What You'll Learn From This Post
- The annual January notice your landlord owes you, and what returning it sets in motion
- Why paint in a pre-1960 building is presumed to be lead, and how narrow the escape hatch is
- The XRF testing records that should already exist, and how to ask for yours
- The 2027 deadline nobody is talking about, and exactly whose apartment it lands in
I'm at the mailboxes in January doing the thing where I sort my mail directly into the recycling bin. Tax document, keep. A privacy policy that has evolved. A dentist I stopped seeing during the Obama administration writing to say it's been a while.
Marisol from 2R is at her box doing the opposite. She opens everything. She reads everything. She brings her own letter opener down to the lobby: floral housecoat, drugstore readers on a chain, and she draws that opener like a stiletto and slits each envelope in one clean pass.
She holds one up. "You get yours yet?"
"My what?"
"The lead one. The January letter. I keep them. Since 2017. Manila envelope, year on the flap in marker."
I ask her why anyone keeps those.
"Because the year my nephew started staying over, I sent it back. So now there's a piece of paper with a date on it, and my landlord doesn't get to say he didn't know."
That's the whole statute. She just doesn't bill for it.
The obligation underneath her envelope: in an older building in this city, your landlord must send you that notice every January, asking whether a child under six lives in your apartment. Not when you ask. Not if somebody complains. Every damn January, in writing, forever.
Two questions follow, and they're why this article exists. Did you get one? And if you never did, what does that mean?
I keep thinking about the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The thing everyone spent the film chasing gets crated, wheeled into a warehouse the size of a neighborhood, and filed among ten thousand identical crates. Not destroyed. Just somewhere, in a box, with a number stenciled on the side, and nobody is ever going to open it.
That's the shape of this whole area of law. There are supposed to be records. On your building. Right now. Marisol's crate is a manila envelope, and hers is full. The question for the rest of us is whether anybody put anything in ours.
🏚️ Pre-1960 Paint Is Lead Until Somebody Proves Otherwise
The law is Local Law 1 of 2004, the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act, and it rests on one load-bearing presumption. In a covered building, the paint is presumed to be lead-based. Your landlord doesn't get to argue about it casually. It's rebutted only by a sworn written statement supported by testing or sampling results submitted to HPD. No test, no rebuttal. It applies to common areas too, not just apartments where a young child lives. The threshold HPD uses is 0.5 mg/cm2.
That flips the default from "prove there's lead here" to "prove there isn't," and puts the burden of finding out on the owner rather than a parent.
🏠 Which Buildings This Covers, Which Is Broader Than You've Heard
Most of what's online gets this wrong, and the error runs toward telling Brooklyn tenants they aren't covered. The requirements reach:
- Pre-1960 multiple dwellings of three or more units.
- Buildings built between January 1, 1960 and January 1, 1978, where the owner has actual knowledge of lead-based paint.
- Tenant-occupied units in one- and two-family houses built before 1960.
- Co-op and condo units that are not owner-occupied.
Read that third bullet again if you rent a floor of a two-family house. That's an enormous share of the housing stock in this borough, and the version circulating online usually stops at "three or more units." What makes it wrong is Local Law 29 of 2020, which redefined multiple dwelling for these purposes to take in rentals in one- and two-family houses, excluding units the owner or the owner's family lives in. If you rent the parlor floor of a brownstone that went up in 1908, you are not outside this law.
🧒 The Trigger Is Not Only "A Kid Lives Here"
The duties attach where a child under six resides in the unit or routinely spends ten or more hours per week there.
That ten-hours prong gets left out constantly. A grandchild there three afternoons a week counts. A kid in a home daycare counts. Marisol's nephew, who lives in Queens and treats her apartment as a weekend embassy, counts. The rule was written around exposure, not around whose name is on the lease. If you assumed it doesn't apply because the child doesn't live with you, check the hours.
🗄️ The Crate With Your Building's Number On It
Local Law 31 of 2020 required owners of covered buildings to complete XRF testing of every painted surface in dwelling units by August 9, 2025, and Local Law 111 of 2023 folded common areas into the same deadline. That date has passed.
Sit with the tense there. It was supposed to be finished before last Labor Day, which means the polite question, "when will you be testing," retired a year ago. The current question is "where are the results," and it's a different genre of question.
Which makes this a documents question, and those are the ones tenants win. Ask, in writing, for the XRF results for your unit and the common areas. If your landlord has them, you learn what's in your walls. If not, you've learned something better: a citywide deadline passed and your building has nothing to show for it.
Marisol, of the letter opener, asked for her XRF results in March. Nothing came back. She isn't upset in the way you'd expect. She just knows something about her building she didn't know in February, and it cost her one email.
One violation class I can give you, because HPD's own rules confirm it: peeling or deteriorated lead-based paint in a common area is a class C violation where children of the applicable age reside. I won't quote a daily fine figure. The $250-per-day number circulating comes from lead-testing vendor sites, marketing copy rather than HPD material, so I'm leaving it where I found it.
🔨 The Deadline Nobody Is Talking About Yet: July 1, 2027
This isn't in any tenant-facing article I've found, and it's the biggest thing on the list.
Local Law 123 of 2023 amended Administrative Code 27-2056.8. Three clocks run, and the work is owed on whichever arrives first.
| Which clock | When the work is due | Whose apartment this is |
|---|---|---|
| Turnover | Before the next tenant moves in | Any unit in a pre-1960 multiple dwelling |
| The 2027 date | By July 1, 2027 | Only units where a child under six was residing as of January 1, 2025 |
| The three-year clock | Within three years of the child moving in | Units where a child under six began residing after January 1, 2025 |
The work itself is three things:
- Remediate all lead-based paint hazards and the underlying defects that caused them.
- Make all bare floors, window sills and window wells smooth and cleanable.
- Remove or permanently cover lead-based paint on all friction surfaces on all doors and door frames and on all windows, or install replacement window channels or slides.
Friction surfaces are the point. Lead paint mostly doesn't hurt anybody sitting on a wall. It hurts people when it grinds into dust every time a window sash rides up and down a painted channel, in a room where a toddler puts their hands on the sill and then in their mouth. The law is finally aimed at the mechanism.
Owners can seek a temporary exemption where a tenant refuses to relocate. I mention it so the word doesn't blindside you, and I won't characterize how often they're granted. The door and window work must be done by certified contractors using safe work practices. Somebody sanding a window sill with an orbital sander and a shop vac from Home Depot is not compliance, it's an exposure event.
🎯 What To Do This Week
Four things, none of which require a lawyer.
| Do this | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Put the child in writing | Tell your landlord a child under six resides in, or routinely spends ten or more hours a week in, the unit. Keep a copy. Highest-value ten minutes in this article, because it converts "the owner should have known" into "the owner knew, on this date." The statute starts the three-year clock when the child begins to reside. HPD's guidance to owners starts it when the owner learns. If he's going to date it from when he found out, put that date in his hands |
| Ask for the XRF results | In writing, for your unit and the common areas |
| Find the January notice | Return it by February 15. HPD's tenant page says the sixteenth. The law, and everything HPD sends landlords, says the fifteenth, and the sixteenth is when the owner's follow-up window opens because you didn't send it back. Don't cut it fine. Never got one? Say so in writing, with the years |
| Call 311 | Or file with HPD online, for peeling, chipping or deteriorated paint anywhere, including the hallway and stairs |
If the answer to any of this is silence, that's a repair problem with a well-worn path, and I've written the route out: Your Landlord Won't Make Repairs. Now What?. If it ends up in front of a judge, know what you're walking into.
⚖️ Housing Case or Injury Case
If a child has already been diagnosed with an elevated blood lead level, that's a personal injury matter with its own timelines and its own specialists. Talk to a lawyer who does that work, quickly. That is not this article. This one is the housing side, the notice and the records and the duties, and getting the hazard out before anybody gets hurt.
📬 Anyway
Go back through your January mail. Not this year's. All of them, as far back as you keep things. Marisol has nine years of hers in an envelope, slit clean, filed by flap. Most of us have ours in a landfill.
If you have a kid under six in a pre-1960 building and have never once seen a piece of paper from your landlord asking about it, that absence is a fact, and facts that were supposed to exist and don't are the most useful kind. That's the crate. It's empty, and empty is something you can work with.
If that's you, or if you asked for XRF results and got nothing back, go to my intake page, fill out the landlord tenant questionnaire, and email me your lease and anything your landlord has or hasn't sent you about lead. I'll get back to you in 48 hours (not including weekends, cuz c'mon).
