Encarnación challenges inspection pass rates against ground conditions; Greene cites Maintenance Cares and CRI

But you're inspecting yourselves and...

Is there anyone outside of NYCHA who inspects yearly or?

regularly any NITRA properties or NITRA units?

Yes, thank you, Councilman, for that question.

Yes, that's the Inspire inspectors.

So those report to HUD REAC, which is a division of HUD.

And that's yearly?

They're yearly, yes.

If you get a certain score, they skip a year.

So if you get above an 80, they'll skip one year.

If you get above a 90, they'll skip two years.

And as I said, right now, approximately 87% have passed their 2026 Inspire inspections.

And I really attribute the passage rate to the apartment inspections.

I think it's been transformative because now we're getting into every unit.

And such as the conditions that were described by some of the panelists, which are very unfortunate, we don't want to have folks with missing cabinets.

We don't want to have folks with temp sinks.

So now they can escalate those repairs directly to prioritize them in our very lengthy scheduled process because we want those folks to go first.

We want to better prioritize.

So through the repairs of the apartment inspections, our really diligent work of our maintenance workers and prioritizing, I think we're starting to see a trend of better scores the past two years.

And I think we're doing, we're about 120,000 inspections deep this year.

So we've already done 120,000, got about roughly 20,000 and a little bit less to go.

I think we're going to come very close to hitting the actual 100% this year.

I think we're going to see this really be transformative for our residents.

I'll be honest, I don't know how you're hitting those numbers, if I'm being extremely honest with.

what I've been seeing on the ground in some of these apartments and knocking on some of these doors, it is extremely difficult for just all of our council staff.

Like a large number of our constituent services are essentially helping push these work orders.

I mean, if I look at my staff's notebooks, it's all work order numbers.

It's all of them following up, calling poor Brian, hearing from me every single day.

It is a lot of work that our offices are assisting with and helping with.

And a lot of it is in unit.

Issues that we're seeing in apartments.

And so I am very surprised that these inspections are going as well as they are.

I know that you guys are working hard, but it's a really big issue.

And a lot of these issues are just prevalent and really creating

an unsafe environment for the people that are living in these apartments.

It just is.

I mean, we see it day in and day out, especially with the amount of nitrous that we have in our development.

It's really, really difficult to believe that we would have this high of a percentage of

passing inspection rates for these dilapidated, in many cases, apartments.

And I just have to be on record saying that.

Thank you, Council Member.

And I just want to just be clear.

I'm by no means a mission accomplished person.

I'm at a development every day except for today because I'm here because I want to see the conditions on the ground, what the residents are experiencing, what our staff are experiencing.

And it's extremely tough conditions.

I visit apartments every week and there are unacceptable conditions.

What we're trying to do, though, is proactively identify those uninhabitable conditions and connect those resources with our trades, with our resources to get it done.

That's why we started Maintenance Cares.

So any maintenance worker in the city can email me and my team so that we can prioritize apartments like you see and your staff see every day.

We don't want folks living in those conditions, and then we try to work with residents to address that.

The other thing that we're really excited about is the critical repairs initiative, which is going to allow residents through a formalized process to escalate non-mold and leak repairs.

They can already escalate mold and leak through the OCC, but now missing cabinets, temporary sinks, damaged floors.

Through the CRI program, residents are going to be able to leverage off of that and come into us, and we have some additional money as well to support us on the overtime, which is critical for doing many of these jobs as well.

So we're very appreciative to the administration for supporting the CRI program, and we think it's going to be also transformative to, again, push those repairs because we don't want folks living in those conditions.

We want to find them and correct them.