Lead paint flip-flop Blaz blasted NYCHA as candidate, covered for it as mayor
As mayor, Bill de Blasio has tried to downplay the problem of lead paint at NYCHA, insisting only a handful of children were lead poisoned and that there was no proof conditions in public housing were the cause.
But back in February 2013 when he was running for mayor, the then-public advocate had a very different perspective on the outside looking in.
At the time, then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg had made an ambitious promise to close more than 400,000 open repair requests by the end of the year. That included around 100 requests by tenants to inspect their apartments for the presence of lead paint.
De Blasio requested that NYCHA provide data on the work-order reduction effort, and by July of that year, he got a response claiming the number of repair requests had dropped by 50,000 in the first two weeks of February.
An incredulous de Blasio questioned the legitimacy of that claim in a scathing letter to then-NYCHA Chairman John Rhea. In particular, he made a point of raising his concerns about lead paint inspections.
In a July 9, 2013, letter to Rhea obtained by the Daily News, de Blasio specifically noted, “Outstanding work order requests for asbestos and lead paint removal are among the most troubling given the health risks posed by these materials.
“At Isaacs Houses and Whitman Houses, repair requests for lead removal have been outstanding for three years,” he wrote. “At the Jacob Riis Houses and Baruch Houses work order requests for asbestos removal have been sitting for two years.”
And he made a point of noting the potentially harmful health effects caused by elevated levels of lead in a child’s blood or exposure to asbestos can do damage to children’s health.
“It is critically important that NYCHA prioritize these repairs which could carry significant health risks to NYCHA residents,” he wrote.
Until last month, the mayor has repeatedly claimed only 19 children had been lead poisoned while living in NYCHA over the last 6 years. He’s downplayed the scope of the problem, at one point last November going so far as to say, “Thank God there has not been harm done to any child because of the mistakes that have been made.”
Last month, The News revealed that from 2012 through 2016, there were 820 children under 6 years old living in NYCHA that had registered elevated levels of blood-lead that the federal Centers for Disease Control considers of concern. Because the city used a higher level of exposure to trigger an investigation, the city did not inspect those apartments.
After The News pushed for the release of the numbers, de Blasio took the unprecedented step of announcing during a TV appearance that he had ordered lead testing of 130,000 NYCHA apartments -- far more than the 55,000 NYCHA had planned to test.