Lead woes in Section 8
Subsidized apts. left unchecked
The city failed to perform proper lead paint oversight not just in public housing but also in thousands of private sector buildings where the rent is subsidized with taxpayer dollars.
Department of Housing Preservation & Development Commissioner Maria TorresSpring on Tuesday — out of the blue — announced that it had conducted a top-to-bottom reexamination of its lead paint program and discovered numerous areas where federal regulations on inspection and abatement weren’t followed.
The department is responsible for overseeing and inspecting 40,000 private sector apartments that receive federal funding, mostly via the Section 8 program that subsidizes rent for low-income tenants. That includes 4,000 apartments with children under 6.
On Tuesday the Housing Department for the first time admitted it has failed to follow federal regulations regarding lead paint inspections. The department’s statement did not spell out how many children lived in the apartments where these failures occurred.
The reinspection was ordered by Torres-Springer in July shortly after the city and NYCHA signed a consent decree with federal prosecutors admitting they’d failed for years to perform required lead paint inspections in public housing.
NYCHA admitted from 2012 through 2015 it simply stopped doing annual lead paint inspections required by local law and federal regulations, and through most of 2017 used untrained workers to inspect and clean up lead paint from apartments.
Landlords are responsible for annual lead paint inspections in private apartments with young children, but the Housing Department must inspect all apartments when they become vacant. Commissioner Torres-Springer insisted that the department has been performing these initial inspections and if peeling paint was discovered, landlords were ordered to clean it up.
But on Tuesday the agency admitted it did little to no followup on the apartments to make sure landlords had actually cleaned up the problem.
Since 2016, they say they’ve found 186 apartments and 15 1- or 2-family homes with children under six where these followups never occurred. Since June they reinspected these units make sure the lead paint was abated.
They also did no followup in the common areas of 2,300 buildings with 3,645 households. All of these areas are now being reinspected with the city hoping to finish up by mid-November.
In announcing the reinspections Tuesday, the department used vague bureaucratic language, stating that “process enhancement needed to be made to ensure owner adherence to all federal guidelines for lead paint removal.”
Torres-Springer initiated the reexamination of its Section 8 units in July shortly after Mayor de Blasio announced a more aggressive effort to combat lead poisoning both at NYCHA and in private apartments.