One in three city Housing Authority tenants say mold in their apartments returns even after NYCHA claims the problem is fixed, according to a city investigation.
The ineffectiveness of dozens of these court-ordered “repairs” emerges in an internal report by the city Department of Investigation obtained under the Freedom of Information law by the Daily News.
DOI Commissioner Mark Peters and NYCHA Inspector General Ralph Iannuzzi sent the agency’s findings to NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye Wednesday, a day after the News finished its series on problems with NYCHA’s mold-abatement.
The findings reveal that DOI quietly began monitoring NYCHA’s anti-mold effort back in April, shortly after the authority agreed to settle a federal lawsuit by promising to aggressively eradicate mold in its aging apartments.
Over the last few months, DOI sent investigators to 53 developments and reviewed internal NYCHA data of 10,327 work orders for mold-related repairs filed from May through July.
The NYCHA data showed 74% of what NYCHA deemed “simple repairs” were completed within seven days as required. But that’s below the promised 95% success rate, and NYCHA didn’t make its seven-day goal with the other 26%.
Problems became even more apparent when NYCHA did follow-up visits to see if the repairs did the trick.
In a random sampling of 432 tenants, 309 — or 71% — at first said the mold was gone.
Ultimately, however, 147 tenants — that’s 34% — reported the mold returned following the NYCHA “repairs.”
Tenant Oscar Cruz, 59, whose wife, Felipa, is a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, was one of those unlucky tenants.
On Friday, Cruz recalled how for years he’d tried to get NYCHA to eradicate mold in the first-floor apartment he shares with his wife, daughter and two children in the Webster Houses in the Bronx.
Most of the family members have been diagnosed with asthma, and during his talk with The News he repeatedly coughed and had to use an inhaler to regain his breath.
Over the summer, NYCHA sent workers to abate black mold festering in his bathroom, ripping open walls to repair pipes and wiping down everything with chemicals.
Last month, the mold came back. On Friday he pointed to dozens of brown dots that have begun to multiply above the shower head and across the ceiling.
“It’s not just me,” he said. “There’s a whole bunch of people sick right now because of this problem. This is very, very dangerous because of this. They can wipe it up millions of times and they’re not going to stop it.”
Michael Stanley, an organizer with Metro Industrial Area Foundation, the group of non-profits and churches that filed the anti-mold lawsuit, said the DOI report corroborated what they’re finding.
“We’re not happy that they’re failing to do what they’re supposed to do,” he said. “This is a problem that’s decades in the making, so it’s not surprising that it wasn’t turned around in a year. But that’s no excuse for exposing thousands of people to seriously dangerous conditions.”
Last week the News, working with the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism NYCity News Service, reported that a year after the lawsuit was filed, hundreds of tenants struggling with mold conditions were still awaiting help from NYCHA.
In its investigation of the mold cleanup efforts, from April through last month DOI did field visits to a sampling of 53 NYCHA developments in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx.
DOI ultimately interviewed 283 tenants who’d filed mold complaints, and found 76% were satisfied with mold-remediation provided by NYCHA.
But they also found 24% reporting the mold clean-up wasn’t complete, didn’t work or that NYCHA staffers had failed to show up.
The independent review also discovered that NYCHA workers marked some repair requests as “closed” when they arrived at apartments and tenants weren’t home. That behavior is contrary to NYCHA policy, which requires that work orders remain open until the work is complete.
DOI quoted an internal NYCHA memo from 2003 that implied this happens all the time. It stated, “It has been common practice to close out apartment work tickets after making two visits to an apartment and finding no one home.”
DOI also investigated tenant complaints that ventilation in bathrooms didn’t work. Checking seven developments, they found while the mechanic fans on roofs were working, some superintendents said NYCHA last year had stopped bringing in vendors to clean the ventilation shafts “due to lack of funding.”
They also found another disturbing trend: tenants “had covered over bathroom vents with tape, plastic or other materials in an effort to prevent vermin infestations.”
Inspector General Iannuzzi made several improvements, including varying work shifts so maintenance employees are available off-hours “to accommodate residents’ schedules,” ensure staff doesn’t close work tickets if a tenant isn’t home, and increase inspection of ventilation systems.
NYCHA spokeswoman Joan Lebow noted the IG found NYCHA made “quick and full remediation” in more than 75% of cases, “with most others in progress and advancing.”
The findings “reflect the commitment of new NYCHA leadership to continue to diligently address this tenacious problem that persists in the city’s aging public housing stock. There is certainly more work to be done and we thank the OIG for a clear and detailed look at the considerable effort and accomplishment thus far.
She said the report “expresses increasing resident satisfaction with NYCHA’s customer service improvements and notes constructive OIG recommendations in line with changes already underway such as clarified scheduling and work order tracking.”
