The campaign was initiated by Met Council and supported by the Queens League of United Tenants, the Legal Aid Society, the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, the New York Public Interest Research Group and the Harlem Tenants Council. The Community Service Society, the City Project's Alterbudget, and the Community Training Resources Center have also called for increased housing code enforcement to preserve New York's endangered supply of affordable housing. At Council hearings on May 14, the city's housing commissioner, Richard Roberts, confirmed that there are 3 million code violations outstanding on apartment buildings in the city. Yet Mayor Giuliani's proposed budget for the 1999 fiscal year only includes funds for 230 housing inspectors. Other Councilmembers supporting the initiative include Democrats Stephen DiBrienza of Brooklyn, Sheldon Leffler and Morty Povman of Queens, and William Perkins, Margarita Lopez and Ronnie Eldridge of Manhattan.
Organizers expect to get additional support in the Bronx and in Brooklyn.
Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields has also endorsed increasing spending on housing preservation. After a building on West 141st Street, in her old City Council district, collapsed in 1996, killing one person, she successfully sponsored an initiative requiring the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Department of Buildings to inform each other about violations observed by their respective inspectors. The parts of the code-enforcement system that follow up on inspectors' reports are equally undermanned. The city itself only brings 200 of its own cases each year, despite receiving 500,000 complaints from tenants for conditions that include no heat and hot water, collapsing ceilings, rats, leaks, holes in the walls and floors, and exposed lead paint, which poisons thousands of babies and toddlers every year. Last December 16, the Council withdrew an ill-advised bill which would have required the city to erase overdue code violations whenever owners simply claimed to have cured them, with no city inspection to verify whether the work was done.