New York is a harbor city tied to a cold interior, and your house belongs to only one of those climates. Masonry, party walls, flat roofs, and slush belong to the city. Long freezes, deep snow, and pitched roofs that hold weight belong upstate, and upstate weather is not the city. A brownstone leak and a lake-plain ice dam are different calls. Name the place before you name the failure.
Housing follows the same split. In the city, many people live over or under someone else, with a roof they may not control and a wall they share. Upstate, the usual house is detached, with a basement, a yard, and a heating plant that has to carry a long winter. Buffalo adds lake-effect snow off the water, which is a different burden from a city storm that melts by afternoon. Do not describe one as if it were the other.
The trades follow the building. Roofs, windows, heat, and pipes fail where the weather gets in. A city parapet ponds water. An upstate eave grows an ice dam. Pests move through shared city walls, or they come in from a field edge when the freeze arrives. A bath in a walk-up is a stack and a small room. A bath in a detached house can have an outside wall that stays cold for months.
Have the facts ready and skip the tour of places you do not live. Say the city or upstate, the kind of building, and what changed. If this is a policy question, have the declarations page, the deductible, and whether you are calling about a claim or about the coverage you hold now. If water is moving or the heat is out, say that first. Photos can wait until someone asks for them.
This state is too large for one story about a house. New York City is the masonry and the harbor. Buffalo is the lake winter. Everywhere else on the map still needs an honest description of the building in front of you, not a borrowed one. Pick the trade that matches the failure, not the trade that sounds general. Pick the trade and call.