Within two weeks, a city health inspector visited the two Brooklyn public housing apartments where Mikaila spent her time — her mother’s in the Tompkins Houses; her grandmother’s in the Gowanus Houses — to look for the source of the lead exposure, records show. The inspector, wielding a hand-held device that can detect lead through multiple layers of paint, found the dangerous heavy metal in both homes. The Health Department ordered the Housing Authority to fix the problems.

The discovery spurred the Housing Authority to action: It challenged the results.

Rather than remove or cover the lead, the Housing Authority dispatched its own inspector who used a different test, documents show. The agency insisted that however Mikaila was poisoned, there was no lead in her apartments.

Entrusted as the landlord to 400,000 people, the Housing Authority has struggled for years to fulfill its mission amid a strangled budget and almost endemic political neglect. Last week, a judge suggested strongly that the federal government should take over the agency after an investigation found evidence of deep mismanagement, including that the Housing Authority failed to perform lead inspections and then falsely claimed it had. Six top executives lost their jobs amid the federal investigation; a complaint was filed in June.

But the authority did not just ignore the required lead inspections, The New York Times found.

For at least two decades, almost every time a child in its apartments tested positive for high lead levels, NYCHA launched a counteroffensive, city records show. From 2010 through July of this year, the agency challenged 95 percent of the orders it received from the Health Department to remove lead detected in NYCHA apartments.

Private landlords hardly ever contest a finding of lead; they did so in only 4 percent of the 5,000 orders they received over the same period, records show.

NYCHA’s strategy often worked. The Health Department backed down in 158 of 211 cases in public housing after the authority challenged its finding, the data shows. A Health Department spokesman said that it rescinded its orders because it became convinced that its initial test was a false positive.

“I’m not sure how useful it is to spend all the time and resources going back and forth with testing when maybe we could spend the time and resources making sure the exposure is controlled,” said David Jacobs, who ran the lead poisoning prevention program at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1995 to 2004.

It is emblematic of disarray in the Housing Authority’s lead policy that stretches back decades, an examination by The Times found.

The Times interviewed more than 100 current and former top city and federal housing officials, maintenance workers, building managers, lead contractors, health experts and public housing residents and reviewed thousands of pages of documents and court records. Taken together, they reveal an agency that assumed lead was no longer a threat, despite not really knowing where it was.

In a two-month stretch at the end of 2017, contractors hired by the city visited 8,300 apartments and found potential lead paint hazards — peeling or flaking paint, or dust — in 80 percent of them, according to records produced as part of a lawsuit in state court.

The suit, filed by a tenant group, is one of several the authority faces over lead, including a state court suit by Mikaila’s mother, Shari Broomes.

New York state law requires children to be screened for lead exposure even before they can walk, and annually up to age 6 if they are at particular risk. If the amount of lead in a child’s blood hits a certain threshold, it triggers a mechanism: The doctor contacts the city Health Department, which sends an inspector to test the child’s home for lead paint.

In 2015, 171 children in New York City public housing tested positive for elevated lead, down from 517 in 2010.

The Housing Authority was ordered by the Health Department inspector to remove lead in a child’s apartment an average two dozen times a year from 2010 through 2017, records show.

But city and court records show the authority refuted the Health Department’s findings as a matter of routine.

The Health Department would do a test using an X-ray fluorescence device called an XRF analyzer, which looks like a ray gun and can measure lead through layers of paint. NYCHA would follow up by digging out samples in the apartment and sending them to a lab, called a paint-chip test.

In a 1999 affidavit, Brian Clarke, then the coordinator of the Housing Authority’s lead detection and abatement unit, had disparaged the paint-chip technique. “A false negative can result,” he said in an affidavit.

But the paint-chip test eventually became the Housing Authority’s preferred method to challenge the Health Department’s tests.

Clarke, who declined to comment for this article, would eventually rise to the upper echelons of the authority, as a senior vice president for operations. He was one of several top executives to be forced out late last year over his handling of the lead paint scandal.

The goal in challenging the Health Department’s findings was to shield the city from lawsuits by showing that the high lead levels in these children came from somewhere other than the home where they lived and played, officials said.

The authority believed its approach was valid because the Health Department so often rescinded its orders, Stanley Brezenoff, the interim NYCHA chairman, said recently in an interview.

The Housing Authority cannot say precisely when it began challenging the city’s own findings of lead. Staffers recalled that the practice dates at least to the late 1990s, Jasmine Blake, an authority spokeswoman, wrote in an emailed statement.

It continued until September when, after inquiries from The Times, the de Blasio administration reversed course.

“We are now in a posture of not contesting,” Brezenoff said. “Whatever the merits of a particular case, or whatever is involved, we’re accepting whatever the finding of the Health Department is.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio this year promised to spend $80 million for testing next year to figure out, once and for all, where the lead paint is. The city will be inspecting apartments built before 1978, approximately 140,000 units out of 176,000 that the Housing Authority maintains, and the inspectors will be relying mainly on XRF analyzers for the hunt.

The Housing Authority declined to comment on Mikaila’s case, citing the pending litigation.

Mikaila, now 5 and a kindergartner, has not required any special attention at school, her mother said. Still, said Max Costa, a professor and chairman of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine, her experience is “going to totally affect her life, and there’s no way you can reverse it.”

The New York Times

J. David Goodman, Al Baker and James Glanz © 2018 The New York Times