NEW YORK (AP) — “Sex and the City” star and gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon visited a housing complex Wednesday and said the conditions she saw were “devastating,” in some cases resulting in death.
Among the issues cited by Nixon: residents hold umbrellas while using toilets under leaky ceilings; moldy, insect-infested apartments need asthma machines; holes in walls used by rodents don’t get fixed for years; broken boilers leave residents without heat or hot water.
At Brooklyn’s Albany Houses, a complex with thousands of apartments in the Crown Heights neighborhood, “it’s not just a matter of how broken and crumbling everything is, it’s literally about how it’s killing the residents here,” said Nixon, who is challenging Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Sept. 13 Democratic primary.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former Democratic state senator, accompanied Nixon on a tour of a building where a worker hurried to install on a lock that had been omitted when a new door was put in several years ago. Other workers rushed to collect garbage that residents said was strewn across lawns until word spread that a prominent visitor was expected.
Cuomo, elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2014, is fighting for $550 million in funding for the state-run New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). He says he won’t sign the state budget unless it includes “real and immediate remedies” for public housing tenants.
Nixon, who played Miranda Hobbes in the “Sex and the City” TV show and spinoff movies, said she doesn’t know how Cuomo could have toured NYCHA housing three times in the last week and a half and “not be putting a billion dollars into the budget” to fix the kind of dilapidated housing she saw.
“It is definitely a state of emergency,” Nixon said.