up my bathroom. All they did was come and take the water out and leave the [damaged to the walls.] This whole place is f–ked up,” he said.

Tiffany Lopez, a fellow King complex tenant who is still waiting for her leaky ceiling to be fixed, ripped the maintenance in her building as “definitely not up to par.”

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Until now, she believed her delayed repairs — which she fears, if untreated, could result in mold and electrical damage — may have been due to a contracting glitch.

“When you find out that in actuality there’s something going on on the side, it’s upsetting,” Lopez said of the busts.

“It’s shocking to me. It’s taking advantage of people who live here and need those types of repairs. It’s a liability for family members who have children. It’s not a safe environment for them to live in.”

A Taft resident, who only identified herself as JR, said she’s been waiting years for a much-needed repair for her kitchen.

“I’ve been waiting three years already. That’s how long I’ve been waiting. And now we see this outside Taft?” she said of the Tuesday morning busts.

Fellow resident Mona, added, “I’m a little p—ed off, but it’s not surprising. That’s the way the world works. That’s the system.”

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Nicole, a mom who lives at the La Guardia housing complex in the Lower East Side in Manhattan, said years of mismanagement and negligence in her building suddenly made more sense in the wake of Tuesday’s busts.

“A lot of people were complaining that they didn’t get repairs and paint and stuff, but I just thought they didn’t have enough staff. I thought, ‘We just picked the wrong building,’ ” she said.

“Hopefully [the arrests] will make things better. We need better management. Hopefully they’ll pick better people.”

The avalanche of bribery and extortion crimes occurred in about a third of the 335 housing developments citywide when the suspects demanded cash in exchange for lucrative construction, maintenance and no-bid contracts, federal prosecutors said.

The defendants, including housing superintendents, assistant superintendents and other employees, sought between 10% and 20% of the contracts’ values – or kickbacks of between $500 and $2,000 – between 2013 and last year, the feds added.