Report: City Failing To Repair Most Dangerous Buildings

Community members and housing activists yesterday criticized the Department of Housing Preservation and Development for failing to ensure repairs in the city’s most dangerous buildings.The housing advocacy coalition Housing Here and Now released a report saying that nearly a third of the 1,533 buildings identified in “Major Problem Landlords,” an internal department document, have more violations this year than they did when the list was compiled in 2003. The department provided the list to one of the coalition’s member groups in late 2003.The report was released at a rally outside 258 Jefferson St., an apartment building in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn with 90 open housing code violations.A total of 1,028 buildings on the list had an average of four or more violations for each unit in 2005, according to the report. The Department of Housing Preservation and Development defines a building that has three hazardous or immediately hazardous violations per unit as “unsatisfactory.”Also, 438 buildings had more violations classified as “immediately hazardous” than in 2003.The classification includes such problems as rodent infestations or a lack of heat, hot water, electricity, or gas. Building owners have 24 hours to correct such violations.“Thousands of tenants are waiting not for hours, but years, with immediately hazardous conditions,” the executive director of Housing Here and Now, Julie Miles, said yesterday.“We are sick and tired of living in houses with conditions that are hazardous to our health,” a tenant at 258 Jefferson St., Irania Sanchez, said through a translator.She led reporters through her apartment, pointing out rotting walls and floors that crumbled at her touch. “Rats and mice get in here,” she said of a hole larger than her fist in the kitchen floor.The four-room apartment, which costs $825 a month and houses Ms. Sanchez and her aunt, cousin, and three children, lacks hot water, she said. The electricity in some rooms cannot be used because of short circuits. Many of the faucets don’t work. The back door, which opens onto the street, has no lock. Although she bars it with a wooden plank, robbers have broken in, she said.She added that the city had removed the lead paint in her apartment, but that no other problems had been fixed after three years of complaining to the city.Ms. Miles called on the department to pursue violations more aggressively.“In July 2005, HPD started a new initiative with the City Council and housing advocacy groups to identify the most distressed buildings in each district in order to do comprehensive roof-to-cellar inspections. Many of the buildings on Housing Here and Now’s list will be inspected through this initiative,” a spokesman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Neill Coleman, said in a prepared statement.Mr. Coleman added that the list recorded buildings owned by major owners, not necessarily problem owners.Ms. Miles said the 2003 list her group obtained clearly reported problem owners and included statistics on code violations for each of the owners’ buildings.“There were a lot,” she said.

Report: City Failing To Repair Most Dangerous Buildings

Report: City Failing To Repair Most Dangerous Buildings

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