NYC Punishes Landlords For Conditions Own Tenants Know Too Well

NEW YORK, NY — New York City announced sanctions Monday against dozens of landlords for letting thousands of tenants languish in deteriorating conditions, even as the city struggles to fix some of the same problems in its public-housing complexes.

The Office of Housing Preservation and Development added 250 buildings containing more than 4,000 apartments to its "Alternative Enforcement Program," subjecting their owners to fees and tougher inspections if they don't make legally mandated repairs, officials said.

The buildings — more than half of which are in Brooklyn — have together racked up more than 4,800 "immediately hazardous" violations, including the presence of lead-based paint and a lack of heat or hot water, city officials said. Other such violations include rodent infestations, inadequate fire exits and no electricity or gas.

The staggering number of violations means the city can order landlords to fix them, impose extra fees and conduct "roof to cellar" inspections at the buildings, officials said. The landlords already owe more than $1.5 million for repairs the city made after landlords let problems fester for too long.

"This kind of willful negligence puts tenants in danger," Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. "It is immoral and illegal and we will use every tool we have to go after property owners and make these buildings safe for New York families."

Since its inception in 2007, the Alternative Enforcement Program has forced repairs worth more than $74 million in more than 1,600 buildings containing more than 22,000 apartments, city officials said.

The city puts 250 buildings into the program each year that enough open housing law violations. The violations can be in the "immediately hazardous" category, or slightly less serious but still severe, such as leaks or holes.

New York City Housing Authority tenants are familiar with some of those conditions, including the threat of lead-based paint and a lack of heat.

The city-run agency failed to inspect apartments for lead for four years despite telling federal officials the inspections had been done, a Department of Investigation report revealed in November. And more than 80 percent of NYCHA apartments have lost heat or hot water at some point since October, even as temperatures plunged in the winter months, officials admitted last week.

The failures constitute violations of city, state and federal laws, according to lawyers and investigators. Four senior officials have resigned from the beleaguered housing authority since the scandals became public.

But de Blasio has blamed both problems on a dearth of federal funding, which started declining in the 1980s. City officials under de Blasio have tried to fill funding gaps and meet NYCHA's capital needs, which reportedly total $25 billion.

Private landlords, on the other hand, "have a lot more resources to work with" when it comes to making legally mandated repairs, de Blasio said.

"We’re going to do the best we can with what we got," de Blasio said at an unrelated news conference last week. "It’s a very different reality than what the private sector faces. It’s a very different reality than buildings that were built for upper-middle-class people, for example, or well-off people."

NYCHA has said it's hiring more workers to repair its struggling boilers, and it created an internal compliance department to ensure it follows lead-testing rules. De Blasio has stuck by NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye despite calls for her resignation, saying she's helped the struggling agency make progress in her four-year tenure.

At a hearing last week, City Councilwoman Alicka Ampry-Samuel, the chair of the Council's Committee on Public Housing, said NYCHA's problems would be treated differently if the housing authority were a private landlord.

"We'd be talking about punishment, we'd be talking about fines and frankly, we'd be talking about jail," the Brooklyn Democrat said.

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks outside a NYCHA complex on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2014. Photo by Rob Bennett for the Office of Mayor Bill de Blasio)