Giuliani Budget Proposes Laying Off Housing Inspectors
by Kenny Schaeffer

Mayor Giuliani’s executive budget calls for the elimination of the $2.7 million added by the City Council for code enforcement inspections in 1998. Inspectors were hired after a campaign last year by Met Council and others to win the first substantial increase in the number of housing inspectors in 20 years. By last year, the number of inspectors in the field had dipped to a record low of below 200, down from over 700 before the 1970s fiscal crisis. The City Council overrode Giuliani’s veto and voted money to hire 78 additional inspectors; later, Council negotiations resulted in the hiring of 24.

Last year Met Council was supported by the New York Public Interest Research Group, the Legal Aid Society, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, and Councilmembers William Perkins, Helen Marshall, Stephen DiBrienza, Stanley Michels, Margarita Lopez, and Sheldon Leffler, in its argument that given the city’s $2 billion budget surplus, it was indefensible to allow 3 million code violations to go uncorrected and to continue neglecting housing preservation.

The Giuliani administration is also neglecting other areas of enforcing its housing code. Every year, it abandons hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and civil penalties from scofflaw owners, while the already beleaguered supply of affordable housing is allowed to deteriorate. The city Department of Housing Preservation and Development has allowed its Housing Litigation Bureau (HLB)—which takes owners to court seeking repairs and fines when violations are not corrected on time—to be decimated. Almost no comprehensive cases are brought against owners with hundreds of recorded violations in their buildings, because the handful of HLB attorneys is almost completely tied up handling individual heat and hot-water complaints. To find out more about the fight for code enforcement, call Met Council at (212) 693-0553.