Health department in on the deception
done.”
NYCHA made no mention of this to HUD. In fact, after an Aug. 1, 2012, Daily News front page saying, “Sack them all,” which targeted NYCHA mismanagement and the huge work-order backlog, NYCHA — behind the scenes — claimed to HUD it had fixed the backlog problem.
The feds found that NYCHA simply cooked the books, manipulating statistics to make it seem as if the backlog had been significantly reduced. “A significant portion of NYCHA’s backlog reduction involved simply moving needed work off the books,” they wrote.
The feds discovered that between August 2012 and December 2013, NYCHA moved 200,000 work orders off the books. It did this by claiming tenants were not home — a policy crafted by top NYCHA management specifically to shrink the backlog, the feds said.
In a May 5, 2013, report, The News revealed that NYCHA was cutting the backlog by closing thousands of repair requests without doing the repairs. NYCHA denied that was happening.
The News also revealed that NYCHA had a policy of automatically contesting the Health Department’s findings when it registered lead paint in an apartment where a child had tested positive for high blood-lead levels.
In 2015, after The News revealed the Health Department had identified 202 children with blood lead over 10 micrograms per deciliter in NYCHA apartments, NYCHA said its tests showed only 18 were confirmed cases. Since then, the agency has confirmed one more case.
The prosecutors question the validity of NYCHA’s results, citing cases revealed by The News of apartments that tested positive for lead after NYCHA claimed there wasn’t any.
“There is every reason to believe the true number of children with lead poisoning is materially higher,” the report says. Then there’s the problem of vermin. In 2015 a city health inspector criticized NYCHA for its failure to combat vermin, predicting new kitchen cabinets installed in one apartment “will quickly become a beautiful rat condo” because the installation left a gap that would allow vermin inside.
The feds cited a 2016 work order from a tenant at Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses who wrote, “Too many mice. They climb on my baby crib and I have an asthmatic child and it affects him.” And the feds noted a report about the presence of a “labyrinth of rat burrows” below the Patterson Houses in the Bronx in 2016.
The News was the source of that disclosure.