Code-Enforcement Campaign Gains Momentum
By Kenny Schaeffer

The movement to increase the city’s enforcement of housing-code violations is gaining steam in the City Council.

So far, three members of the Council’s Housing and Buildings Committee, Helen Marshall (D-Queens), Guillermo Linares (D-Manhattan) and Stanley Michels (D-Manhattan), have endorsed proposals to spend part of the city’s $2 billion budget surplus on beefing up its staff of housing inspectors and code-enforcement lawyers. The campaign was initiated by Met Council and supported by the Queens League of United Tenants, the Legal Aid Society, the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, the New York Public Interest Research Group and the Harlem Tenants Council. The Community Service Society, the City Project’s Alterbudget, and the Community Training Resources Center have also called for increased housing code enforcement to preserve New York’s endangered supply of affordable housing.

At Council hearings on May 14, the city’s housing commissioner, Richard Roberts, confirmed that there are 3 million code violations outstanding on apartment buildings in the city. Yet Mayor Giuliani’s proposed budget for the 1999 fiscal year only includes funds for 230 housing inspectors. Ten years ago, 700 inspectors were considered necessary for the city.

Other Councilmembers supporting the initiative include Democrats Stephen DiBrienza of Brooklyn, Sheldon Leffler and Morty Povman of Queens, and William Perkins, Margarita Lopez and Ronnie Eldridge of Manhattan.

Organizers expect to get additional support in the Bronx and in Brooklyn. Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields has also endorsed increasing spending on housing preservation. After a building on West 141st Street, in her old City Council district, collapsed in 1996, killing one person, she successfully sponsored an initiative requiring the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Department of Buildings to inform each other about violations observed by their respective inspectors.

The parts of the code-enforcement system that follow up on inspectors’ reports are equally undermanned. The budget contains funds for 38 lawyers in the city’s housing-litigation bureau, which obtains court orders that housing code violations be corrected (and occasionally seeks fines when they are not)—but only 17 positions are filled. At the May 14 hearing, HPD Commissioner Richard Roberts testified that he considered this adequate, because the litigation bureau “handles 8,000 cases a year.”

But what Commissioner Roberts did not say is that these 8,000 cases are “HP” cases, in which tenants sue both their landlord and the city in order to get repairs. The city itself only brings 200 of its own cases each year, despite receiving 500,000 complaints from tenants for conditions that include no heat and hot water, collapsing ceilings, rats, leaks, holes in the walls and floors, and exposed lead paint, which poisons thousands of babies and toddlers every year.

A study released on April 28 by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development found that in New York City, 380,000 households, containing more than a million people, live in “worst case” housing emergencies, which it defined as paying more than half their total income for rent, living in substandard housing, or both. These conditions affected 38% of all households earning less than half the city median income.

Last December 16, the Council withdrew an ill-advised bill which would have required the city to erase overdue code violations whenever owners simply claimed to have cured them, with no city inspection to verify whether the work was done. An audit conducted by Comptroller Alan Hevesi and State Sen. Franz Leichter (D-Manhattan) had revealed that landlords lie 50% of the time when they “self-certified” under the more limited provision of the law now in effect. Even the New York Times applauded the wisdom of withdrawing the measure in a December 30 editorial, and called on City Hall to revisit the issue of code enforcement in the new year.

Several years ago, the Assembly’s former housing committee chair, Pete Grannis, released a report that the city is losing hundreds of millions of dollars by not collecting fines against scofflaw owners who do not correct violations that have been recorded by city inspectors.