Time to lead on lead

For years, the New York City Housing Authority has dodged its obligation to protect its smallest tenants from toxic lead paint, slipping through a loophole in safety rules. No more, if the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development keeps up its nerve with a plan to force NYCHA and other housing authorities to prevent kids’ poisoning.

As the Daily News revealed earlier this year, since 2010 city health officials have identified at least 202 children living in NYCHA apartments with dangerously elevated levels of lead in their blood — poisoning associated with potentially irreversible damage to developing brains.

Nearly half lived in apartments containing lead paint from decades past, which crumbles loose with time in decaying housing projects.

But in most cases, NYCHA left the tainted paint be. Even though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control since 2012 has urged intervention for children with even low levels of lead in their bloodstreams, HUD and the city health department only mandate action once kids are more severely poisoned.

Even then, NYCHA frequently prevails in challenging city tests showing lead paint risks in an apartment where a poisoned kid lives.

HUD now wants to apply the CDC’s tougher standard — meaning that many more children than the hundreds known to be poisoned could be revealed so.

The Housing Authority would be obligated to promptly get the lead out of each of their apartments, as well as scour their buildings for crumbling lead paint, or stand to lose federal funding.

Goodbye, wiggle room to evade responsibility to kids, even as Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara investigates the alarming possibility that NYCHA misrepresented its lead-cleanup efforts.

NYCHA Chair Shola Olatoye has until the end of Halloween to tell the federal government what she thinks of the looming lead-poisoning crackdown. Her bag is all out of tricks.