NYCHA execs feared they’d be ‘toast’ if truth told
A DAMNING federal report on mismanagement at the city Housing Authority shows that NYCHA and the city Health Department deliberately and repeatedly misled the public — often in response to Daily News exposés on public housing failures.
On June 12, 2016 — the day The News revealed the scope of lead poisoning in children who live in NYCHA apartments — NYCHA and the Health Department issued a press release titled, “Lead-based Paint and NYCHA: Facts.”
The feds said that the release “falsely stated that NYCHA has done ‘rigorous work’ to ‘remediate any lead-based paint and performs annual inspections of units for lead’ without disclosing that these inspections had just started the month before.”
The Health Department added its own “fact,” claiming, “Prevention and abatement efforts at NYCHA properties are an unqualified success,” the report states. But at the time, senior NYCHA officials knew that they’d failed to perform required lead paint inspections for years.
They also lied after The News reported on April 13, 2015, about a little girl at a Brooklyn development who had registered high blood-lead levels.
In response, the NYCHA execs sent a letter to tenants and elected officials that stated their agency “complies with federal, state and city regulations” and that the Health Department found the “vast majority of NYCHA developments” do not have lead paint.
“At that time at least two senior NYCHA managers involved in drafting this presentation knew that more than half of NYCHA developments had been confirmed to have at least some lead paint on the premises and roughly 30% of those NYCHA developments had been confirmed to have lead paint in apartments,” the prosecutors wrote.
Behind the scenes, NYCHA officials worried about the press finding out what was really going on.
One executive explained in an email, “If (the press) show up and the resident shows a surface with defective paint, that we have already identified as such, then shows a disclosure stating that the failed coating is presumed to contain lead but we are waiting before we remediate to do further testing knowing a child resides in the apt, we are toast.”
The Manhattan U.S. attorney noted that NYCHA often didn’t react to tenants’ repeated complaints until the press got involved.
A senior NYCHA executive noted her concern that “Greg got the same email” about a tenant with a nasty water bug problem. The prosecutors noted this was “presumably Greg Smith, a New York Daily News reporter.” The worry got an investigation into the complaint.
In 2012 and 2013, NYCHA made false statements to the federal Housing and Urban Development Department and the public about its maintenance work-order backlog — claiming reductions came from “improved efficiency.” But, the report found, “much of this reduction resulted not from ‘improved efficiency’ but from NYCHA’s manipulation of the work-order process so that it no longer reflected the work that NYCHA knew needed to be