Most apartment buildings and businesses at “high risk’’ for contamination at a Superfund site in trendy Brooklyn have not been tested for cancerous toxins — because their owners are allegedly worried about property values.
Only about 260 of the 1,000 properties in the federally designated “Meeker Avenue Plume” area — a 45-block expanse straddling Greenpoint and East Williamsburg — have undergone air testing offered by the EPA since the region was declared a Superfund site in 2022, City Councilman Lincoln Restler told The Post.
The testing is even free, the local rep noted.
“About 25% of the buildings have been tested, and that is unacceptable,” Restler said, arguing that only “when there is testing completed, [then] we can evaluate with high interval of certainty whether people working or residing in building are at a public health risk.”
The testing is mostly not mandatory, with many landlords ignoring the push for it because of the “stigma” of having a contaminated property, the local rep said — especially in a trendy area where rents have gone up 43% since 2022 and one-bedroom apartments average $4,575.
The councilman said there was a “major” landlord in the targeted area who has several basement tenants — and who walked back his promise to test just days before.
“This is someone who fully understands the facts and is choosing ignorance. … It’s incredibly disappointing and dangerous,” Restler said, adding that the EPA can enforce testing in special cases, for example, if a tenant is pregnant.
Government investigators have blamed the area’s industrial past — which has included dry cleaners, metal foundries and steel-drum recycling facilities — for hazardous solvent dumping that led to the contamination.
The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation — which has been monitoring the area since at least 2007, when the agency was cleaning up a nearby oil spill — subsequently found what it called “several sources of the subsurface contamination and properties that pose a significant threat to human health and the environment.”
The EPA is testing the sites for toxins such as TCE, which has been found near the highly contaminated Gowanus Canal, and PCE — both carcinogens that can cause liver and kidney damage with long-term exposure.
Since toxic fumes from the site can enter homes through vapors coming up through the ground, basement and ground-floor workers and tenants face the highest risk, Restler said.
The EPA has also installed dozens of groundwater monitoring wells in the area to “help fill in data gaps and further define the extent of the contamination,” Greenpointers first reported.
The area — one of thousands of sites around the country known as Superfunds because they qualify for special government funding for cleanup, since they are so contaminated — includes McGolrick Park and PS 110 elementary school. Both the park and school have been tested and cleared, the feds said.
Dozens of residents with uncooperative landlords have since reached out to Restler’s office for help, he said.
Some renters at other local Superfund sites, such as the Gowanus Canal, have resorted to fundraising to pay for their own tests.
But even if a property were to test positive for toxins through private companies, the landlord would still have to agree to federal testing to qualify for government-funded remediation.
The councilman said he is still hopeful that more testing with be done with continued outreach by his office and “direct conversations with neighbors to build support for testing.
“We want to reduce the stigma and help landlords understand that a failure to act puts their tenants at serious health risk,” Restler said.
Until then, “we’re continuing to just push and build awareness.”
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