NEW YORK — Victoria Leltenant was watching the news in her 17th-floor apartment in the Bronx on Wednesday morning when she heard a boom and felt the building shake. The broadcast went dark. Smoke filled the air.
In a panic, she scrambled outside to find that an entire corner of the 20-story building she had lived in for four decades had crashed to the ground in a pile of rubble.
She had left her phone and all of her belongings inside the building, which is part of a public housing development in the Mott Haven neighborhood called the Mitchel Houses.
“I just want to go home,” Leltenant, 74, said as she waited in a crowd of people outside the building. None of the building’s roughly 350 residents were injured, authorities said.
Many of the more than 300,000 people who live in New York City’s deteriorating public housing have become accustomed to dealing with leaks, mold and faulty elevators. But the partial collapse Wednesday, which followed an explosion in a ventilation shaft connected to the boiler room, brought a new level of fear about conditions in a system that was already estimated to need $80 billion in repairs and other improvements over the next 20 years.
Hours after the initial collapse, objects continued to fall from the building.
“You’ve got to think about it: If that happened in that building, are we safe in any other buildings?” said Marsha Williams, the president of the Mitchel Houses tenant association.
It was not immediately clear Wednesday what had led to the explosion. The boiler room, which helps provide the development with heat and hot water, is on the lowest level of the building.
Mayor Eric Adams noted during a news conference that Wednesday was the first day of the city’s heating season, during which all building owners have to maintain an indoor temperature of at least 68 degrees. City officials said there was some kind of work being done on the boiler.
The public housing agency, the New York City Housing Authority, has increasingly struggled to keep its buildings in good shape. From 2001-17, for example, federal capital funding — money for repairs and upgrades — declined nearly 20% even as needs grew. And while the funding has increased over the past few years, conditions have gotten worse.
Mitchel Houses, built in 1966 and home to about 3,500 people, accounts for about $717 million of those needs, according to city data, including about $118 million for the buildings’ exterior and other structural issues.
The housing authority, under Adams, has increasingly sought to rehabilitate its portfolio by shifting many developments to private management.
“No one should be surprised by today’s tragic incident,” said Jessica Katz, the city’s former chief housing officer under Adams who is continuing to work on NYCHA improvements. “It’s a miracle there were no injuries today. But with a portfolio of 2,400-plus public housing buildings citywide, we can’t afford to keep playing games with residents’ lives.”
© 2025 The New York Times Company