Thomas O'Neil-White | July 11, 2024

Eight plaintiffs including four City of Buffalo residents and four community organizations filed a lawsuit to compel the city to fully implement the Proactive Rental Inspections Law.

The law is intended to protect residents living in rental properties from health and safety hazards like lead paint, water damage, mold and structural problems and also to revoke or restrict rental privileges for property owners who are not up to code.

P.R.I. has been a law since 2020 but community groups and attorneys say the law has been little used. To date, only 5,000 rental units out of the 36,000 that fall under the law have been inspected.

And only 458 certificates of rental compliance have been issued for those 36,000 rental units.

“That means the process has only been completed in 1.2% of the covered rental units,” said Partnership for the Public Good Executive Director Andrea O Suilleabhain, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “Families in Buffalo are regularly living in households that are not fit for human habitation.”

This is not a new problem.

Attorney John Lipsitz started representing lead poisoned children in Buffalo and Western New York in the 1990’s. He said the city continues to hold off on full implementation of P.R.I. despite the health and safety concerns of the renters.

“But the city of Buffalo,” he said. “As it has for the past 30-plus years, continues to drag its feet, continues to sweep the matter under the carpet. While this crisis deepens, it continues to affect poor communities in the city and communities of new immigrants at a very high and alarming rate.”

O Suilleabhain said the city continues to pass the buck off to someone else.

“In meetings of this task force in Buffalo Common Council meetings,” she said. “They have said, ‘we haven't had the staffing, we haven't had the budget.’ They have at times said, ‘lead isn’t our job, so we shouldn't be responsible for that.’ But it is, right in the city code, in the law that was passed that it is their responsibility to do this.”

A spokesperson from the City of Buffalo said the city does comment on pending litigation.

In his State of the City address earlier this year, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said seven additional housing inspectors will be hired.