NYCHA’s acting chair refused to prioritize lead paint abatement at the Bronx River Houses — where a staggering 98 percent of apartments tested for lead came back positive — and admitted the beleaguered authority doesn’t have a master plan to overhaul buildings that house 400,000 residents.
Bronx Councilman Ritchie Torres grilled Chairwoman Kathryn Garcia about the problem at a hearing Monday, citing a Post article that says federal officials inexplicably gave NYCHA 20 years to get the lead out of the Bronx River Houses.
Meanwhile the poisonous compound must be stripped from two other properties with widespread contamination — Manhattan’s Harlem River Houses and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Houses — within just five years.
Garcia said they have “historical data” for the Harlem River and Williamsburg complexes that they don’t have for the Bronx River Houses.
When Torres asked Garcia to speed up the timeline for the Bronx River Houses she refused.
“I’m not going to specifically talk to a housing development until I really understand the whole universe,” said Garcia, who temporarily took over the authority last month after her predecessor resigned over her handling of lead paint inspections.
Garcia acknowledged she’s still working on a master action plan to update the decades-old complexes that suffer from lead paint contamination, mold, faulty heating, broken elevators and pest infestations.
“We have a list of priorities,” Garcia said, “We don’t necessarily know which ones are going into which bucket,” she added.
Explore More
A second Bronx Councilman, Ruben Diaz Sr., pushed Garcia on the 20-year timeline for the Bronx River Houses.
“That’s still two more years for the mayor after the mayor after the mayor,” Diaz said, noting that the number of mayoral administrations it will take beyond Bill de Blasio to finally fix NYCHA’s lead problem.
Diaz asked Garcia to promise to treat the Bronx River Houses as an “emergency priority.”
Again she declined.
“In all honestly I can’t promise anything,” Garcia said.
Jay Martin, the head of a landlord group that owns thousands of rent-regulated apartments, slammed NYCHA for giving itself 300 times longer to remedy the lead situation than the city allows the private sector.
“As any private property owner knows, the stringent lead testing and remedying laws require immediate action with the threat of jail time,” said Martin, head of the Community Housing Improvement Program.
“CHIP members take these regulations seriously, and it is galling that our government leaders would not hold themselves up to the same high standards,” Martin said.
ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2Jlfnp7j2xmamlfo8aktMBmm6ido6PBbrTAr5xmqJyWu27Azmamr52ina62uIylnJqcXZrFsbvSnptmmqKku7l50aKtnqpdnby2v8SsZg%3D%3D