Queensbridge tenants draw up class action suit against NYCHA for purposeful neglect

 

 NY Daily News

 Fed-up tenants of the Queensbridge Houses sued the New York City Housing Authority on Tuesday, citing hazardous conditions in the nation’s largest public housing complex and what they describe as illegal harassment.

Pamela Wheeler, 72, and Marilyn Keller, 58, are among 11 plaintiffs named in two lawsuits — one representing residents of the complex’s northern section, the other representing its southern section — filed in Queens Housing Court.

The suits come after years — and for some residents, decades — of complaints about quality-of-life issues in their homes, including asbestos, lead, mold, severe leaking and flooding, vermin, and other biohazards.

“I am tired of living with mice, roaches, waterbugs, lack of heat, holes in my walls and sink, waterlogged and rotting cabinets, and many more repair issues that are a threat to my health and safety and an affront to my dignity,” said Wheeler at a press conference.

Keller, abreast cancer survivor who suffers chronic health issues, described exposed electrical wiring, a broken radiator, rotted kitchen cabinets, and a broken door in her apartment she said frequently gets jammed.

 Her calls to NYCHA rarely, if ever, result in action, Keller says.

“Any type of repairs that need to be done in my house — I have to wait forever to get them done,” said Keller. “I put the ticket in. Then NYCHA calls me back to tell me the date they are coming.

“So, I prepare for the appointment, take everything out of the closet and cabinets, and ask for the day off work. But then they never come. They are a bunch of no-shows.”

The plaintiffs further allege the city’s trouble-plagued housing authority declines to make repairs in the hope that the Queensbridge Houses can be handed over to “private entities who would receive federal money in exchange for their agreement to keep the units affordable” under federal housing regulations and laws.

The “private entities” could be for-profit companies, or new government entities, the lawsuit says. In any case, the lawsuit says, it’s not clear that handing the project to new public or private managers “will benefit low-income renters more than it will harm them.”

So they don't care much about the new basketball court de Blasio's NYPD built there?

de Blasio's Dept. of Education also covered up lead contamination

 

Gothamist 

Thousands of water fountains, faucets and water bottle refilling stations in New York City schools sat out of commission for months while they awaited additional safety testing or repairs to remove lead. That’s according to a new report from the city Comptroller’s Office.

The audit found more than 5,700 water fixtures had lead levels that violated environmental regulations in 2018 and 2019. Of those, only 537—less than 10%—were fixed and ready for follow-up testing within a month of being flagged.

Once they were fixed, close to 30% of the water sources didn’t receive an additional test until after the two-week deadline laid out by the Department of Education (DOE), according to the report.

“No child, teacher, or member of school staff–whether in Washington Heights or Brownsville–should be exposed to lead in our public school buildings,” Comptroller Scott Stringer said in a statement. “Our audit found that the DOE’s testing and remediation of lead was perennially delayed—potentially exposing both students and staff to dangerous levels of lead in school drinking water.”

The report found 11% of school water sources checked between 2016 and 2019 had high lead levels, amounting to 15,860 fixtures spread across 1,323 schools. Overall, 84% of city schools had at least one water fixture with elevated lead.

Lead found in 9000 more NYCHA apartments; three years after de Blasio thanked God when he lied that only a few were contaminated

 

THE CITY 

Thousands more young children living in public housing were potentially exposed to lead poisoning than originally thought, officials revealed Thursday.

The city’s public housing authority has determined that the number of apartments believed contaminated with lead paint that house children under age 6 is triple the number it previously claimed.

NYCHA officials this week acknowledged for the first time that there are 9,000 apartments — not 3,000 apartments as they had asserted — that likely contain lead paint where youngsters live. Children under 6 are particularly susceptible to cognitive damage caused by exposure to lead.

The revelation was not made by NYCHA but by Bart Schwartz, the federal monitor appointed to oversee the nation’s biggest public housing authority after revelations by the press and federal prosecutors that the authority had for years deliberately hidden its failure to perform required lead paint inspections.

Late Thursday, NYCHA was unable to spell out precisely how many kids live in these apartments. The list of 9,000 includes apartments of relatives where children spent more than 10 hours a week.

Councilmember Alicka Ampry-Samuel (D-Brooklyn), chair of the public housing committee, blasted NYCHA for what she called yet another failure to confront its many failures.

“At this point in time, there is no room for excuses,” she said. “We should be at a place where we know the apartments that have lead exposure and who lives in them. Just that simple. To continue playing this game of paper shuffling is increasing the known risk of detrimental health hazards and brain damage in our children.

“If NYCHA cannot get it right and ensure these apartments are safe, people should lose their jobs and some should go to jail for reckless endangerment of a child,” she added.

de Blasio lied, public housing's kids got poisoned

NY Post 

  Newly surfaced documents reveal damning details about the scale and scope of what NYCHA knew of its serious lead issues in housing units with kids — all while Mayor Bill de Blasio downplayed the health crisis.

Local Health Department inspectors found lead in 222 NYCHA apartments across 93 developments — more than a quarter of all complexes citywide — between 2010 and 2018, according to records that City Hall only produced after The Post sued it under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.

Experts have said there is a high likelihood of finding lead in other apartments in a building where it has already been discovered.

Yet NYCHA was able to avoid making any repairs to 158 of the 222 lead-tainted apartments thanks to appeals to the city DOH, the documents show.

Lead is still a persistent problem in Queens public schools

Jackson Heights Post


Classrooms in nearly 50 different elementary schools in Queens tested positive for lead, according to new data released by the Department of Education Wednesday night.

Inspectors hired by the DOE found lead-based paint in 48 borough schools where children below the age of six study, according to the data. Many of the schools have multiple classrooms where peeling lead paint was found.

 In total, the department inspected 797 school buildings across the city built prior to 1985 that house students younger than six years old. More than a third of the pre-K and kindergarten buildings, 302 schools, tested positive for lead, according to Chalkbeat.

Deteriorating lead paint is especially dangerous to young children who may breathe in lead dust or swallow paint chips. According to the CDC, lead poisoning can cause damage to the brain and nervous system, learning and behavioral problems, slowed growth and development and hearing and/or speech issues.

Drinking fountains in Queens public parks are loaded with lead

 

Gothamist


The water from one drinking fountain in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx has 50 times as much lead in it as permitted by federal regulations, according to an official test. Another at a tennis court in Cunningham Park in Queens has nearly 23 times above what officials consider safe.


The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation has published early results from its program to test for lead contamination at its public drinking fountains. And while many of the numbers are alarming, they’re also “very common” for cities with aging, lead-based plumbing, according to Marc Edwards, a civil engineer at Virginia Tech who helped uncover harmful lead levels in Flint, Michigan.


A Gothamist/WNYC analysis of the city’s data found that, out of the 448 fountains checked thus far, 20 fountains (4.5 percent of the early total) tested above the federal standard of 15 parts per billion (ppb). By comparison, in a similar exercise carried out in New York City public schools in 2017, roughly 8 percent of water sources tested above the same threshold once all the results were tallied.


The testing program is a component of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s LeadFreeNYC campaign to eliminate childhood lead exposure in the city. The parks department said drinking water from public fountains is not a known source of exposure, but the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, said the tests “will ensure that we leave no stone unturned.”


Research has shown that even low levels of lead exposure can cause reduced IQ, hyperactivity and other behavioral problems in children. In adults, lead is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and other health issues.


Sampling in parks and playgrounds started on May 6th in Queens. All of the city’s 3,500-plus public fountains are scheduled to be tested by June 14th. Two samples are drawn for each source, one after a fountain has sat unused for up to 18 hours prior to testing, and another after a flush of several seconds to help determine how deep the source of contamination in the plumbing goes. Any fountain that exceeds 15 ppb will be turned off until it can be fixed, officials say. Test results are to be updated on a weekly basis.


At the Dry Harbor Playground in Forest Park in Queens, a drinking fountain where children regularly play came in at 296 ppb, nearly 20 times the federal standard.


“There's no doubt that that's too much lead to be drinking from a fountain,” Edwards said. “You should be worried about it. You should remediate that tap. That shows there's a hazard.”

 This investigation only started a few weeks ago and Queens parks dominate the list. And despite Gothamist's headline and the odious NYC Parks officials marginalizing this vast public health hazard, these are a lot of parks with high level toxicity and not "some".

Councilman Holden's bill for mandatory lead inspection and prevention passes.

 Queens Chronicle

 
Last April, Councilman Bob Holden (D-Middle Village) held a red flag and declared a CAC Industries lot a “red flag site” after learning that a sewer main project in Middle Village was stalled late in 2017 after high levels of lead were found in the soil.

On Wednesday, Int. 1063 passed the City Council, which requires any city development to provide notice to the relevant Council member and community board within five business days of discovering or becoming aware of a hazardous level of lead in soil.

The bill is Holden’s first to pass in the City Council.

“Increased transparency between city agencies and the public is a value that I campaigned on and I’m pleased to see this bill accomplishing that,” he said in a statement.

The soil that had been excavated during the Penelope Avenue sewer work was sitting in a yard leased by CAC Industries across the street from PS/IS 128, a K-8 school. The dirt had been sitting uncovered at the site until a tarp was eventually placed over the mounds.

In April, Holden took aim at the Department of Design and Construction, saying, “If they knew this was contaminated, to leave it uncovered is criminal. To leave it uncovered across from a school is more criminal.”

The discovery about the soil was made after CAC Industries, the project’s contractor, tried to bring the dirt to a dump but management there declined to take it after a visual inspection.

Testing revealed lead levels in the dirt mounds between 300 and 600 parts per million, exceeding the federal limit for bare soil where children play.

Eventually, the soil was removed and relocated to a facility in New Jersey.

 “It is common sense that local officials should be notified of any dangerous contamination so they can help inform and protect their constituents,” Holden said in his statement. “There is no excuse for carelessness that this bill will correct.”

Other bills in the package address lead-based paint hazards, lead testing in water, blood lead screenings, childhood lead poisoning prevention and the availability of lead hazard testing.

NYCHA weaves a tangled web

From the NY Times:

Mikaila Bonaparte has spent her entire life under the roof of the New York City Housing Authority, the oldest and largest public housing system in the country, where as a toddler she nibbled on paint chips that flaked to the floor. In the summer of 2016, when she was not quite 3 years old, a test by her doctor showed she had lead in her blood at levels rarely seen in modern New York.

A retest two days later revealed an even higher level, one more commonly found in factory or construction workers and, in some cases, enough to cause irreversible brain damage.

Within two weeks, a city health inspector visited the two Brooklyn public housing apartments where Mikaila spent her time — her mother’s in the Tompkins Houses; her grandmother’s in the Gowanus Houses — to look for the source of the lead exposure, records show. The inspector, wielding a hand-held device that can detect lead through multiple layers of paint, found the dangerous heavy metal in both homes. The Health Department ordered the Housing Authority to fix the problems.

The discovery spurred the Housing Authority to action: It challenged the results.

Rather than remove or cover the lead, the Housing Authority dispatched its own inspector who used a different test, documents show. The agency insisted that however Mikaila was poisoned, there was no lead in her apartments.

28,000 kids poisoned by lead - and no one seems to care

From the Daily News:

He had to be backed into a corner by this newspaper and the Department of Justice, but Mayor de Blasio is now correctly having the city use standards set by federal health experts to protect children from lead-paint poisoning.

City Hall’s assurances that only 19 children living in the Housing Authority have been poisoned by lead was devastatingly misleading. Health Department records obtained by the Daily News show 820 NYCHA kids since 2012 ingested quantities of lead sufficient to cause neurological damage. Citywide, nearly 28,000 children did.

They and their families have to live evermore with the tragic reality: lead poisoning in NYCHA, and beyond, is a far greater public health menace than the mayor has been willing to admit or act on, leaving it to special ed teachers to administer to minds forever stunted.

The coverup consists of two sins, one in the headlines and one behind the scenes.

Shouldn't this be a criminal investigation at this point? The FBI has been investigating a payment made to a porn star for more than a year but no one is sinking their teeth into this?

Why it's important to research history

From the NY Times:

since 2015, most of the Red Hook fields have been closed because of lead contamination in the soil. A $107 million cleanup by the New York City parks department has been delayed, leaving residents, coaches and parents anxious and confused.

“We need our fields back,” Mr. Bazemore said. “But safe.”

Problems started in 2012 when the parks department and the city’s health department learned of a dissertation by an environmental scientist who identified close to 500 lead-smelting sites around the country. One of the smelters once stood in Red Hook, right across the street from the housing projects and right on top of some of the playing fields.

In the late 1920s and ’30s, Columbia Smelting and Refining Works operated on the corner of Hicks and Lorraine Streets, leaving lead in the soil that would eventually become Fields 5, 6, 7 and 8 — the same fields that Mr. Bazemore and generations of children once played on. The parks department and the health department tested the soil in 2012, finding lead levels four times the safe limit on the surface and nearly 10 times the limit further underground. They quickly closed them. A concrete pad to guard against the lead was laid down. The fields and grass were hydroseeded.

In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency did further testing in the surrounding fields and found more elevated lead levels, causing Parks to close the fields for a four-phase cleanup that has yet to begin.

Work was set to start this spring on Fields 5 through 8 — the worst of the bunch and closest to the housing projects — but has now been pushed back a year because of delays in the construction bidding process. A contractor is now being approved and work should be completed by fall 2020, when a 12-inch buffer of clean fill will be topped by a drainage layer and then synthetic turf.

Just think what we could avoid if the city consulted historians once in a while. Or at least looked at old maps...

Contractor dumped lead contaminated soil near Middle Village school

Photo by Christopher Barca/Queens Chronicle

From the Queens Chronicle:

A $22 million sewer main project in Middle Village that was nearing completion suddenly stalled in December, and no one in the community knew exactly why.

There was some talk among area leaders that workers were transferred to another job site or that they had various problems digging into the ground.

But on Tuesday, Councilman Bob Holden (D-Middle Village) said the real reason for the project’s halting was much scarier.

“The Department of Design and Construction sent four representatives to my office on Friday and they told me the project stopped because of contaminants in the soil,” Holden said. “I asked one gentleman what were the contaminents in the soil.

“He said high levels of lead.”

As if that wasn’t a big enough issue, the lawmaker said that problematic soil that had been excavated during the Penelope Avenue sewer work is sitting in a yard leased by CAC Industries — the project contractor — across the street from PS/IS 128, a K-8 school in Middle Village.

The massive mounds of dirt had been sitting uncovered at the site, possibly for months, as a tarp wasn’t placed over them until this week.

And at both a press conference and Community Education Council District 24’s monthly meeting on Tuesday, Holden said the person who spoke about the high lead levels — a senior DDC project manager based in the immediate area — was contradicted by his colleagues over how dangerous the soil was and if it was covered.

The lawmaker added he visited the site last Friday and noticed the massive mound of soil was uncovered. But on Monday, he claimed, DDC Acting Commissioner Ana Barrio falsely told him it had been covered the entire time and that the agency project manager “misspoke” regarding lead levels.

Farewell, Shola

From the Daily News:

Beleaguered NYCHA chairwoman Shola Olatoye, accused of making misleading statements about the conditions in public housing and under fire from multiple critics, will announce Tuesday that she is resigning.

Olatoye will make the announcement at a public housing development in the Rockaways along with Mayor de Blasio, who appointed her four years ago and has defended her against a growing chorus of criticism.

Late Monday, the mayor said he will tour the Ocean Bay Bayside Houses Tuesday morning, and a City Hall spokeswoman confirmed Olatoye would step down and the mayor will install government veteran Stanley Brezenoff as interim chair of the New York City Housing Authority.

Late Monday the mayor continued his defense of Olatoye, 43, calling her “a change agent from Day One. Crime is down. Repairs are faster. Finances are stabilized. And NYCHA is putting record investment from the City to work making life better for the 400,000 New Yorkers that call NYCHA home.”

BDB knew about the NYCHA mess for quite some time

From the Wall Street Journal:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has known the city’s housing authority wasn’t complying with lead-inspection regulations since last year, his office said Sunday.

In a report issued last week, the city’s Department of Investigation said the New York City Housing Authority submitted false claims to the federal government showing it had conducted lead-paint inspections when the required work hadn’t been done for years.

The mayor was first informed of “the possibility of non-compliance” in March 2016, his office said.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat who was re-elected to a second term on Nov. 7, has said “operations executives” were responsible for the lapses.

The housing authority notified City Hall that the agency wasn’t in compliance with local laws in April 2016 and with U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rules in July, according to de Blasio spokeswoman Olivia Lapeyrolerie.

“As part of the agency’s response, NYCHA inspected every apartment with kids under 6 where there may have been lead paint in 2016 and will do so again by the end of 2017,” Ms. Lapeyrolerie said.

Meanwhile, all this is costing us taxpayers a ton of cash.

NYCHA lied about inspecting for lead paint

From PIX11:

The New York City Housing Authority failed to conduct lead paint safety inspections for four years beginning in 2013, according to a new report by the city’s Department of Investigation. The DOI further alleges NYCHA then lied about the inspections to Federal housing authorities.

MTA sued over peeling lead paint

From AM-NY:

Queens residents are suing the MTA for failing to protect them from peeling lead paint on the elevated tracks of the 7 line, which they say rains down on pedestrians, property and businesses below, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

Plaintiffs of the class action lawsuit include Jackson Heights residents and their children, a day care chain owner, and the owner of the neighborhood’s popular gay club, Club Evolution, according to Kate Foran, the attorney representing the group.

One plaintiff, Dudley Stewart, lives 500 feet from the elevated track on 80th Street in Jackson Heights and fears for the safety of his two children, ages 12 and 8, Foran said.

“His kids are there all the time,” she said. “It’s a scary situation.”

The first elevated structures on the Flushing line were built before June 1915 and were painted with lead-based paint, according to the complaint. And the tracks have been poorly maintained ever since, it adds.

City falsified lead testing records

From the Daily News:

City workers falsified records to claim day care centers had tested for lead in drinking water when no tests were actually performed, a city controller audit released Friday found.

Starting in 2008, the city was supposed to make sure all day care centers tested drinking water for lead. But Controller Scott Stringer's auditors found that by 2011, the city Department of Health & Mental Hygiene had dropped the ball.

DOHMH — the agency that's required to inspect all 11,000 child care centers in New York City annually — had more or less given up on the task.

"We have supervisors who told employees to falsify these tests and they never bothered for four years to go back and do the testing," Stringer said. "This is outrageous. Neglecting this lead test is a gamble on the health and safety of our kids."

At first, Stringer found, the city tried to enforce the lead test requirement. But by 2011, inspectors were finding the providers weren't keeping up with the testing requirement.

Soon DOHMH supervisors were instructing underlings to simply mark "tested" at sites that had not be tested. This allowed the city to renew or approve a new license for day care providers without actually testing for lead in drinking water at their sites.

Under pressure to keep child care centers open, the agency's bureau of child care management directed staff to claim that the agency had received lead water test results, regardless of whether such tests had been received.

Army Corps to clean up Fort Totten spot

From the Queens Chronicle:

The U.S. Coast Guard doesn’t use its 9.6 acres at Fort Totten anymore, but the government will be cleaning it up.

Gregory Goepfert, project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, announced plans for removing lead-contaminated soil during a meeting Tuesday in Bayside.

The area is near the northern part of the fort between the ballfields and the old fortifications.

“We would like to go ahead and clean up the soil that has been impacted and replace it with clean material,” Goepfert said.

The 20,000-square-foot site would be refilled with clean soil from elsewhere. The endeavor will cost about $200,000.

Goepfert said the plan was preferable to alternatives like doing nothing, just fencing it off to the public or covering it with a landfill cap, but that would require additional maintenance in the future.

The Army Corps determined that it is the only one of five areas they tested at the fort that requires remediation.

Slumlord busted for tenant harassment

From the Daily News:

A Brooklyn landlord has become the first person arrested under a new city-state campaign to go after property owners who threaten and harass rent-stabilized tenants, Mayor de Blasio and state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced Wednesday.

Daniel Melamed, 39, was indicted on charges of unlawful eviction, child endangerment and filing false documents in harassment of rent-protected tenants at the Crown Heights building he owns.

The mayor and Schneiderman formed a task force to go after landlords who illegally force out rent-stabilized tenants so they can jack up the rent.

The charges involve a Melamed building on Union St. where he began illegal construction and demolition last year.

The indictment alleges he knocked down interior walls and destroyed common spaces, and illegally shut off heat to rent-stabilized tenants as temperatures plummeted in December.

He also exposed tenants -- including a 6-year-old -- to toxic lead paint dust. In some apartments the dust tested at 80 times above acceptable levels, the indictment alleges.

Avella calls for shut down of Pan Am homeless shelter

From the Queens Courier:

State Sen. Tony Avella has joined the opposition to the planned conversion of an emergency homeless shelter at the former Pan American Hotel into a permanent facility due to what he called “horrendous” conditions at the site.

Avella, who is chairman of the Senate’s Social Services Committee, joined residents and local leaders to speak out against the proposal to convert the shelter at 7900 Queens Blvd. in Elmhurst to a permanent facility under a $42 million contract with the city.

“It is an outrage to take an abandoned hotel, warehouse homeless families inside it, ignore shocking City Code and HPD violations, waste an exorbitant amount of taxpayer dollars in the process, and then award a $42 million contract to a questionable-at-best organization, making the entire situation permanent,” Avella said.

According to the senator, the shelter houses over 700 residents, made up of families of which many have small children. Each unit at the shelter holds four to five people.

Because the shelter uses former hotel rooms, they are not equipped with cooking facilities. The senator and organizations such as Elmhurst United claim this goes against a NYC Administrative Code requiring that each unit at a family shelter have a kitchen, and in order to do this, there would need to be major renovations at the site.

The shelter has also had a large number of violations such as failure to provide hot water or heat for days, reports of bed bugs, peeling of lead paint in one unit, and garbage left sitting in front of the entrance to the children’s play area, according to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Due to all these conditions, Avella said he calls on the city to reject the contract that would covert the former hotel into a permanent homeless shelter because he believes it is “not fit for long-term housing for the homeless.”

Don't eat these veggies!

From the NY Post:

Herbs and vegetables grown in New York City community gardens are loaded with lead and other toxic metals, a startling state study shows.

Tainted vegetables — some sold in city markets — were found in five of seven plots tested, according to data obtained from the study by The Post through the Freedom of Information Law.

In the study, scientists used safety levels set by the European Union for lead and cadmium, since the United States doesn’t set a threshold for veggies.

Once in the body, lead can remain for 30 years, causing permanent learning disabilities, behavioral issues, hearing problems, heart disease, kidney disease, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and death.

Children, pregnant women and sick people are most vulnerable to lead poisoning, experts said.

Shoppers at a farmers market outside East New York Farms in Brooklyn — where a carrot was tested with nearly three times the safe amount of lead — were stunned by the study.

The Parks Department said gardens involved with the study have all received clean soil and compost.