NYCHA Offers Lead Tests For Kids In Improperly Painted Apartments

NEW YORK, NY — The New York City Housing Authority will offer free lead tests for nearly 3,000 kids living in apartments where efforts to fix lead paint may have been botched, officials announced Friday.

NYCHA will offer the tests starting Monday for kids aged 6 months to 8 years who live in the 2,300 apartments that workers repainted last year without proper certification. Those apartments are among 4,200 units housing kids younger than 6 that are presumed to have had lead paint, NYCHA has said.

Residents of these 2,300 apartments will get a letter under their door and phone calls telling them how to schedule a lead test. They must call a hotline to schedule an appointment at 347-507-3684.

"Resident safety is our top priority," Shola Olatoye, NYCHA's embattled chairwoman and CEO, said in a statement. "We want to make sure families know about this free testing to address any concerns and provide peace of mind."

Any kid who shows elevated levels of lead in his or her blood — five micrograms is considered the threshold — will be "connected to care," NYCHA said.

The tests follow a daming city Department of Investigation report last month that revealed the housing authority didn't properly check apartments for lead for four years but falsely told federal officials the tests had been done when NYCHA leaders knew they hadn't.

Olatoye has said she ordered inspections of the 4,200 apartments as soon as she found out about the testing lapse in April 2016. City law requires that NYCHA perform visual inspections of those apartments every year.

But officials have acknowledged that lead paint in the 2,300 apartments was painted over by workers who lacked the proper federal certifications, raising concerns from elected officials about whether those they could still be dangerous.

NYCHA's letter to tenants advertising the free tests also acknowledges the certificaiton problem.

"The Authority now knows that the work may have been conducted by employees who lacked the appropriate certification to conduct that work," reads the letter, signed by Olatoye and city Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett. "NYCHA is working hard to correct and improve our program for remediation of potential lead-based paint issues."

NYCHA maintained Friday that there's a low risk of "significant" lead exposure in its apartments. Just 17 kids in public housing showed elevated blood lead levels from 2010 to 2016, while the number of children with lead poisoning citywide has dropped 69 percent since 2005, officials have said.

City officials say none of the 17 lead-poinsoned kids in NYCHA apartments showed lasting health effects. But Sherron Paige, a NYCHA employee who lives in the Red Hook East Houses complex, told the Village Voice her son Kyan has shown signs of a learning disability. NYCHA took years to repair a hole in her apartment's wall that had exposed lead paint, she told the paper.

"He’s lived in Red Hook since the day he was born, and I still don’t know if he’s safe," Paige said at a City Council committee hearing last week.

NYCHA residents who want to participate in the lead tests should bring a photo ID and will need to sign forms allowing their kids to be tested.

(Lead image: A NYCHA complex in East Harlem is seen in 2015. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)