These Bronx Tenants Lived Six Weeks Without Water and Power. The City’s Fix? A Vacate Order

For more than six weeks, a Bronx family lived without running water, gas, or electricity—showering in a park and using the bathroom at Burger King—after their utilities mysteriously shut off in mid-August.

Now, after New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development says it was unable to help them get the services back over the past month and a half, it has ordered them to leave.

Tenant Violeta Ramos said HPD's vacate order gave her just days to find emergency housing through the Red Cross—and a place for her five cats—before the City arrived on Monday to order the locks changed.

"I am feeling so scared. I don't know where I'm supposed to go," said Ramos, who moved to New York from Mexico 30 years ago. "We have no family here. I'm lost."