Six years is a long time for a sidewalk shed to be up, but it's a trifle compared to the sheds at 409 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem, which have been up for nearly 17 years. Johnson added, "You have all these scaffolds up, and when they put up this fencing, people were saying it makes it look like they were in prison." Scaffolding at the Howard Houses (Hell Gate) "I have to laugh," Johnson said, shaking her head. One thing that has changed since that 2019 event: NYCHA recently installed chain-link fencing around some of the buildings that already have scaffolding. "It's good when it's raining, but other than that," resident Kyera Sease shrugged. Other residents are also not fans of the sheds. "I told them that I need to go into this business and make some money," Johnson quipped. Meanwhile, NYCHA pays scaffolding companies citywide some $30 million every year to maintain this status quo. Johnson, who has been a resident of the Howard Houses for 42 years and TA president since 2011, said NYCHA told her in a meeting last year that there was no money to fix the building facades, so the sheds would have to stay up to protect people's safety in the meantime. "I mean, you want people to take pride in where they live." And it looks bad," the 70-year-old Johnson told Hell Gate, adding that the sheds collect trash and block the view of security cameras. More than three years later, on a blustery March afternoon, Johnson was showing yet another reporter those same sidewalk sheds, which have now stood for more than six years. Standing next to Adams was the Howard Houses tenant association president Naomi Johnson, who explained that NYCHA had told her the sheds needed to stay up because work on the building facades had to be finished, even though no workers had shown up for months. "We don't want to live in the shadows of scaffolding," Adams told a local TV news crew, standing in front of the sidewalk sheds that had come up in 2016 but had yet to be taken down. Back in 2019, then-Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams visited NYCHA's Howard Houses in Brownsville to draw attention to a problem that had bothered residents at the development for years.
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