New York City Looks To Crack Down On Slum Lords

"New York City wants to strengthen its hand against recalcitrant landlords by giving itself broad new powers to overhaul entire building systems — like heating, electrical or plumbing — in long-troubled properties, and to force landlords to pay for the work.

A bill to be introduced in the City Council today with the Bloomberg administration’s support would give the Department of Housing Preservation and Development the right to go into buildings that have dozens of serious housing code violations and a history of emergency repairs, do cellar-to-roof inspections and fix not only immediate problems, but also the underlying systems.

The proposed program, which city officials said would go beyond anything they knew of elsewhere, is intended to bring as many as a thousand severely run-down buildings into compliance with the housing maintenance code over the next five years and to shore up the supply of habitable apartments for lower-income families at a time when the inventory of lower-priced housing is rapidly declining."