Follow-up Audit Report on the Enforcement of Housing Maintenance Code by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS

This is a follow-up audit to determine whether the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) has implemented the recommendations made in an earlier audit report, Audit Report on the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s Enforcement of the Housing Maintenance Code (Audit # MJ95-098A, issued June 30, 1995). The earlier audit examined performance indicators published in the Mayor’s Management Report (MMR) and investigated whether a statistical sample of violations issued by HPD for immediately hazardous conditions had been corrected. In this current audit, we discuss the recommendations made in the previous audit report as well as the implementation status of those recommendations.

The earlier report noted that neither HPD nor the public knew whether HPD was effectively enforcing the Housing Maintenance Code (Housing Code). That report concluded that HPD should assess its effectiveness by measuring how often violations were corrected, instead of only measuring performance in terms of activities, such as calls received, inspections performed, violations issued, etc. The report also noted that the collection of such information was not useful if HPD did not know whether the activities led to a desirable outcome, i.e. the correction of violations. This report also concluded that HPD lacked both the resources to initiate litigation and the authority to penalize building owners who disregarded the Housing Maintenance Code.

The previous report made six recommendations to HPD. This follow-up audit determined that two of the six recommendations were implemented and four were partially implemented. The six recommendations and their current implementation status follow.

HPD should:

1. Develop appropriate reinspection processes and performance indicators geared toward showing whether violations have been corrected, and whether these violations were corrected by the landlords or by HPD. To accomplish this, HPD should conduct reinspections of all Class C violations and a representative sample of Class A and Class B violations
2. Make these types of performance indicators public and include them in the Mayor’s Management Report. The public and public officials would then have meaningful indicators to rely on when making decisions regarding Housing Code enforcement policy and budget allocations.
3. Change its goal and objectives in the MMR, and redefine them more in terms of getting violations corrected, rather than in terms of merely enforcing compliance. HPD should work with the Mayor’s Office of Operations to accomplish this.
4. Continue to seek State legislation enabling it to adjudicate NOVs (Notices of Violations) and issue and docket penalties for uncorrected violations without having to obtain judgments in the Housing Part of the Civil Court. To accomplish this, HPD should use the results of this report to convince legislators that HPD needs greater enforcement authority to effectively achieve owner compliance with the Housing Maintenance Code.
5. Inform tenants of their right to take landlords to Housing Court when their landlords fail to correct the violations. Specifically, HPD should develop a printed flyer or booklet that would be handed out to tenants when inspections are performed.
6. Reinspect a sample of correction certifications and initiate litigation to penalize those landlords who submit false statements to HPD claiming they have corrected the violations. Such litigation should be publicized so those owners are informed that they cannot submit false certifications with impunity.

To address weaknesses on these issues that still exist, we recommend that HPD:

1. Continue to enhance its performance indicators in the MMR by separating the indicators for violations issued in the current fiscal year from indicators for violations issued in previous years and still pending. The indicators should be broken down by class of violation, and reports should describe whether the corrections were made by the owner or by HPD.
2. Include all Class C violations in the verified correction rate it reports, and clearly identify any statistics for subsets of Class C violations.
3. Continue to seek State legislation enabling it to adjudicate NOVs (Notices of Violations) and to issue and docket penalties for uncorrected violations without having to obtain judgments in the Housing Part of the Civil Court.
4. Increase its efforts to prosecute false certification cases to penalize those landlords who submit false statements to HPD claiming that they have corrected the violations.
5. Include on its web site as well as in newspapers and various community publications the names of building owners fined by the courts for false certification of corrections, and identify the buildings and violations in those cases.
6. Continue to seek approval from the City Council to increase the civil penalties for owners falsely certifying the correction of violations.

The matters covered in this report were discussed with officials from HPD during and at the conclusion of this audit. A preliminary draft report was sent to HPD officials and discussed at an exit conference on May 28, 2002. On May 29, 2002, we submitted a draft report to HPD officials with a request for comments. We received a written response from HPD on June 14, 2002.

HPD agreed with three of this audit’s six recommendations (#3, #4, and #6). It disagreed with the audit’s finding regarding the need to distinguish in the MMR between current versus previous year performance indicators for violations, but agreed to take the corresponding recommendation (#1) under advisement.

Regarding the recommendation (#2) that HPD include all Class C violations in its MMR correction rate indicator, HPD stated that it has changed the indicator to "ensure that at least 95% of emergency conditions (Class C violations) in private dwellings, requiring repairs, are either verified by the tenant as corrected, or corrective action is initiated by the Department." While HPD’s action increases its performance goal, it does not address the recommendation because the indicator that HPD will report upon (Class C "emergency" violations) will not include all Class C violations and will therefore be misleading.

Regarding the recommendation that HPD include on its web site the names of building owners who have falsely certified corrections of building violations (#5), HPD stated that it "already provides online a record of violations for every building that it has inspected. That includes the name of the owner and the violations that have been falsely certified."