‘Game’ was to keep HuD in the dark
NYCHA officials “gamed” the system to trick the feds into thinking they were following the rules.
Nearly 70% of NYCHA’s day-to-day funding comes from the federal Housing and Urban Development Department, and HUD performs regular inspections of its buildings to make sure the authority is providing habitable housing with that money.
As a result, NYCHA goes out of its way to make HUD think everything is fine, even if that means deliberately fooling inspectors who show up for what’s called a Public Housing Assessment (PHA). In a blistering report Monday, the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office documented how NYCHA officials treated the HUD inspections as a game.
The game was openly discussed via email.
In 2013, a NYCHA superintendent emailed staffers to notify them, “We’re hiding four big pails of oil behind your containers for our PHAs inspection today.” The email was forwarded to a top NYCHA executive, the report said.
At some buildings, NYCHA managers hid chronic water leaks from HUD inspectors by shutting off the water before inspectors showed. Sometimes workers were told simply to wrap duct tape over holes in pipes just before a scheduled inspection.
Other times the game was a last-minute affair. At one development, a NYCHA supervisor instructed elevator technicians “to stay one building ahead of PHAs inspector” during an inspection. That was apparently too risky — the next year the technicians were told to stay two buildings ahead of the HUD team.
In one development, a NYCHA manager installed a refrigerator motor inside a broken roof fan and turned it on so the sound would fool the HUD inspector into thinking the fan worked. This trick succeeded, the report noted.
Newspaper was stuffed into holes in walls and painted over. Foam spray was used to make flaking plaster seem intact.
“NYCHA management even included a document with suggestions for deceiving inspectors in NYCHA’s official training materials,” the report found.
That guide included “quick fix” suggestions, including using painted cardboard to replace busted wall tiles, substituting missing drains with custom-made plywood covers, complete with drilled holes “for drainage,” and moving all gasoline-powered equipment outside the day of the inspection.
The quick-fix tips were standard operating procedure for more than 10 years and were well known to top NYCHA management. They were only removed in last summer after the feds started asking questions about the tips in front of NYCHA’s lawyers, the report noted.