INFORMATION PLEASE! (August, 1998)
The repeated question "Is it safe?" resulted in terror from Dustin Hoffman when a Nazi dentist sought information from him in "The Marathon Man." At a time when we can often obtain more information than we can use on CD's and over the Internet, getting certain information from the City of New York can still be as difficult as pulling teeth. Housing information is particularly important to organizations seeking to prevent building abandonment and deterioration, but many records, while technically public, are still much too difficult to obtain.
Take Code Violations for example. These are violations of the city's Housing Maintenance Code recorded by inspectors from the Department of Housing Preservation & Development. They code the violations as A, B or C with C being those that are Immediately Hazardous. The violations can cover items such as failure to provide adequate heat and hot water, cracked and peeling paint or a defective building security system. Failure to comply in the specified time can lead the city to contract for the work itself through its Emergency Repair Bureau or to begin a court action against the owner through its Housing Litigation Bureau. The tremendous number of violations currently outstanding means, however, that the city will actually enforce very few of them and some will sit uncorrected for years and even decades. african americans.
Obtaining access to these recorded violations is becoming increasingly difficult, even as advances in technology should make them available to anyone who needs them. The Housing Department (HPD) has only one office in the Bronx on Longwood Avenue that can provide a written record, and requests for more than one building can take a while.
While they are also available at the Dept. of Finance Office on Arthur Avenue, they are not available to the general public at the new Bronx Housing Court! And incredibly they are available in some supermarkets (on a screen, no printouts) in information kiosks designed to let you pay your traffic tickets and real estate taxes with a credit card. (More on these "kiosks" later).
Why would community groups, landlords, tenants and even other government agencies need to get copies of the Code Violations? Tenants, obviously, would like to see if there are existing violations on the record. They can use a printed record to pressure the landlord and the city to take action to resolve them. Tenants can begin their own case in Housing Court to correct outstanding violations and can also use them as documentation of hazardous conditions with mortgage holders or with other city agencies such as the Department of Health for Lead Paint and window guard violations. Landlords need to be able to get copies in order to correct them and also to have them removed. Many times violations are old, were corrected years ago but remain on the record. This can prevent an owner from obtaining city financing or a real estate tax exemption. Some banks and mortgage companies want to see all violations removed before they'll make a loan.
The violation records are most needed, however, to coordinate efforts to combat housing deterioration and abandonment and to plan community redevelopment and reinvestment efforts. In this area the city's HPD has been attempting to initiate an Anti-Abandonment Program for several years. This program would combine information on outstanding property taxes and other city liens with code violations to pinpoint buildings in danger of abandonment. It is to be used in coordination with the city's Tax Lien Sales and their new 3rd Party Transfer Program for dealing with properties delinquent in real estate taxes and other city liens and charges. The city's objective here is not only to collect more taxes, but also to avoid the costly step of taking title to occupied, tax delinquent properties.
HPD wants community groups to help, particularly those with Neighborhood Preservation and Community Consultant Contracts. Many community groups have long used code violations and tax arrears along with direct contact with tenants and property owners as indicators of buildings in crisis. The city's "new" approach will not be new, but rather an attempt at improving coordination of information.
Now, back to those "kiosks". The NYC Dept. of Information and Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) last year contracted with a private company to establish CityAccess, an information kiosk demonstration program. These kiosks provide all sorts of city data including housing code violations, real estate tax balances and, "most importantly", fines for outstanding traffic tickets. The kiosks are really mini collection agencies where you can pay your fines, taxes and tickets by credit card. You can get a receipt for payment but a tenant can't get a copy of the code violations to use in court. The records only appear on screen.
The Kiosks are found in an odd assortment of places: supermarkets, check cashing joints, Bellevue Hospital and some government buildings (but not Housing Court).
When I contacted DoITT about the possibility of community groups getting direct access to city records through City Access I heard from Daniel K. Moy, Special Assistant to the Commissioner. He informed me that the city was very excited with the project and that it was receiving 14,000 weekly visits from New York City's citizenry. I assume this includes the kids I've seen playing with the buttons in the supermarket, as well. As for the information we're looking for, the responsibility for those systems still remains with HPD, even though DoITT has managed to provide it to a private company to locate somewhat haphazardly at scattered locations around the city.
Moy concluded by saying that in the longer term, they are investigating accesses to the City's data from the Internet. What's to investigate? Everyone we've talked to agrees this is information that needs to be made more available. The city will collect more taxes, tenants will be able to get more repairs, property owners can remove old violations from the public record and communities can prevent abandonment.
How to get it done? The information people at the city's HPD, DOF, DEP and DoITT need to make a joint decision to go forward and provide their information to the general public on-line, as it should be. The information is available and the technology is available. They simply need to be put together. It can be as easy as dialing a number from our desks and requesting, "Information, please."
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