State Human Rights Cops Tag NYCHA With Fair Housing Suit, Alleging It Failed To Reasonably Accommodate Disabled 3rd Floor Tenant With Ground Floor Apartment During 13-Week Shutdown Of Building's Elevators For Modernization

In New York City, DNA Info New York reports:

• NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] discriminated against a disabled tenant who walks with a limp when it denied his request to move to a ground-floor apartment during a planned 13-week shutdown of his building's elevators, a new lawsuit charges.
  
  The lawsuit, filed by the state's Division of Human Rights, says the tenant, Alaba Hamzat, who has nerve and muscle damage in his left leg due to childhood polio, was forced to take the stairs to get to and from his third-floor apartment in the Robert F. Wagner Houses while the elevators were out of service.
  
  "They didn't treat me right," Hamzat, 57, said during an interview []. "They have no feelings for people with disabilities."
  
  The lawsuit, filed last week in Manhattan Supreme Court, says Hamzat continuously asked for a transfer during the two years before the planned service shutdown, which began in August 2013.
  
  He spoke to NYCHA's management office about a move shortly after the Housing Authority issued a July 2011 letter to Wagner Houses tenants informing them that their elevators would undergo a major modernization.
  
  In February 2012, a NYCHA manager visited Hamzat's apartment and later promised it would move him and his family to an accessible unit, the lawsuit says.
  
  Despite the assurances, NYCHA didn't move them.
  
  ***
  Hamzat said he was forced to take the stairs for several weeks.
  
  "I had no option. I had to go down to work and take my kids to school," he said.
  
  Hamzat said he suffered a back injury from using the stairs. He said the pain eventually became so bad that he had to move out of the apartment before the elevator shutdown ended Nov. 16, 2013.
  
  His family remained in the Wagner Houses apartment until February 2014, when Hamzat found an apartment in Newark where they could all live together.

For more, see Disabled NYCHA Tenant Had to Climb Stairs During 3-Month Elevator Shutdown.