Exclusive | Tens of thousands New Yorkers left without heat as temperatures drop to 4 and tenants blast Mamdani for failing to act

New Yorkers placed a staggering 80,000 calls to 311 reporting a lack of residential heat and hot water in January 2026 — the highest monthly total on record — as private and public housing tenants told The Post they were trapped in unlivable conditions and accused Mayor Zohran Mamdani of failing to act.The complaints poured in amid a brutal deep freeze, with tenants across the city reporting days without heat, ice-cold showers, and overnight shutoffs as temperatures plunged into the teens.Alex Hughes, a Williamsburg tenant, said the situation in his building has deteriorated so badly that he recently packed his bags and moved into a hotel.“We’ve had over 40 days of no hot water over the last 11 months.And we’re now on day eight or nine straight of no hot water,” Hughes told The Post.

“I had to walk 15 minutes in the snow and ice to a friend’s house so I could shower.”In Astoria, Queens, Nicole Pavez, 31, a city planner for the City of New York, said the current cold snap has pushed her building’s already unreliable heating system into crisis mode, forcing her to bundle up indoors and dress her dog in sweaters to keep him warm.“For the last week, the heat has been going out almost every night,” Pavez told The Post.“You wake up in the middle of the night freezing, and there’s nothing you can do except layer up and wait.”Public housing tenants have also been frozen in their homes, with one NYCHA resident blasting the authority as “the worst motherf—ing landlord” in a social media video and directly calling on the mayor to intervene as temperatures hovered near ten degrees.

Another tenant, Malik Williams, 27, who has lived at the Lehman Houses since 2009, said his apartment went without heat for most of January, forcing residents to rely on unsafe stopgaps.“Last month, we didn’t have any heat,” Williams told The Post.“We had to boil water on the stove just to keep the house warm.

We also bought portable heaters.” Heat was...