City inspectors have found dangerous levels of lead dust in nine East Village-area buildings produced by vacant apartments being gut-renovated, most recently in one owned by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In investigations conducted over the past five years in response to tenant complaints, the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found lead levels at the buildings ranging from four to 440 times as high as the federal Environmental Protection Agency standard of 40 micrograms per square foot. At 118 East 4th Street, owned by Kushner’s Westminster City Living, inspectors on November 21st found 383 µg per square foot on the staircase between the second and third floors.
“There was a white dust cloud that invaded my apartment. It covered everything,” says tenant David Dupuis, who lives upstairs from a vacant unit being renovated. “I felt a very intense burning in the back of my throat. I was coughing and choking.”
It’s common for landlords of rent-stabilized buildings to renovate vacant apartments, as it gives them a legal way to raise rents to market rates. In buildings constructed before 1960, demolition usually means taking down walls that have lead paint on them, says Jodie Leidecker of the Cooper Square Committee, a neighborhood group helping tenants in the affected buildings organize. If safe work practices aren’t followed, she adds, “tenants are exposed to extreme levels of lead dust.”
Not following legally required safety practices, such as using a HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air filter) vacuum cleaner to suck up microscopic lead-dust particles and putting a plastic sheet over the door of the apartment being renovated in order to keep the dust out of the halls, has two advantages to landlords. First, it’s less costly. “We see that nine times out of ten, the landlords do it the fast and cheap way, and hope they don’t get caught,” says Cooper Square Committee organizer Brandon Kielbasa.
Second, it creates conditions noxious enough to make rent-stabilized tenants want to leave — a practice dubbed “construction as harassment.” The nine buildings where the lead dust was found, eight in the East Village and one in northern Little Italy, are owned by Kushner, ICON, Samy Mahfar, or, formerly, Raphael Toledano — all landlords who neighborhood housing activists regularly cite as driving out rent-stabilized tenants so their apartments can be converted to market rate.
325 East 12th Street (Scott Lynch / Gothamist)
At 325 East 12th Street, a six-story apartment building between 1st and 2nd avenues, resident Liz Haak says the troubles began when Toledano bought the building in 2015 as part of a 15-property package. “He actually told people, ‘You don’t want to live here, because I’m going to do construction,’” she says.
“I had dust coming through the floorboards, every crack and crevice,” says Holly Slayton, who lives with her daughter, now 11, at 514 East 12th Street, another building bought by Toledano in 2015.
The three tenants say construction workers did not follow safety procedures mandated by city law, such as putting lead-contaminated debris in sealed containers before bringing it into public areas of the building, sealing vents, and having a plastic cover on the apartment doorway.
In Haak’s building, five vacant apartments were gutted “down to the brick walls,” but “we never saw an air scrubber,” she says. When the city did a safety sweep in May 2016, she adds, Con Ed said the building’s damaged gas pipes were too decrepit to be repairable, so it turned off the cooking gas for all 36 apartments — and Toledano “made no move to restore” it. (He did offer them free ice cream 2½ months later.)
In April 2017, the Madison Capital Realty private-equity firm foreclosed on Toledano for $140 million in debts, taking over the 15 buildings. That spring, Haak says, the super had to go away for a family emergency, and the porter couldn’t keep up with mopping and vacuuming the halls. After tenants called 311, Health Department inspectors found 640 µg of lead dust on the floor of the third-floor hallway, 16 times the EPA standard.
A spokesperson for Silverstone Property Group, Madison Capital Realty’s property-management arm, says that since it took control, “all 14 lead violations have been removed.” City Department of Housing Preservation and Development records online indicate no current lead-paint violations in the two East 12th Street buildings.
“Rampant” non-compliance with lead laws
Dangerous amounts of lead dust are minuscule—100 µg is the size of a speck of coffee sweetener, says Matthew Chachere of the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning. Even low levels of lead can be hazardous: As little as as 5 µg per deciliter of blood—less than 250 µg in the circulatory system of a preteen—can cause brain damage in children under 6, and scientists are increasingly concluding that there is no safe level.
The problem is particularly acute in New York City, because more than 60 percent of its housing stock, 2 million units, was built in the years before 1950, when lead was added to paint to make it more durable, moisture-resistant, and quick-drying. In 1970, the year the Department of Health established a lead-poisoning prevention program, it found more than 2,600 children with more than 60 µg per deciliter in their blood, “levels today considered medical emergencies.”
118 East 4th Street (Scott Lynch / Gothamist)
The city outlawed lead paint in 1960, 18 years before the federal government did. But outlawing new use wasn’t enough, as children could still be poisoned by peeling or flaking paint, or dust from “friction surfaces” like windows and doors, especially in poorer neighborhoods where building owners were less likely to maintain paint. By the 1990s, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Flatbush, and Jamaica were dubbed the “lead belt.”
A 1982 city law required building owners to remove or seal up (“encapsulate”) lead paint. But, Chachere says, courts interpreted this as mandating that building owners “remove every molecule of lead,” which rendered it too costly to enforce—by that standard, landlords would have had to gut-renovate every apartment they owned that had been built before 1960.
In 1999, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani pushed through a bill that gutted the previous law’s protections, but courts struck it down on environmental grounds. The current law, enacted in 2004, requires landlords to conduct yearly lead inspections of apartments where children under six live; remove or encapsulate lead paint on doors and windows when an apartment is vacant; and use safe construction practices. They also must file “prenotifications” with the Department of Health for work that would disturb a surface of more than 100 square feet that could contain lead paint or when replacing two or more windows.
Since that law was enacted, according to Department of Health figures, the number of children under six who tested positive for high levels of lead has declined from more than 37,000 in 2005 to 4,261 in 2017, from 12 percent of those tested to less than 1.5 percent. HPD Commissioner Maria Torres-Springer told the City Council on September 27th that the department has issued 314,000 violations for lead paint since 2005, and taken more than 2,300 actions to force landlords to abate it.
Enforcement of lead-paint laws is split among three city agencies — HPD, the Department of Health, and the Department of Buildings — each with different responsibilities. An HPD spokesperson says the Department of Health is responsible for responding to complaints about lead contamination, and the Department of Buildings is responsible for responding to unsafe-work complaints. A Department of Buildings spokesperson said that lead-paint dust is “not within our purview,” so it refers those complaints to the Department of Health.
HPD says its primary responsibility “is to conduct inspections in response to complaints about lead hazards caused by poor maintenance, and the agency either supports, requires, or does the work to remediate those hazards,” as well as looking for lead-based paint hazards during regular building inspections and going out to “the worst buildings” through its special enforcement programs.
All three agencies are members of the Tenant Harassment Prevention Task Force, which is mandated to bring enforcement actions against landlords who harass tenants by creating unsafe living conditions.
Housing and lead-prevention advocates, however, say that enforcement is weak, especially when it comes to lead dust generated by apartment renovations. The city logically enough concentrates lead-law enforcement on buildings with children under 6, but that means that those without young children are less of a priority, they say, and with enforcement split among three agencies, relying on safe-work-practice rules isn’t enough.
“The way the system is set up, landlords simply don’t face strong enough penalties for contaminating buildings,” says Cooper Square’s Kielbasa.
“Non-compliance with the safe work practice rules is rampant,” concluded “Lead Loopholes,” a report issued in September by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and other groups. The city, it added, has failed to implement “systems to ensure that owners are satisfying their legal obligations to prevent lead paint exposure before it occurs,” and instead relies primarily on complaints from tenants.
HPD, the report said, has never given a landlord a violation for failing to conduct an annual inspection, and as of mid-2017, had only issued two for failure to abate lead in vacant apartments.
HPD responds that it issued 71 violations in the 2017-18 fiscal year against owners who failed to provide adequate records related to properties with Department of Health lead-abatement orders. The agency has also sued 22 landlords for failing to submit any documents, such as proof they abated or remediated lead paint in vacant apartments. It says it has collected about $56,000 in fines levied on 16 of them, and is owed $3,350 by one more. The agency is still working to get those documents from the owners, a spokesperson told Gothamist, and will bring cases back to court if they do not.
The City Council is now considering a package of 23 bills to improve lead-poisoning prevention, including measures to expand inspection mandates and require lead-based paint to be permanently removed or encapsulated when an apartment becomes vacant. Intro 874, sponsored by Councilmember Margaret Chin (D-Manhattan), would require HPD and the health department to notify the Department of Buildings if they find a violation of the lead-paint hazard laws. The Buildings Department could then use that information to issue a stop-work order for any construction in that building.
“You could see footprints” in the dust
“I know that even more buildings than we have proof for are being contaminated,” says Kielbasa. The problem, he says, is that tenants “don't always know to call 311 to get the test done when the work is happening,” and when they do, often have difficulty getting their complaints routed to Department of Health inspectors through 311 operators.
The result can be a clean bill of health for contaminated buildings, if inspectors happen to arrive on the wrong day. HPD says it has not found any “safety-related violating conditions” at 118 East 4th Street in the past two years, most recently on December 7th. At 325 East 12th Street, it says inspectors found no construction-related dust the morning after tenants complained in April 2017, nor at 514 East 12th Street in March 2016.
Yet at 514 East 12th Street, the contractor renovating vacant apartments “didn’t use any of the protocols,” says tenant Holly Slayton, such as plastics to cover doors. The Department of Health’s Healthy Homes program, she adds, told the landlord and contractor “to put air purifiers in the hallway. They never did.”
514 East 12th Street (Scott Lynch / Gothamist)
In November 2017, the Department of Health found lead dust more than twice the EPA standard on three staircases in the building, including 169 µg per square foot on the steps to the second floor.
Fortunately, Slayton says, her daughter did not test positive for lead poisoning—more than 5 µg per deciliter of blood. But Toledano, she says, was still able to use an array of harassment tactics to push out 200 tenants across his 15 buildings, and her building still has problems with chronic lack of heat and mold serious enough to give her and her daughter upper-respiratory infections.
“We have performed thorough lead testing at the buildings, all with negative results,” the Silverstone Property Group spokesperson told Gothamist. The bankruptcy court decision that gave its parent Madison Capital Realty control of the buildings barred it from doing renovations except in emergencies, and the spokesperson said the only work it has done since has been “repainting and minor necessary unit repairs.”
However, tenants charge that Madison, which lent Toledano $124 million to buy the 15 buildings in 2015, was well aware of the landlord’s predatory business model. Then-state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman unsuccessfully objected to the bankruptcy court ruling that gave the firm control of the buildings, alleging that Madison knew the only way Toledano could hope to pay back the loan on time was to “embark on a hyper-aggressive plan to drive up the rents” by getting rid of rent-stabilized tenants and renovating vacant apartments “often without regard to applicable housing and safety laws.”
At the Kushner building at 118 East 4th Street, meanwhile, Dupuis recalls dust so thick on the hallway floor that “you could see footprints.” Once he saw a worker carrying an uncovered plastic garbage can full of rubble out of the building, wearing only a rag over his mouth. Another worker he saw was “coated head to toe in thick white dust—you could see it on his eyelashes.”
“As soon as we were alerted to the condition, we instructed the contractor responsible to immediately clean the public areas and to implement stricter measures to prevent construction dust or debris from escaping the work area,” a Kushner company spokesperson responds. “Kushner always uses a lead certified contractor who fully complies with the law.”
The Department of Health says it ordered the landlord to abate the lead dust, and followup inspections on November 23rd and December 10th found no dust in common areas and no violations of safety rules.
In that instance, the city at least got the landlord to obey the law after the fact. Since the order was issued, Dupuis says, the contractors have “been cleaning the hallways every single day” and put the plastic cover back on the door of the apartment being renovated.
“If proper precautions had been taken, there was no need for that exposure,” says Liz Haak. “City agencies have to be more rigorous in enforcing the laws.”
