NYCHA Checking Common Areas For Lead After Lapse

NEW YORK, NY — The New York City Housing Authority has started inspecting common areas in several of its buildings for lead paint after another yearslong lapse in legally mandated tests, officials said Thursday.

By the end of March, NYCHA will perform lead inspections in entrances, stairwells and other public areas in more than 250 of its apartment complexes, according to a letter the housing authority sent to residents Wednesday.

The housing authority admitted that inspections of common areas "have not been systematically conducted" since a city law mandating them was passed in 2003.

The housing authority also shirked its obligation under that law, Local Law 1 of 2004, to inspect individual apartments presumed to have lead paint that house young children, the city Department of Investigation said in a report issued last month.

"This is another requirement we’re undertaking aggressively as we move the agency into full compliance," NYCHA spokeswoman Ilana Maier said in an email.

The city law requires all landlords, including NYCHA, to check for lead hazards in any building where kids younger than 6 live that's presumed to have lead paint. The city probe found NYCHA stopped inspecting individual apartments in 2012.

NYCHA workers checked common areas in some buildings when necessary, but there has never been a "protocol" to inspect all of them as required, housing authority spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said in an email.

The buildings NYCHA is now inspecting contain 8,960 apartments where a kid younger than 6 lives, Blake said.

The revelation peels back another layer of a scandal that has bedeviled NYCHA and its leadership for more than a month.

NYCHA is working to finish inspections in all affected apartments by the end of the year and repair any outstanding lead hazards by March 31, Chairwoman Shola Olatoye said at Wednesday's housing authority board meeting.

Olatoye has said she learned of the lapse in inspections required by city law in April 2016. The DoI also found NYCHA failed to inspect as many as 55,000 apartments as required by federal lead-testing rules, even though top officials falsely told federal officials the inspections had been done.

The lack of inspections in common areas means tenants could have inadvertently tracked lead paint fragments or dust into their individual apartments, said Corey Stern, a lawyer representing NYCHA residents in a class-action lawsuit over lead poisoning.

"People who live in these communities, they don’t just live in their apartment," Stern said. "They can’t get to and from their apartment without going to common areas."

Stern said NYCHA should redo inspections in the thousands of apartments within buildings that haven't had their common areas checked.

The housing authority forced two top officials to resign and created an executive compliance office to ensure NYCHA follows all local, state and federal rules. Edna Wells Handy, the former legal counsel to NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill, started this week as NYCHA's first-ever chief compliance officer, Maier said.

NYCHA has pledged to continue inspecting potentially dangerous apartments and common areas every year as the law requires. This week it started offering free lead tests to kids living in apartments that had been repainted by workers who weren't certified to fix lead hazards.

Workers inspecting and repainting common areas are certified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Blake said.

(Lead image: A New York City Housing Authority complex is seen in Manhattan in March. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)