Housing Becomes Harder
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The New York City Council yesterday voted to make it harder for poor people to find housing in the city and harder for the city’s run-down housing stock to be upgraded. They did this under the guise of “lead paint protection,” but make no mistake about it, what’s really happening is an attack on affordable housing in the city, as some of the most far-sighted of the city’s nonprofit leaders realize. The anti-lead fanatics caricature opponents of the law passed yesterday as callous landlords indifferent to the poisoning of poor children. That’s unfair. Among the opponents of the lead paint law passed yesterday by the City Council over Mayor Bloomberg’s courageous veto were people who have devoted their professional lives to improving the lot of the city’s poor through housing preservation and development. The Local Initiatives Support Corp., a respected nonprofit group chaired by President Clinton’s treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, opposed the law. Can anyone seriously accuse Secretary Rubin of wanting to give poor New York children lead poisoning? Phipps Houses, which has developed more than 6,000 affordable apartments, opposes the law.
As our Andrew Wolf has written, the standard for lead poisoning has shifted so far over recent decades that by today’s standards, “nearly every man, woman, and child living in New York City in the 1950s was lead-poisoned. Incredibly, they actually scored better on IQ and SAT tests than children today, who have virtually lead-free blood coursing through their veins.” The new law shifts the burden of proof in a lead poisoning case onto property owners. It will make insurance more expensive for property owners and will make housing rehabilitation more costly. It will decrease the value of existing property.
Here is the essential element to keep in mind about the lead paint law that the city council has just passed: It is not about the health of our children. The only people likely to benefit from this new law are the tort lawyers who bring lead-poisoning cases against landlords and the few expert witnesses they pay for their testimony. Mayor Bloomberg deserves credit for trying to stop the measure, as does Council Member James Oddo. As for the 44 Council Members who voted for the law, New Yorkers can be consoled by the fact that they’ll be thrown out of office in relatively short order by term limits.
