The Lead-Painted Apartments in NYC

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we're going to talk about new investigative reporting from the WNYC and Gothamist Newsroom that shows the number of apartments in New York City that still have dangerous lead-painted surfaces, despite a law that dates back to 2004, so 20 years, exactly, that was meant to force landlords to remove lead paint. When looking at city data, WNYC found that more than 12,000 apartments in the city have been cited for lead paint violations, some of them over and over again, and kids in New York City, not as many, but kids in New York City are still being poisoned by lead in their apartments. Can you believe it?

This is another great example of how my newsroom colleagues aren't just covering what politicians say, showing up at news conferences and taking notes and things like that but are doing real original reporting. We like to give them an extra chance to explain their work on this show when we can since we have the luxury of time in our long format here. Here to explain what she found when looking at the data and the new laws going into place this year to enforce lead paint removal even more is WNYC and Gothamist data reporter, Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky. Hi, Jaclyn.

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: Hi Brian. Thank you for having me. In the spirit of pitch, I just feel like I have to say there aren't a lot of public radio stations that are able to have a data reporter. That's something that your support makes possible and makes this reporting possible.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, well, you anticipated my first question because I was going to ask you to remind people of your beat to start out, why don't you tell everybody what it means to be a data reporter?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: Absolutely. A data reporter is just like any other type of reporter, except that in addition to interviewing people, looking through documents, good old-fashioned shoe leather, we also interview data sets. Honestly, I spend a lot of my time trying to get data sets that maybe aren't readily accessible, whether it's through public records requests or just the way they're stored online. I use a combination of technical programming skills and then good old-fashioned reporting to report out stories like this one.

Brian Lehrer: We've known about the dangers of lead poisoning for a long time now. We, as a country, as a world, the effects of even small amounts have been documented since the 1950s, and there's been a lot of public campaigning around it. I'm sure many listeners are aware but just to give us a reminder about how serious this is, what happens when people, and especially children, are exposed to too much lead.

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: When you ingest lead, whether that's through leaded water or dust from lead paint, it goes into your bloodstream, and it builds up in your organs including your brain. Of course, that's especially dangerous for young kids because they're small, because their brains and their bodies are still growing.

Also honestly, because small kids especially are more likely to be crawling around on the floor, picking up paint chips and dust and putting them in their mouths. It's worth noting that lead paint has a sweet taste. It might actually be kind of appealing to little kids. There's no safe amount for really anyone, but specifically for kids, what we've seen is that consistent exposure to the neurotoxin can cause irreversible brain damage, behavioral problems and slow down growth.

Brian Lehrer: Doing a little bit of further history, it seems almost incredible that it took until even 2004 to pass a law regulating lead paint as many decades before that as the hazards were known. The city did lay out a system 20 years ago that was supposed to remove it. What were the regulations, the law put in place?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: Local Law 1 of 2004, actually, believe it or not, so it wasn't the first lead paint regulation law in the city. There was one in the 1980s, but it was basically unenforceable. The original law in the 1980s basically required landlords to get rid of all lead paint everywhere, which in a city like New York where our housing stock is quite old, a lot of our buildings are built prior to 1960, the scale of that was just inconceivable. The real advantage of the new law, Local Law 1 of 2004, was that landlords had to permanently get rid of lead paint on friction surfaces. Those are things like doors, windows, windows sills, et cetera.

Basically, parts of the apartment that you touch a lot that easily shed lead paint dust. Even if they don't look bad, even if they're not visibly cracking, they're still really dangerous to kids. The 2004 low said that they had to permanently get rid of lead on those surfaces, and they also had to do regular annual inspections to look for peeling lead paint elsewhere if you had a kid under six in your apartment.

Brian Lehrer: Take us through what you found in your new reporting when you looked at city data, what records were you looking at with respect to lead, and what story did the numbers tell you?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: The nice thing about Local Law 1 of 2004 is that city inspectors were enforcing it. You can look at a database of violations filed by the Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development against landlords or against departments that had peeling lead paint or deteriorated lead paint. I took a look at those 20 years' worth of complaints. I'm specifically interested in, this was a tip from our investigative, a narrative editor, Christopher Wirth, about apartments that had gotten cited multiple times because theoretically, if you get cited once, there's a work order, the paint is fixed, and then it should be taken care of.

When you see apartments getting cited multiple times, that's a sign of a loophole or an enforcement failure or something. Specifically, I looked at all these complaints, I aggregated them by apartment, and I specifically looked for apartments that had racked up complaints in multiple different years over the last two decades because to me that suggests that they are possibly poisoning children over and over again.

Brian Lehrer: The number of children who are poisoned by lead has dropped. I see more than 90% since that law went into effect in 2004, so that's really good, but how many kids are still affected?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: It's absolutely plummeted. The law has been just a smashing success and has saved so many children from this irreversible brain damage. That said, about 5,000 kids each year do test positive for elevated blood lead levels.

Brian Lehrer: Even beyond the landlords receiving citations, you found that most aren't even inspecting for lead, which they're supposed to do annually. Why have so many landlords been able to skirt the regulations?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: The experts who I talked to, they chalked up this remainder, those 5,000 kids, to two failures. The first one is that the city, until the last couple of years, really wasn't checking whether landlords were doing these inspections. They would come in if someone reported peeling lead paint or if a kid tested positive for elevated blood lead levels, but they weren't doing the kind of proactive checking that was required for the law to actually work. Then the second thing was that some argue that the law was weakened by the Bloomberg Administration who opposed it at the time. There was a lot of back and forth, and some provisions were taken out.

Brian Lehrer: Right. That might be worth dwelling on for a second because I know there were some provisions from what was originally proposed for the 2000 Law, but some didn't make it in the final version. Like what?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: The biggest one, the one that experts mentioned time and time again was that the law as originally written said that landlords had to get rid of lead paint on those friction surfaces within three years. By 2007, there was a hard deadline. The Bloomberg administration said, "Well, we think that's going to be very expensive, and we think that's going to expose landlords to legal liability." They negotiated it down to, instead of that hard deadline, the landlords would simply have to do that work when the last tenant moved out, between tenants essentially, so turnover.

The problem is though if folks are staying in their apartments for a long time, that means that they're just being exposed to lead that entire time. I met some tenants while reporting the story who grew up in apartments and then raised their own kids in those apartments. You can see how that turnover provision, it just allows for more lead exposure.

Brian Lehrer: Did you say that Mayor Bloomberg himself was instrumental in removing those provisions from the original version of the bill. Because Bloomberg, if he was anything, he was the public health mayor, right? He's got a public health school named after him. I guess he bought the naming rights at Johns Hopkins. This is his passion. He imposed the smoking ban in restaurants. He tried to get a sugary drinks thing for restaurants through but couldn't get it through, but he tried. Bloomberg was the Public Health Mayor. I'm sure he described himself that way, but in this case, no?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: I think the grounds on which the Bloomberg Administration opposed the law was less that lead paint needed to be regulated and more that they didn't see it as being very enforceable or very effective. I listened to some old city council hearings and a member of the Bloomberg Administration, Jerilyn Perrin said they just didn't know that the juice would be worth the squeeze in terms of spending.

Brian Lehrer: What are the experiences of some of the people who end up living in these apartments and trying to get the law enforced? You looked at that, too, right?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: Yes. The nice thing about this data is that once I identified the list of apartments which had racked up multiple lead paint violations over the course of the 20 years, I just went to those apartments. I knocked on the doors. I sent them letters just to talk to them about their experiences. I included the experiences of two tenants in the story, but I talked to quite a few others as well. It was really striking to see, particularly, I met tenants who had been in their apartments for decades.

One woman had grown up in her apartment and then was raising children in that same apartment, and that whole time, there had been repeated lead paint violations. That was despite multiple calls to the landlord, to the city. The loopholes in the law made it difficult to actually get rid of that lead paint for good. It was just really sad to see.

Brian Lehrer: You're our data reporter, as we established at the beginning of the segment, but being a data reporter, it sounds like also means after you look at the numbers, then you go out, and you become what the old-time was called a shoe-leather reporter. You go out on the streets, and you go to people's homes, and you go to political offices, and you talk to human beings, yes?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: Yes, that's the trick of it. The data is just one part of the story. For a story like this, it's not even really the main part, it just guides us to the people and guides us to the causes.

Brian Lehrer: Now, we have new provisions with respect to lead and apartments going into effect in June and September. Can you describe them?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: Yes. What's really interesting about these provisions, as well as some of the other ones that have been passed since 2004, is that some of them were stripped from the law in 2004, in an effort to get it passed and then have since been added back. The turnover requirement is being removed, and now it's going back to a hard and fast deadline, just like it was in 2004. Now, finally, landlords are going to have to permanently remove all lead paint on friction surfaces, this time by 2027, so only 20 years later.

Brian Lehrer: Some people listening to you are writing in some personal stories. Here's one. "My grand-niece has serious developmental issues due to lead paint in her family's apartment. It's clear the landlord knew there were issues but did nothing despite knowing there was a baby living there. It was only remediated once she tested positive at age two." The listener writes, "I think landlords of this sort should go to Rikers like the recent 'worst landlord' you've done other stories about." That's one.

Another one, "I moved from Brooklyn, Upstate, because of lead all over my apartment. I'm an adult and got lead poisoning. Still dealing with some issues six months later. Landlord didn't do much to help me."

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: Wow.

Brian Lehrer: We didn't even ask people to write in with their stories, so that's an indication that these stories are out there.

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: Yes, it's a deeply personal issue. The first person who wrote in, particularly, it really strikes me that so much of how the city approaches lead paint, again, it's been overwhelmingly effective, but it's also reactive. A kid testing positive for elevated blood lead levels is oftentimes what triggers city inspectors to come in and for the lead paint to ultimately be abated.

It goes against the spirit of the 2004 law, which call for proactive inspections for landlords to keep records and for the city to check those records. The city actually did an audit in 2019 to see whether landlords actually were keeping those inspection records, and the vast majority, it was like 90% plus of landlords that they randomly selected, weren't keeping those records. That is, in fact, punishable.

Brian Lehrer: Last thing, are there any signs that the paint in your apartment might need to get tested? I hear what you were just saying, they're supposed to do it as a matter of course, but often it only happens after a kid gets sick. Are there any signs that the paint in your apartment might need to get tested before symptoms appear?

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: There are certain clues. If you have a kid in the apartment who's under the age of six, and the apartment was built before 1960, the landlord is legally obligated to conduct annual inspections and to notify you if there is lead paint in the apartment. As far as outside of that, if your building again is of a certain age, you should definitely be looking for paint that appears to be peeling, cracking, deteriorating or otherwise just doesn't look like it's in good shape.

Particularly on walls, if it's all sealed up and in good condition, you're probably okay, though you just do still have to worry about those friction surfaces. What I would encourage everybody to do is to go to the HPD online portal. We have it linked the Gothamist story, and you can actually type in your apartment, your address and see all the violations that are active on your apartment building, including overdue lead paint violations. That's a great way to see whether your apartment has, in fact, already been identified as having lead paint.

Brian Lehrer: Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky is our fabulous data reporter at WNYC and Gothamist. Her latest data dive into lead paint illnesses, lead paint presences, lead paint enforcement and lack thereof in New York City, leading to these stories and maybe to a better future for more kids and more apartments. Jaclyn, thanks for all this. Thanks for sharing it on the show.

Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky: Thank you for having me.

 

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