NEW YORK, NY August 26, 2008 —It's been a week since a five-year-old boy died after falling down an elevator shaft at a Brooklyn public housing complex, but residents in other buildings are still concerned about the safety of their elevators. Several of them lit candles for the boy in front of the housing authority yesterday. Dolores Quintero lives at the Jefferson Houses in East Harlem and says she takes the stairs to avoid getting stuck in the elevator.

QUINTERO: Many times I would hear the alarm go off and I would have to actually call the emergency unit to ask somebody to come and take them out.

REPORTER: The tenants say the housing authority's budget woes are leaving their buildings in disrepair. The housing authority says there were close to 44,000 elevator outages throughout its 343 developments this fiscal year, down eight percent from the year before. And close to a third were due to vandalism.