Documents coughed up under the Freedom Of Information Law again show that the de Blasio administration downplayed the true scale and scope of lead exposure crisis in public housing.
From 2010 to ’18, city health inspectors found lead in 222 NYCHA units across 93 developments — more than a quarter of all complexes citywide, The Post’s Nolan Hicks found. Experts say that finding lead in one apartment meant the poison likely was present throughout the building. Yet NYCHA leaders opted to avoid costly remediation by challenging findings — successfully, in 158 cases.
But the costs to the children potentially exposed to a brain-damaging toxin at places like the Jacob Riis Houses are incalculable.
Just before the COVID-19 lockdown, Bart Schwartz, the federal monitor overseeing NYCHA, reported that over 100,000 public housing units hadn’t been inspected for lead and 55 percent of the ones inspected are indeed contaminated.
To be fair, NYCHA’s “appeal everything” approach started well before Mayor de Blasio took office — but it continued on his watch. And the mayor didn’t expose the trickery as he downplayed the lead threat long after the public learned of the crisis.
Maybe he’ll learn, before he leaves office, that honesty really is the best policy.
