Caught failing to inspect thousands of public housing apartments for lead paint, NYCHA has launched a mad-dash campaign to get into residences — even if that means breaking in.
Last Tuesday, tenants across the city with children under 6 years old in apartments with presumed lead paint got a notice that inspections would take place the following Monday.
That notice came a week to the day after the city Department of Investigation revealed that for years, NYCHA was violating local law and federal regulations by failing to perform required lead paint checks.
At Pomonok Houses in Fresh Meadows, Queens, tenants were told if they weren’t home between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. Monday, NYCHA would “exercise the right to enter” anyway, removing and replacing door locks.
“We need to complete this inspection quickly,” the notice stated.
Tenants were instructed to pick up keys to replacement locks by no later than 4:30 p.m. — or bring photo ID to collect them later at the local police precinct.
The sudden push to inspect follows a recent city Department of Investigation report that revealed NYCHA had bungled these inspections for years. Last week, two senior managers were forced out and a third was demoted in a top-level shakeup to fix the lead paint inspection program.
On Saturday, NYCHA spokeswoman Jasmine Blake said the “not-at-home” policy has been in existence for years, and that the lock would be replaced only if the authority’s extra key didn’t work.
“This is standard policy for any large-scale inspection schedule to ensure we are meeting the schedule of the planned inspections and to manage the routes,” Blake said, asserting that tenants got a two-week and a five-business days notice, along with a robo-call 48 hours before the inspection date.
But Monica Corbett, president of Pomonok’s tenant association, said she got only a five-day notice — and it came in Spanish, a language she doesn’t speak or read. Because she is out of the house on her way to work by 5:30 a.m. weekdays, she won’t be home when inspectors show up Monday.
“It’s unfair that we’re being bullied that you have to be home. Most people have jobs and they can’t be home, especially after a holiday weekend,” Corbett, 43, said.
It’s particularly galling, she noted, that this emergency response follows the housing authority’s failure to do its job in the first place.
“It’s hard enough that they’re inconveniencing tenants because of a mistake they made,” she said. “Now they got to run around and make it look good.”
She knows about this mistake personally. Four years ago her son, Carver, then 4, registered a high level of lead in his blood.
At the time, NYCHA had not inspected her apartment for lead, although it was aware there was lead paint throughout Pomonok’s 35 buildings.
That’s because although NYCHA was failing to inspect all apartments with presumed lead paint annually as required, it does test apartments when a tenant moves out.
From 2013 through 2015, NYCHA found lead paint in 20 Pomonok apartments, including one a floor below Corbett’s in September 2013.
Shortly after his elevated blood-lead level was detected, Carver was designated by the city school system for a special education program, his mother said.
“It concerned me,” she said. “He wasn’t slow but he wasn’t hitting the milestones other kids had hit.”
Corbett is worried NYCHA’s new efforts to address this problem are still flawed.
Federal regulations require that NYCHA inspect all 55,000 apartments with presumed lead paint. But NYCHA will only be checking Pomonok apartments when children under 6 are listed as tenants.
That’s just 190 of Pomonok’s 2,071 units.
Corbett noted that NYCHA will not inspect apartments where young children spend days with grandparents while their parents are at work.
And she says the authority is using 2016 data to target apartments, which doesn’t include tenants who’ve had babies since Dec. 31, 2016.
“There’s a whole number of people who aren’t being served,” Corbett said. “They’re being very selective. And maybe there’s that apartment where they just had a baby but they will not test it.”
