The starting position.
The owner of two adjacent pre-1960 walk-ups in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx came to us with 14 open HPD violations across the two buildings — 9 lead (Class C), 4 mold (Class B and C under LL55), and 1 vermin (LL55). Several had certification windows that had already lapsed.
Why it had accumulated.
The pattern is common: each violation had been addressed in some form, but certification of correction was filed inconsistently, and a previous contractor had performed lead work without the EPA-certified-firm documentation HPD expects on lead abatement closure. The owner had paid for work twice on three of the units.
How we scoped the sprint.
We mapped the 14 violations against unit access, regulatory cure windows, and which work shared overlapping containment. Three observations drove the plan:
- Six of the lead violations sat in two stacked apartment lines. We could run one continuous containment across both units in each line, halving setup cost.
- Three mold violations sat in the same wet stack as the lead-painted bathrooms — addressable in the same containment as the lead work.
- The vermin violation was an IPM treatment plus exclusion, schedulable in parallel.
The three-week schedule.
Week 1: re-inspection of every unit by our licensed assessor, with a written pre-work scope shared back to the owner. Tenant relocation arranged for four apartments for three days each.
Week 2: containment-led abatement and remediation across both buildings. Independent assessor on each completed unit at end-of-day.
Week 3: clearance failures (two units required re-cleaning); IPM pass; documentation assembly; certification of correction packages filed with HPD across all 14 violations.
Result.
13 of 14 violations dismissed within HPD's standard review window. The 14th was a re-classification — HPD had a clerical duplicate that we got cleared by separate request. Total elapsed time: 23 days from kickoff to final dismissal confirmation.
What the owner did right.
Two things. First, they gave us a single point of contact authorized to coordinate tenant access — that's almost always the bottleneck in violation work. Second, they stopped using the previous contractor and let us run the project end-to-end. Mixed-contractor work generates inconsistent documentation, which is what got them into the spot they were in.