The city has been housing homeless families in buildings that have serious building-code violations, and the city has been paying landlords rent for apartments without ascertaining whether promised repairs have been done, according to a report from the public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, that was obtained by The New York Sun.

The Department of Homeless Services – which has been working to place the chronically homeless in stable housing situations – has re-inspected only a fraction of residences found to have code violations and often the promised work hasn’t been done, the report, entitled “Subsidy Shame,” said. The report is to be released in its entirety next week at a press conference with Ms. Gotbaum.

“If DHS gives a landlord a checklist of things they should fix because there are code violations, they should go back and make sure the landlord does that before tenants go in,” Ms. Gotbaum said in an interview. “Taxpayer money is going to slumlords who aren’t doing what they said they would do.”

Six months ago, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a homeless program called Housing Stability Plus, in which the homeless would no longer be permitted to apply for federal rent vouchers or public housing and instead would get rental-assistance grants for up to five years, with the size of the grant shrinking each year. The program brings together city, state, and federal funds to wean the chronically homeless off the dole. But some of the apartments, according to housing activists and Ms. Gotbaum, are substandard.

“One shelter provider told us about an apartment with live rats in the oven,” the senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, Patrick Markee, said. “There are apartments in buildings with lead-paint violations. Obviously that is a problem for families with small children. We’re really disturbed because the Department of Homeless Services said that they would match addresses used in the HSP program to the database of housing-code violations, and clearly they aren’t doing that.”

The public advocate’s office did. Using a list of apartments that DHS uses to find permanent housing for shelter residents, Ms. Gotbaum’s staff cross-checked the list with the violation reports on the Housing Preservation and Development’s Web site. Of the 175 buildings on the list of available apartments that had been registered in Mr. Bloomberg’s Housing Stability Plus program as of February 25, nearly 40% had housing maintenance code violations in the last year.

Fully 31% of the buildings had Class C, or “immediately hazardous,” violations in the last year, and 12% of the buildings had more than 10 Class C code violations in the last year. Class C violations include inadequate fire exits, rodents, lead-based paint, and lack of heat, hot water, electricity, or gas, according to the housing agency’s online glossary.

About 20% of those on the list had between 25 and 50 code violations in the past year, the report said. What’s more, when HSP program participants move into buildings in poor condition, anecdotal reports suggest that the Department of Homeless Services is not helping families resolve the problems, even after they have asked the agency for help.

A spokesman for the agency, James Anderson, told the Sun that the apartments had been inspected and in some cases re-inspected and that the department has a special unit to help the families with their apartment problems.

Many of the brokers and landlords who had been in the federal Section 8 Housing program opted to participate in the new plan, so the stock of apartments is very similar to what had been available. About one-quarter of the apartments that had a code violation had been re-inspected, DHS said, and in those cases the violations had been remedied by the time the inspector returned.

“One building I was in, there was no lock on the door, paint chipping, and the building was terrible,” Ms. Gotbaum told the Sun. “DHS can’t say that just because the buildings have problems, the units for HSP don’t necessarily have problems. When you have rats in the building or no heat in the building you are going to have that problem in the apartments.”

Mr. Markee, of the Coalition for the Homeless, agreed. “If there is lead paint in the building, well, where there is smoke there is fire,” he said. “Under the previous housing-subsidies program you had rigorous standards of quality. They didn’t use the benefit of the doubt. They want to streamline the process, and we’re all for that, but that has happened at the expense of making sure these are decent, suitable apartments.”

Ms. Gotbaum recommended the Department of Homeless Services ensure that buildings where homeless families are placed meet the requirements of the city’s maintenance code, just as the Administration for Children’s Services does. A second inspection should occur before the household moves in.