NYCHA Knowingly Housed Kids In Lead-Poisoned Apartments: Report

NEW YORK, NY — The New York City Housing Authority put families with young children in apartments that it knew contained lead paint, but told the tenants nothing about the danger, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday. Some of the kids living in those units suffered from lead poisoning and now show signs of developmental problems, the story says.

Some 1,600 NYCHA apartments tested positive for lead between 2013 and 2015, but the housing authority didn't tell new tenants about the hazard when they moved in because they had ostensibly been repaired and deemed "clean," the Daily News reported.

But the fixes were done in many cases by workers who weren't certified to remediate lead, meaning the danger never went away, according to the report.

The Daily News interviewed nine NYCHA tenants whose young kids have shown elevated levels of lead in their blood. Several of them have had trouble learning to talk or are in special-education programs in school, the paper reported.

Since the city Department of Investigation revealed yearslong lapses in lead inspections in November, NYCHA has maintained that kids living in public housing have not shown any lasting health effects from lead poisoning.

NYCHA argues the Daily News story is misleading. The housing authority has eliminated the risk of lead through certified abatement work before new tenants moved into more than 5,000 apartments since 2012, NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said in an email.

"Contrary to the story’s claims that residents were left unaware, NYCHA’s standard procedure is to provide every resident, upon move-in, a notice of the status of lead in their unit and the common areas of their building, for units built prior to 1978," Blake said, referring to the year in which lead-based paint was outlawed nationwide.

Read the full Daily News report here.

(Lead image: NYCHA's Farragut Houses complex in Brooklyn is pictured in March. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)