One-third of NYC Housing Tenants Say Mold Returns After It’s Fixed

January 28, 2015- An internal report by New York City’s Department of Investigation obtained by the Daily News reveals that 1 in 3 Housing Authority tenants say mold in their apartments returns after NYCHA claims the problem is fixed.

A pattern of ineffectiveness of these court-ordered “repairs” emerges in the report, obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information law.

The findings reveal that DOI quietly began monitoring NYCHA’s anti-mold effort back in April, shortly after the authority agreed to settle a federal lawsuit by promising to aggressively eradicate mold in its aging apartments.

The NYCHA data showed that 74 percent of what NYCHA deemed “simple repairs” were completed within seven days as required. But that’s below the promised 95 percent success rate. Problems became more apparent when NYCHA did follow-up visits to see if the repairs did the trick.

In a random sampling of 432 tenants, 309 — or 71 percent — at first said the mold was gone. But ultimately 147 tenants — 34 percent — reported that the mold returned following the NYCHA “repairs.”

Read the full nydailynews.com post here.

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