Deidre Williams | July 11, 2024

Dorothy Oatmeyer says the Duerstein Street house where she and her family reside feels as though it is falling apart.

There are holes between bricks and in the corners of windowsills. Bricks are falling off the back of the house. The kitchen floor is missing in large areas. The kitchen cupboards are detached from the walls.

And on her wooden front porch, there is chipped and peeling lead paint, she said. Her young granddaughter tested positive for a “very high lead level” in her blood when she was 2 years old. The Erie County Health Department determined that was from playing on their front porch, Oatmeyer said.

Oatmeyer is among four Buffalo residents and four community organizations that filed a petition Wednesday in State Supreme Court to compel the city to fully implement its Proactive Rental Inspections Law, which was intended to protect residents in rental housing from lead paint and other health and safety hazards.

They say the city’s failure to enforce the PRI Law violates the rights of its most vulnerable residents to live in a clean and healthful environment, as guaranteed by the New York State Constitution.

“During these years of living with mold, lead paint, leaks and dampness, and other poor conditions, my family’s health has suffered. One of my daughters developed asthma,” Oatmeyer said in official court documents. “She had never had any symptoms or respiratory issues before. She had been an active and healthy kid, but now she needs an inhaler for the last two years.”
“If the Proactive Rental Inspection law were fully implemented, the landlord would not have been able to rent this house, with its many code violations and lead hazards, in the first place, unless repairs were made,” Oatmeyer added.

The city does not comment on pending litigation, Buffalo city spokesperson Michael DeGeorge said.

The lawsuit

In court documents, tenants describe living with leaking roofs, collapsing ceilings, mold, broken windows, rotting floors and exterior doors that do not lock. Their children and grandchildren have lead poisoning, asthma, persistent headaches and nosebleeds and more, they claimed.

“We’re not asking for anything new. Just for the city of Buffalo to live up to its own stated standards,” said Steven Haagsma, education specialist at Housing Opportunities Made Equal, which filed the court petition.

The other organizations that petitioned the court are Partnership for the Public Good, PUSH Buffalo and the Center for Elder Law and Justice. Lipsitz, Ponterio & Comerford, the Western New York Law Center and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice are co-counsel on the case.

The other city residents who filed the petition are Krystal Cruz, Denita Adams and Victoria Ring.

None of them attended Thursday’s press conference at HOME offices on Main Street because of logistics, such as no transportation or childcare, organizers said. Another was working.

Since at least the early 1990s, Buffalo has ranked among the nation’s worst cities for childhood lead poisoning – a function of its aging housing stock and concentrated, segregated poverty.

The Erie County Health Department designated nine ZIP codes in the city as communities of concern because of elevated childhood lead poisoning.

PRI problems

The Buffalo Common Council unanimously adopted the PRI law in 2020, requiring the interior and exterior inspection of 36,000 rental units in the City of Buffalo every three years at an anticipated cost of $2.1 million a year. The program sends building inspectors into non-owner-occupied one- and two-family rental units to check for lead paint hazards, as well as functioning utilities, mold, asbestos, rodents, water damage, broken windows, rotting floors and other unhealthy conditions.

The city has inspected fewer than 5,000 rental properties and issued fewer than 500 certificates of compliance since 2020 under PRI, said Andrea Ó Súilleabháin, executive director of Partnership for the Public Good.

City officials said earlier this year that funding for PRI was a problem, and the inspections are more time-consuming than expected.

To raise funds for the program, in May the city doubled rental registry fees paid by landlords.

The rental registry fees are now set at $50 for single-family dwellings, up from $25, and $100 for two-family homes, up from $50.

Mayor Byron Brown announced in his State of the City address May 1 that seven new inspectors – for a total of 10 — would be hired under the city’s 2024-25 operating budget, which began July 1.

The rental registry ordinance, which the Common Council approved in November 2020, created a database for all non-owner occupied one- and two-family rental dwellings in the city. The data collected includes the name and address of the owner and telephone numbers where the owner, or an agent for the owner, can be reached. Registration is renewable annually.

Prior to the increases, the rental registry fees generated about $1 million per year, officials said.

The move to increase the registry fees followed criticism from local community groups and residents earlier this year – including PPG – who appealed to the city to inspect far more rental properties, as required by its PRI local law.

The PRI program also relies on $1 million in American Rescue Plan funding, which will be exhausted by the end of 2026.

Other resources

More help is on the way.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed a new lead initiative to target prevention of childhood lead poisoning.

The New York State Rental Registry and Proactive Inspections to Identify Lead Hazards involves multiple agencies, including the state Department Of Health, Division of Housing and Community Renewal and Department of State.

There is also the Erie County Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, which is responsible for the case management of lead poisoned children in Erie County. The program addresses the potential for lead exposure, as well as preventing lead poisoned children from further exposure. The program conducts investigations and provides information to the parents or guardians of children under age 18 who have tested positive for elevated blood lead levels.

The state provided about $2 million dollars in grant money to run the program.

City officials have said Buffalo is not the government agency with the primary responsibility for lead paint remediation or lead poisoning. The city has a supporting role with state and county partners.

The city has been saying lead poison prevention is the county’s responsibility off and on for about a decade, Ó Súilleabháin said.

Community groups said Thursday that the city is responsible for basically the safety of buildings in general within Buffalo. It’s up to Erie County to inspect buildings after children have tested positive for high levels of lead in their blood.

“The easiest way to think about is the (Erie County) Health Department is responsible for the health of people. The (city’s) department of permit and inspection is responsible for the health of buildings,” Ó Súilleabháin said.

“We need to be inspecting those buildings prior to children being tested positive for lead to make sure that they’re up to code so that they’re safe for kids to live in and that we’re not just dealing with the consequences of kids being poisoned by lead, but dealing with things up front,” said Sarah Wooten, PPG’s director of community research.