Left to right: dramatization of breaking a lock for lead prevention, the “Lead Lady” Shoya Olatoye, senior citizen and tenant Justa Lopez placed on notice, convicted criminal landlord/developer Daniel Melamud.

Looks like the folks at NYCHA and probably their purveyors at city hall might be taking their jobs seriously now after last week’s revelation of covering up bogus lead inspections and infinite other oversights. And they are not showing a millimeter of class about it.

After appointing a redundant position to assure accountability, for real this time, Shoya and her new crack committee decided to take immediate yet invasive action for actual lead inspections by breaking the locks if no one is home at the time. Leading to new aggravation and inconvenience for the suffering tenants who will certainly be at work or picking up kids at school, for this effort will mostly be done mid-afternoon. Also obviously for more costs with replacing locks and making new keys. Though it’s not certain if some deduction from tenants rents will be considered from this moronic bureaucratic decision, as if the year of neglecting to do federal ordered inspections isn’t enough of a price to pay. Or even if the people they hired are even certified professionals, for it turns out that NYCHA did not even vet the contractors assigned to inspect and repaint the units. Fucking grave.

As NYCHA is now a functioning entity on lead extraction, instead of previously being an optical one, they actually have been quite active on asbestos removal. And just has reckless and irresponsible as the agency’s recent approach on lead, as evidenced at the Seward Park Houses on the Lower East Side by the FDR drive. As the contractors they hired for the toxic removal placed contaminant tents on the project’s playground, exactly right next to the jungle gym and a slide, denying the kids of tenants a safe place to have fun for the last 3 months and certainly for the rest of their remaining childhood

Asbestos huts in a dilapidated playground at the Seward Houses. Sick and twisted.

This is absolutely deranged. And it looks like those playthings need a lead inspection and repainting itself, for it looks like it hasn’t been upgraded in a decade. With this revolting development here, this spot looks like prime bait for the odious NextGen plan to take  unused space like this and parking lots for future development of new buildings with market rate rentals with help from the private real estate industry. Which is naturally the case here, as is NextGen being a program for city sanctioned plunder of government property for predator developers.

While this irresponsible misuse of an public funded amenity is outrageous, NYCHA’s asbestos abatement process is standard procedure.

There’s a lot more where this came from, check out this woman’s youtube channel, she’s got over a dozen more documented flagrant offenses and NYCHA cruelty and brazenness. This building, which is in the super trendy world fascination destination Brooklyn™ makes it seem that Steve Croman, Jared Kushner or Daniel Malemud was running NYCHA. (Yeah, who’s Malemud, you’ll see at the end).

Well, it looks like the Commish is starting to feel the pangs of shame from the general public, mostly from the poor, demanding her termination despite the arrogant, obstinate orders from Day Mayor de Faustio demanding that she remain in her undeserved post. And even from the deluded Ms Olatoye herself, who absolutely has not learned a fucking thing, for she has just summoned her staffers to distribute a hilarious petition letter to the suffering tenant associations for them to sign to advocate for her to remain at her job, as she is about to face the city council in a few days:

A blind person can see the defensive nature of this petition. This letter might be the first of it’s kind that was actually commandeered by an executive instead of the normal protocol which involves actual community participation. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty fucking demented. What does Shoya via the petition mean by we? The royal we, maybe.

With this obnoxious self-preservation letter NYCHA again finds the funds, in spite of being $17 billion dollars in debt and being forced to seek the aid of the real estate overlords, to piss away on bureaucratic bullshit instead of making their buildings habitable and depriving the civil and civic rights and peace of mind of it’s residents. As is wont of the perpetually troubled and corrupt agency, for with the dispatching of actual lobbyists at the bidding of Shoya it falls directly in line for their historic usage of lawyers commissioned to boot tenants out into the streets. A NY Daily News story from 2013 showed that NYCHA under the direction of asshole technocrat John Rhea spent as much money and hiring on lawyers (8 million plus at the time for 98 lawyers), that you and their poor tenants they hassled paid for, than they spent on bricklayers (6 million plus at time at a total of 65 workers). And roofers (2 million plus for 29 workers) and exterminators (3.8 million for 90 workers) combined. Surely this is a big factor in the decrepit and decaying conditions of these publicly funded buildings and the ongoing deliberate attempts to dissuade poor citizens from living there.

The crazy lady commissioner apparently is cognizant of the reaming she is going to get even from the self-serving hacks of the city council. The majority of electeds are looking for her removal and it syncs well with prominent members looking to extend their terms in another voter referendum, the third time it’s been considered and a sound trashing would make for great optics among voters, if they show up of course. Despite that, she still has got to go. And go down hard.

Meanwhile in Astoria and Long Island City in Queens, rent-stabilized tenants have been under duress from their stingy and avaricious proprietors for over a year, driven by the hyped cachet and hyperdevelopment in those respective towns and exorbitant rent speculation/fabrication in both. A fire that engulfed the L.I.C. building that forced section 8 tenants to take up shelter with their relatives as the city-ordered repairs and renovations continued to be delayed by the building’s owners, conveniently keeping them away.

The rent-regulated building in Astoria is another quite sordid affair as the tenants there have been in constant battle with a proclaimed Christian non-profit that has ran the building for quite some time now wants to kick all of them out so they can run the place as a homeless shelter. In a morbid twist of irony, the group known as NYSUM, the  claims that they are not making enough money to sustain affordable housing there and would do better if they just house the homeless, which current city policies have turned into a profitable quasi-industry. Just ask some certain hoteliers. To do this, which NYSUM has been doing for almost a year and a half, they have relied on less measured predatory tactics like disconnecting free wifi and hardcore ones like tearing up a garden the tenants cared for and sending goons under the non-profits name to intimidate the tenants.

The tenants there have been persistent and have been able to remain. Unfortunately so is NYSCUM who served them eviction notices. The evil being dealt by the pseudo-Christian group cannot even be measured considering that the people that they are disenfranchising from their homes will certainly be homeless with nowhere to go because of the lunatic market rate induced on their town, and clearly will not be invited back despite being qualified for the non-profits purported mission because of their forced status. That they are causing. NYSCUM is more like it.

In another case of savage cruelty and contempt for the aged, Justa Lopez, a 100-year-old woman and resident of this city for 70 years, received an eviction notice from her landlord accusing her of not being present at her residence even though she got injured from the uneven floor she walks on. If the building management would have repaired the damaged surface they would have noticed her presence, so it seems that refusing service to her is another way, another cheap underhanded tactic to not acknowledge her existence and a deliberate criminal way to gradually force her out. And with her time away from her home getting healed at a nursing home makes her tenancy status conveniently untenable, giving the landlords fabrications of her convalescence at a nursing home then her daughter’s house as an extra residency a warped and technically legal justification to deny to return to her rent-stabilized apartment on the upper east side.

In a little bit of good news and rare justice being served. A landlord tormenting rent-stabilized tenants in a building he ran in Crown Heights in an brutal and common practice attempt to spread gentrification by refusing to turn on heat and gas and doing environmentally hazardous gut renovations on empty apts. of the tenants he bought off causing contaminants to spread throughout the building in daily clouds of lead, got thrown in the slammer for his egregious and nefarious dirty deeds which included grand larceny and forgery for creating shell companies to buy more properties and flip them for profits (sound familiar, Bill? you recall Rivington House?) and falsifying applications to get loans from H.U.D. (sound familiar, Shoya and you too Bill?).

The NY Post determined this vile man with a vile plan guilty plea as a admission of being an unadulterated scumbag. Which if one can humblebrag is a validation of my term for this kind of lowlife and bag of dicks and shit assembled and stitched in human form.

The scumlord phenomenon and scourge might just catch on, and it damn well should to cure the affordability crisis pandemic and give NYCHA executives and this fucking mayor a sense of shame in perpetuity as long as these unnecessary conditions continue for the real affordable housing plan in the 5 boroughs.