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Mayor Says City Will Inspect All Public Housing Units at Risk for Lead

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York announced Monday that the city would test for lead in every New York City Housing Authority apartment where lead paint may have been used, a vast expansion of its current efforts that would mean inspections of 130,000 units at a cost of about $80 million.

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By
J. David Goodman
, New York Times

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York announced Monday that the city would test for lead in every New York City Housing Authority apartment where lead paint may have been used, a vast expansion of its current efforts that would mean inspections of 130,000 units at a cost of about $80 million.

The undertaking, which City Hall officials said had never before been performed, is the latest effort by the de Blasio administration to respond to a lead paint scandal that resulted in June in a deal with federal prosecutors to make an array of reforms under the watch of a federal monitor.

De Blasio likened the new effort to Vision Zero, a city initiative that aims to eliminate traffic-related fatalities.

“We need to take, in effect, a Vision Zero approach to lead,” he said during his weekly television appearance on NY1, where he announced the new inspections. “We’re going to go and literally go through all of NYCHA and do an inspection of every apartment — even if a child is not there — every apartment that might still have lead in it.”

De Blasio said the idea to move forward with a wide-scale testing of apartments — rather than a sampling of them, as had been done in the past — came from top housing authority officials, with whom he met at City Hall earlier Monday.

“We’re going to then be able to say which apartments still have lead,” he said. Those checks would take place in a substantial majority of the nearly 180,000 units in the city’s public housing system. “I bought into it immediately,” de Blasio said of the idea.

But the new estimate of possibly affected apartments contrasted with one given by the mayor in November, after a Department of Investigation report into the housing authority’s lead inspection failures.

“It’s around 50,000 apartments, if I remember, that even have the possibility of having lead in them,” de Blasio said at the time. “And the trigger is when there is a child under 6,” he said of when an inspection of those would be done. “That’s what the law dictates.”

The new effort would go much further. De Blasio said Monday the goal was to “once and for all end this problem.”

Some of the details had yet to be worked out, as did the question of how it would be paid for. City Hall could not say whether the money to pay for inspections would come from the already cash-strapped budget of the housing authority — which recently announced a need for $32 billion in new repair money — or from the city’s own ballooning expense budget. In June, the City Council passed an $89 billion annual budget for the 2019 fiscal year.

“I know of no previous testing on such a scale,” said Nicholas D. Bloom, a historian of public housing and a professor at the New York Institute of Technology. “Personally, I am more eagerly awaiting his $30 billion renovation plan.”

The inspections would be handled by a private contractor, overseen by the housing authority, that has yet to be chosen, and are expected to take about two years to complete, according to a mayoral spokeswoman, Olivia Lapeyrolerie.

In recent days, the city has said that about 800 children tested positive for lead poisoning from 2012-16 — far more than the 19 cases previously acknowledged publicly by the city, using a higher threshold for blood-lead levels. And City Hall has announced efforts to find lead in the homes of affected children both inside and outside of public housing.

Lapeyrolerie said the city would be calling the families of those 800 children to make sure they are getting appropriate care.

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