To the list of court-created environmental villains, we can now add the former speaker of the New York City Council, Peter Vallone, and the 35 other council members — overwhelmingly Democrats — who voted with him in 1999 to rationalize the city’s absurdly onerous lead-paint laws. The state Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that by passing the law, Mr. Vallone violated the State Environmental Quality Review Act. Mr. Vallone, of course, is hardly an environmental scofflaw. He’s a genial man who realizes, wisely, that stripping the city’s walls of every last scintilla of covered lead is not a goal worth achieving at all costs. In particular, it is not worth making housing in this city, or property ownership here, unaffordable as a result of lead “clean-up” costs or the costs of the associated litigation. Yesterday’s ruling overruling Mr. Vallone’s mostly reasonable 1999 bill manages to bundle nearly all the sins of contemporary liberalism into one pack age. There’s hypocrisy: The same leftish precincts that advocate endlessly for “affordable” housing and historic preservation are now engaged in litigation to make such housing and preservation prohibitively expensive. There’s the resort to the courts instead of to the democratic process — The New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning has been litigating this issue since 1985, though it never managed to win over Mr. Vallone, a Democrat. There’s the patronizing condescension toward the poor: The obligation is always on landlords to make an apartment lead-free, never on a tenant to decide, in the first place, not to rent an apartment or to move out. There’s excessive regulation, even of the regulators: The state environmental laws seem to have ensnared even the city of New York. As the city revisits the lead-paint issue, it’s worth seeking a solution that doesn’t treat Mr. Vallone’s constituency of middle-class property owners as if it were toxic.