When it rains, it pours — right through her ceiling. But the 70-year-old woman, who lives in the King Towers in Harlem, is prepared. The public housing resident has created an elaborate network of aluminum foil aqueducts, taped to the ceiling to channel the deluge into buckets placed strategically on the floor. The jury-rigged funnel system keeps the rainfall off her television, her stove and her 2-year-old son, Josito.

Konrad Aderer joins Brownsville pastor Father Ed Mason and hundreds of city housing residents and faith leaders from Metro IAF as they take to the steps of City Hall to call on Mayor de Blasio to take charge of NYCHA, the dysfunctional New York City agency in charge of public housing.

Frustrated tenants and advocates rallied outside City Hall Thursday, calling for NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye to step down.

Almost 300,000 New Yorkers are on the waiting list for a spot inside a New York City Housing Authority Building yet hundreds of apartments remain vacant, some for more than 10 years. But NYCHA says vacancy rates are the lowest in a decade and that it can’t make the necessary repairs without the necessary funding.

A coalition of churches and public housing tenants frustrated by perceived inaction by NYCHA plans to call for the agency’s chairwoman to step down

At Maria Santana’s public housing apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, dirty, black water has periodically poured in from the walls, from the pipes, from the radiator. She says the problems started two years ago. “It’s so much water, it looks like it’s raining in here. I am scared,” Santana said. She has placed buckets throughout her apartment. Her couch is covered in plastic to keep it from getting wet.

When the head of the New York City Housing Authority met with residents at a chapel in Brownsville on Tuesday night, there were questions about failing radiators, missing kitchen sinks, moldy walls, broken doors, pigeon excrement and more. These were all part of a more general question: A year into his administration, to what extent is Mayor de Blasio accountable for the continuing maintenance woes at NYCHA, which has been shortchanged by all levels of government for at least a decade?

Mayor de Blasio has made the creation of higher density apartments in East New York the centerpiece of his housing agenda. Oddly, his administration never bothered to ask us for our thoughts on its plans to build on the work we’ve been succesfully doing there for 30 years.

Ten-year-old James Ford, who suffers from asthma, has been in and out of the hospital this school year — missing nearly 30 days at Public School 138 in the Bronx. And instead of doing the things boys generally do on the weekends, the public housing resident is taking classes on Saturdays just to finish fifth grade on time. (click link for more)

With Albany preoccupied with an election that inspires no one outside of the capitol bubble and with City Hall distracted by an inability to deal with a staffing crisis of its own making, it might seem foolhardy to expect the city and state’s top political leaders to look 20 years ahead. But that’s what the distracted mayor and preoccupied governor must do if a deepening crisis in senior housing and senior services is to be averted. (click link for more)

When Mayor de Blasio appeared last Sunday before 2,200 leaders from Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, he was already beginning to pivot away from his bruising, but successful, struggle to secure pre-K funding and to talk about other important issues, housing being the most prominent.

The New York City Housing Authority will deal more quickly and more thoroughly with mold in its apartments as part of an agreement by the Bloomberg administration to settle a federal lawsuit by people living in housing projects and coping with asthma. (click link for more)

On New Year’s Eve last year, Rossana de la Cuadra wasn’t celebrating. She was in the hospital with her six-year-old daughter, Amanda Santos, who was experiencing yet another severe asthma attack. An inspection of the family’s apartment, in the city-owned Van Dyke building in East New York, Brooklyn, revealed a possible threat to Amanda’s health: heavy mold growth in the bathroom and moisture on the walls, including in Amanda’s bedroom. (click link for more)

EXCLUSIVE: The federal judicial intervention is seen as a step toward resolving NYCHA’s inability to tackle an issue that affects hundreds of tenants citywide. Tenants and their attorneys can now go directly to a judge to slap financial penalties on the agency if it doesn’t get the job done right. (click link for more)