NYC Housing Authority routinely disputed tests that revealed lead in apartments | Hacker News Reader

NYC Housing Authority routinely disputed tests that revealed lead in apartments

nytimes.com

This is a case where you can spend 10K on lead remediation now, and the payback to society in terms of adults who didn't have lead poisoning is many fold. But then, we put the costs of that remediation on the people who have the least time and money to do it (people who are working and supporting small children). Do you know how cruel it is to ask someone who is living paycheck to paycheck to somehow magically come up with thousands of dollars or have their children be poisoned? But the city refuses to pay for it, by faking tests, so, it doesn't get done. This is not some kind of accidental neglect; it's intentionally being done by people who value their tax dollars in the short term literally more than poisoned children. It's tragic, the pointless, meaningless suffering.

I find it strange that tenants have and show very little agency in all this, except for sueing the city when their child is poisoned. City housing is not a right, it's a public subsidy, and the houses were built with the best interests of the tenants in mind, which unfortunately did not recognize lead hazards at the time.

I would expect tenants to be proactive and organize to have lead removed in time, by their own means if necessary, then recoup the costs from the city. As opposed to going for a settlement as if the taxpayer is a private landlord that provided them an inadequate product at market prices.

> I would expect tenants to be proactive and organize to have lead removed in time, by their own means if necessary,

Lead removal and/remediation is hard to do safely. We looked into this when deciding whether to buy an older house, which had flaking lead paint in interior rooms.

To avoid contaminating everything with lead dust, we would need to seal the area, control air pressure, keep surfaces damp, etc. We would need HEPA sanders and special training, among other things. We were told that it would cost us at least $18k to outsource, and that wouldn't cover the whole house.

So I don't know how people living in subsidized housing can be expected to manage lead remediation without assistance.

When the NYC Housing Authority was informed that tenants had extremely high levels of lead in their blood, and that independent tests showed high levels of lead in the apartment, they chose to deal with the problem by sending in their own testers, who said there was no lead. Given that pretty much every building constructed or repainted between the 40s and 1960 (in NY) has lead, I don't think the Housing Authority should be running its own tests. It certainly shouldn't be claiming to have run tests without actually having run them.

Why remove the paint? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to replace the Sheetrock/plaster?

Sheetrock, maybe, but I don't think those buildings (many of them constructed in the 1940's and 1950's) use sheetrock.

Plaster, almost certainly not.

Lead paint on the flats is less of an issue than lead paint on trim and windows. Trim because toddlers are down near there and some trim presents a nice target for an inquisitive mouth and windows because mechanical action tends to grind the paint, releasing lead dust which is slightly sweet.

The trim is intricate to sand and also would be fairly labor intensive to completely replace as well. (Let's face it: all of this comes down to money...)

Wouldn't replacing trim + windows. And painting over existing lead paint be good enough?

Replacing trim can't be that labor intensive. Especially if your going to paint all the walls anyways

This costs thousands of dollars. It may be even hard to find a compatible window frame for such old building.

Thousands is less than full removal of all the lead paint.

""" According to the EPA, professional lead-based paint removal for the following three options costs about $8 to $15 per square foot or about $9,600 to $30,000 for a 1,200- to 2,000-sq. ft. house. The average removal project costs about $10,000. """ https://www.houselogic.com/remodel/painting-lighting/lead-pa...

As other posters have noted, one of the biggest sources of lead is window trim. Replacing windows in old buildings is also a serious renovation—for example, I know a landlord who paid about $15,000 to replace the windows in a 3000-sq. ft. duplex about 20 years ago. And that doesn't fix door trim, baseboards, or flaking walls.

But more importantly, I've never met a landlord who'd let a tenant replace windows or sheetrock. And what tenant would spend $10,000+ renovating an apartment they don't own? Certainly this is not a viable solution for government-managed, low-income rental housing.

A large landlord, on the other hand, can amortize the cost over multiple buildings and multiple years, and they can order correctly-fitted replacement windows in bulk. It makes no financial sense for low-income tenants to do expensive, piecemeal lead remediation. It's just another long-term maintenance cost, like replacing the linoleum floors, fixing the roof, or replacing the building furnace. (Of course, it sounds like the housing authority wasn't doing that reliably, either.)

Nevermind the fact that poorly done lead removal work actually makes the problem worse, since you're going to produce a lot of lead containing dust that takes specialized skills and equipment to contain. Just doing that willy nilly (and on a budget) will likely expose you and your children to more lead than just leaving it be.

We ran into the same issue in Seattle, where much of the housing stock was built before 1950. Unfortunately, many people like the look of the original double hung windows, which have been repainted many times over the years, so you end up with single-pane lead dust generators throughout the house.

It's public housing. They're poor, and sometimes immigrants who don't necessarily speak English well. They don't have the time, information or resources to do all of this.

It’s pretty hard for middle class families to afford lead removal, with prices rising into the 5 digits per a peer’s comment. For those in public housing? Forget it.

> poor... immigrants who don't necessarily speak English

This is, sadly, sufficient reason for many to fail to sympathize with them and, remarkably, do so aloud in public with only the thinnest cloaks of pretense.

If it’s wrong for you or any other private citizen to do it there should be a strong presumption that it’s wrong for the government to do it.

As it clearly said in the article, the Housing Authority incorrectly and probably misleadingly asserted that only 92 of their 325 developments contained lead, and therefore avoided doing the mandatory lead inspections in those buildings.

> As opposed to going for a settlement as if the taxpayer is a private landlord that provided them an inadequate product at market prices.

So it's legally and morally acceptable for the government to rent out toxic housing, refuse to fix it, and lie about it, as long as it's below market price?

Yes, it's morally acceptable for the government to offer subsidized, best effort public services as long as it's not deceiving and knowingly putting people in harm's way. I'm thinking of something like "here's a house, it has toxic paint, but it can be fixed; do you want to live here and accept responsibility to fix the issue and any other, in return for a long term, predictable and low rent?".

The corruption here is of course morally reprehensible, but what I'm getting at is that the jobs of those involved shouldn't have existed, the conflict of interest shouldn't have existed between providing public aid and then being on the hook to get that aid to standards. It creates a massive perverse incentive for all those involved to pass the responsibility around until it all explodes in litigation, corruption and poisoned kids.

The lawyer fees alone on this one will prevent quite a few kids from getting a house, trapping them into a life of low academic achievement and no opportunity. Wouldn't it all be more effective if a best effort would be provided as such, and for example, allow elder people to live in the house with toxic paint, fully knowing that they are not to eat paint chips and taking responsibility for their actions?

The problem I have is with the chronic dis-empowerment against poor people under the guise of helping them.

> as long as it's not deceiving and knowingly putting people in harm's way

I think you've answered your own question here. This is exactly what the Housing Authority was doing, if the article is to be believed.

Well, now they do know the risks. Subsidized or free housing doesn't mean you have to accept that your child will never be normal--ever. Like giving a person a free sandwich, full of antifreeze. Hey, it's free...why blame me.

Frankly for these life ruining events I support JAIL for the officials. I'm sure laws, already in the books, require them to do the job correctly.

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