Advocates and officials are cautiously optimistic about a new housing inspection program that will target groupings of problem buildings by neighborhood. In its final stages of approval at press time, the program intends to put the squeeze on landlords who fail to correct violations in their buildings.

Developed through months of negotiations between City Council members, nonprofit housing groups, and the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the city hopes the initiative will be effective.

“[Code enforcement] has been a reactive process,” said Luiz Aragon, a deputy commissioner at HPD. “When someone calls with a complaint, we fix it. This is an attempt to develop a proactive approach and seeking out these conditions without having the complaint come to us first.”

Every two months, HPD will select three Council districts and 30 buildings within each to monitor. Buildings will be chosen based on code violations and inspection reports, along with recommendations from Council members and housing groups.

Once one of the buildings is re-inspected, HPD will contact its landlord to plan how to fix violations, and monitor the progress on a monthly basis. There is no hard and fast rule for how long that process will last, as it will depend on landlord cooperativeness, according to Carol Abrams, an HPD spokesperson.

If the landlord is not compliant, or fails to correct 80 percent of violations, the situation will be referred to housing court. “If we realize it’s not [progressing], we would cease to work with the owner,” Aragon said.

John Reilly, executive director of the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation, a nonprofit housing manager and developer, thought HPD’s new push was auspicious, but didn’t think it would be a silver bullet. “HPD seems to genuinely want to increase their work in code enforcement,” said Reilly, who wasn’t directly involved in the initiative’s negotiations. “It’s a good way [to do enforcement], but it’s not the only way.”

Housing groups have advocated for two other approaches — tenant petition inspections and mandated follow-up on serious violations. The first would allow tenants to call for inspections in numerous apartments simultaneously, rather than have an inspector address a single tenant’s complaint while passing over the other problems in the building.

“Our landlord only does stuff when he has an inspection by HPD,” said Andrea Nelson, who lives in a building on East 209th Street with chronic problems. “He says he’s trying to do everything he can to keep people safe. But we are not safe.”

Reilly thought the new program could help these situations, but not as extensively as the tenant petition inspections. While HPD once used this procedure, a Council bill to reinstate the inspections died in 2003.

Advocates also backed the Health Homes Act, a Council bill requiring HPD to automatically re-inspect C violations, the most serious kind, and stiffen penalties for noncompliant landlords.

“We shouldn’t be allowing buildings with class C violations to remain unattended to,” said Council Member Oliver Koppell, who cosponsored the bill along with 26 others. Council members Maria Baez and Joel Rivera were not cosigners.

HPD is pushing the new program as an alternative to the other bills. “Suffice to say, this is the preferred approach to address those issues,” Aragon said.

While a tentative supporter, Koppell was worried about the pecking order of selecting the Council districts. Choices will be made based on a balance between violation hotspots and geographic diversity, according to Aragon.

A Memorandum of Understanding has yet to be signed between the Council and HPD concerning the program, but Abrams was confident it would happen shortly.