This spring, the judge in the tenants’ case ordered new inspections, saying there was a “credibility issue” with testing overseen by the Housing Authority.
A new round of visual checks this year found hazards such as peeling paint in 92 percent of the apartments that were checked.
Federal authorities have said the city Housing Authority failed to conduct lead paint inspections and then falsely claimed it had. The revelations have hurt Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reputation as a champion for public housing.CreditJeenah Moon for The New York Times
Warring agencies
Not that long ago, the city was busy trying to convince a court that lead was a widespread hazard throughout its public housing. In 1989, city lawyers sued companies that made lead paint, accusing them of knowingly selling a poisonous product, much like the successful lawsuits against tobacco companies.
The lawsuit failed. Nycha’s own design specifications showed that except for two developments — Williamsburg in Brooklyn and the Harlem River Houses in Manhattan — the authority had never used the specific type of lead at issue in the suit. Another type of lead was more commonly used on building components, but that was not part of the lawsuit.
From 1998 to 2004, Nycha inspectors testing a sampling of apartments concluded there was lead in less than a third of its buildings. The inventory became a kind of bible: The apartments in buildings that were not on the list, such as the Gowanus and Tompkins Houses, where Mikaila lives, were assumed not to have lead.
But Nycha could have known something was most likely wrong with the list by watching its youngest tenants.
New York State law requires children to be screened for lead exposure even before they can walk, and annually up to age 6 if they are at particular risk. If the amount of lead in a child’s blood hits a certain threshold, it sets off a mechanism: The doctor contacts the city Health Department, which sends an inspector to test the child’s home for lead paint.
In 2015, 171 children in New York City public housing tested positive for elevated lead, down from 517 in 2010.
The Housing Authority was ordered by the Health Department inspector to remove lead in a child’s apartment an average of two dozen times a year from 2010 through 2017, records show.
But city and court records show the authority rebutted the Health Department’s findings as a matter of routine.
Deborah Morrison measured her son Saheed’s growth on a door inside her home at the Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn.CreditKholood Eid for The New York Times
The Health Department would do a test using an X-ray fluorescence device called an X.R.F. analyzer, which looks like a ray gun and can measure lead through layers of paint. Nycha would follow up by digging out samples in the apartment and sending them to a lab, called a paint-chip test.
In a 1999 affidavit, Brian Clarke, then the coordinator of the Housing Authority’s lead detection and abatement unit, had disparaged the paint-chip technique. “A false negative can result,” he said in an affidavit.
But the paint-chip test eventually became the Housing Authority’s preferred method to challenge the Health Department’s tests.
“By the course of business, when we issue violations, Nycha does their own check,” Michel Meulens, a Health Department inspector, testified in October 2017 in a trial involving a child who tested positive for lead in 2003. The case ended in a settlement.
Mr. Clarke, who declined to comment for this article, would eventually rise to the upper echelons of the authority, as a senior vice president for operations. He was one of several top executives to be forced out late last year over his handling of the lead paint scandal. Shola Olatoye, the chairwoman of Nycha, was also among the executives who were ousted. She declined a request for comment.
The goal in challenging the Health Department’s findings, much like it was for the paint companies years before, was to shield the city from lawsuits by showing that the high lead levels in these children came from somewhere other than the home where they lived and played, officials said. The stakes are high: In January, a jury ordered Nycha to pay $57 million to the family of Dakota Jade Taylor, a child with high levels of lead in her blood. The sum is being negotiated.
The authority believed its approach was valid because the Health Department so often rescinded its orders, Stanley Brezenoff, the interim Nycha chairman, said recently in an interview.
The Housing Authority cannot say precisely when it began challenging the city’s own findings of lead. Staffers recalled that the practice dates at least to the late 1990s, Jasmine Blake, an authority spokeswoman, wrote in an emailed statement.
It continued until September when, after inquiries from The Times, the de Blasio administration reversed course.
“We are now in a posture of not contesting,” Mr. Brezenoff said. “Whatever the merits of a particular case, or whatever is involved, we’re accepting whatever the finding of the Health Department is.”
It was a lesson private landlords learned years ago. “There’s a concern and a fear on the part of the owners about liability. They just do it,” said Frank Ricci, director of government affairs for the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents residential building owners. “The landlord calls a certified contractor to come and correct the condition wherever D.O.H. has designated they’ve found lead.”
Warring between government agencies has bewildered families.
Deborah Morrison, 51, a substitute teacher and resident of the Gowanus Houses, recalled when her son, Saheed, tested positive for lead in 2010. Now a soft-spoken 11-year-old, Saheed excels in designing cartoon characters on his phone but needs special help in school. Saheed Morrison, 11, near a wall where lead was detected in his home at the Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn. Health inspectors found lead at a second location in the apartment, but the Housing Authority disputed the findings.CreditKholood Eid for The New York Times
Ms. Morrison said Housing Authority workers used gypsum board to cover a portion of her bedroom wall, close to where Saheed had slept in a crib for the first years of his life.
She did not realize until told by a reporter that the authority had successfully disputed a Health Department finding of lead e paint in a second location, on a hallway pipe. No work was done there, according to city records.
“See, now you got me, because I didn’t even know there was two,” she said.
Lead paint had been found during renovations in the mid-1990s in the Gowanus Houses, Barry Stabile, a former Housing Authority employee involved in the work, said in an interview. But based on its sampling from 1998 to 2004, the Housing Authority did not include the Gowanus Houses on its list of complexes assumed to have lead paint. That did not change even after Saheed tested positive, and the authority worked on his home.
So when federal regulators visited the Gowanus Houses in 2015 on a routine inspection — when Saheed was 8 and Mikaila barely 2 — they did not treat the peeling paint they saw almost everywhere as a health hazard, according to HUD.
Neither did the Housing Authority. For both agencies, the deteriorating paint was just a maintenance problem.
This year, Mr. de Blasio promised to spend $80 million for testing next year to figure out, once and for all, where the lead paint is. The city will be inspecting apartments built before 1978, approximately 140,000 units out of 176,000 that the Housing Authority maintains, and the inspectors will be relying mainly on X.R.F. analyzers for the hunt.
Them not having trust in adults and pro genociders is about as hopeful as you can ask