Chair Hudson questions DSS on comptroller report and hazardous unit approvals

Okay, a recent report by the New York State Comptroller on the administration of the City FEPS program for home-based clients

found that DSS had repeatedly approved housing units with hazardous violations, including approving a client to move into an apartment with significant habitability issues despite previously approving another City FEPS client's transfer out of that same apartment

due to habitability issues.

Do you think the procedure envisioned by this bill would help avoid such problems in the future, or are there ways the process outlined in the bill could be improved or tweaked to be more effective?

And then if I can also just ask specifically, because I've had a similar constituent case like this where I could not understand how the city would approve someone to live under such horrible conditions, what type of record keeping

is being done that somebody in this particular case, somebody new is moving into the same unit that somebody was already moved out of?

Yeah, thank you for the question.

I think the agency does dispute some of the findings in the controller's report, including that there was somebody to be, there was somebody eventually to be moved into that unit, but was not currently living in that unit.

That said, obviously we care about the safety and habitability of the units that we're inspecting and that we're placing people in.

But I think I maintain that we think of the current process that we've been rolling out in the pilot

strikes the right balance between providers and HRA, splitting the inspections, the use of

virtual in all of the ways that you rightly point out where we can still check, but that we can use those kinds of technologies to make the process faster for smaller repairs.

And then us, yes, going back out for larger repairs.

I think important to note that we've also established within our accountability office a rental assistance integrity unit, and they do reviews of our inspections.

And so there is a backstop.

There is additional accountability.

But certainly we would want to hear about the experience of one of your constituents if or that you may have seen yourself a unit that.

You didn't find to be at the level we should be allowing folks to move into.

I think those are all very important, and we would want to understand.

what might have gone wrong in that process.

Thank you.

Yeah, I'm happy to share that in greater detail offline, but it was a situation with a mother who had

three children, one of whom had special needs, and the conditions were just horrific.

Rats, rodents,

water leaks, mold, things like that.

And then the child, you know, essentially couldn't go to school.

They couldn't shower.

They stopped going to school because they were unable to shower.

And we couldn't get them out of the apartment fast enough.

You know, it's all the typical, you know, issues that I'm sure so many of us have seen and you all have experienced too, where we can't get the voucher transfer.

We can't get approval for the new unit.

She had already secured a new apartment, but they couldn't get the payment.

It's just, you know, bureaucracy, right?

But in the meantime, the kids weren't in school, which was a separate problem.

And they had to continue to endure those conditions while they sort of waited for everything to go through.

That's exactly why we're here today.