Lead Poisoning

16 April 01

by Tracey Middlekauff

Over the years, Cordell Cleare had complained about the state of
her apartment in central Harlem, and city inspectors had cited her
landlord for over 40 violations. The presence of lead paint, however,
was not one of them.

Then, in 1994, a pediatrician found that Cleare’s son, not yet two
at the time, had been poisoned by lead.

When a child is found to have levels of lead in his blood in excess
of 20 micrograms per deciliter, the
target=new>Department of Health gets involved. It ordered Cleare’s landlord
to remove the lead paint from her apartment.

Cleare says that her landlord picked “10 random guys” to work on
her apartment; they followed no safety procedures. “They were burning
paint off the walls with flames,” she says. To make matters worse,
Cleare had not been directed to a lead “safe house” for the time the
work was being performed. Her son was re-poisoned. Cleare called the
Department of Housing Preservation and Development, who told her to
call the Department of Environmental Protection. Finally, after two
years, HPD performed the work that should have been done immediately.

Tragically, it took a “painfully long time,” Cleare says, to get
the level of lead in her son’s blood back to normal. He lost his ability
to speak, which he eventually regained through therapy. Now eight,
her son has had to overcome many challenges, Cleare says, and still
gets speech therapy and other support to help with the learning disability
she is convinced was caused by the lead poisoning. Her son is now
performing at his grade level, and she remains hopeful that things
will work out. “I believe my child will eventually be functional without
help.”

A PREVENTABLE ILLNESS

Lead poisoning is widely recognized as one of the most serious childhood
health problems in New York City, and one that is preventable. Found
in about 30,000 New York children, it can cause serious problems such
as mental retardation, neurological damage, and developmental disorders.
If detected early enough, and if the lead contaminant is properly
removed from the environment in which the child lives, the problem
is fully treatable. However, it is not as easy as: test, remove (the
lead), and treat. Along every step in the process, dealing with lead
is a hotly-contested political issue.

Activists call for strict regulations covering testing for lead and
removing it. They insist that landlords should be held strictly liable.
Their opponents say that the demands are financially unrealistic and
draconian. Both see right on their side; neither seems willing to
compromise.

The primary cause of lead poisoning in children comes from lead dust
and paint from peeling or deteriorated lead paint. New York City banned
the use of interior lead paint in the 1960s; the federal government
banned lead paint altogether in 1978. While lead paint can be found
in dwellings in any neighborhood–wealthy to low-income–lead poisoning
is primarily a problem in low income neighborhoods, where apartment
buildings have not been well-maintained, and lead paint has been allowed
to peel and crack due to lack of proper maintenance. While not confined
to any one geographical area, activists have located what they call
a lead belt, which runs through Red Hook, Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant
in Brooklyn, and Jamaica in Queens.

Carol Hill, co-chair of the New
York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning, explains, “Apartments
that are well-kept, where the paint is not disturbed, do not have
a problem. But when less affluent people move in, generally speaking,
the landlords do not care as much.” Hill explains that any breach
or crack in paint that may contain lead poses a threat, and lead dust
is even more dangerous. “Paint has to go through the stomach,” she
says, “dust goes right to the lungs.”

Hill believes the best ways to prevent lead poisoning is to educate
people in any community about the risks of lead paint, and to make
sure that testing is wide-spread and frequent. There are measures
to lessen the impact if a child is exposed to lead, such as what she
calls nutritional intervention: While a well-balanced diet does not
make high levels of lead absolutely safe or desirable, a diet rich
in iron, calcium, and vitamin C can help prevent a child’s body from
absorbing lead. A law enacted in New York City in 1992 mandates testing
every year for children ages one and two, and every year until age
six for at-risk children. But Hill advocates testing every six months
for at-risk children. That way, she says, if a child does contract
lead poisoning, they will not have it that long before something is
done.

Even something as seemingly simple as childhood testing is not without
controversy. This month, the New
York Public Interest Research Group sued the State Health Department,
claiming that officials have refused to release their statistics on
the number of New York children who have been tested for lead poisoning.
The watchdog group feels that not enough children have been tested,
and they are therefore not receiving the
proper care.

Controversy aside, when a child is tested, levels under 10 mcg/dcl
are considered safe by the Centers for Disease Control. A level of
10 is considered to be the beginning of lead poisoning, but it is
not until the level of lead concentration in a child’s blood reaches
20 that the New York City Department of Health is required to take
action when a child under six is involved. When he was just under
five years old, in 1993, Carol Hill’s grandson was diagnosed with
a level of 49. Luckily, an emergency repair team from HPD came in
a timely fashion and covered the walls with dry wall and plasterboard
while Hill and her grandson stayed in a safe house. He suffered no
long-term effects.

But unfortunately, things do not always go as smoothly as they did
for Hill, and just what laws and regulations should govern lead abatement
is the subject of much controversy.

LAW AFTER LAW

Until 1999, lead abatement (removal) was covered by Local Law 1.
At just half a page, the law was not specific in its proscriptions,
and various regulations were imposed to expedite and clarify it. According
to Matthew Chachére, an attorney for the Coalition to End Lead
Poisoning, there were often problems enforcing the law. “Roughly 40
percent of lead paint violations were still on the books a year later,”
he says. Chachere says that these violations were supposed to be fixed
within 24 hours. “The city was ordered to have time frames, and was
held in contempt over and over.”

Ostensibly with the purpose of consolidating, clarifying, and codifying
lead paint regulations and abatement, the City Council passed Local
Law 38 by a 36-15 vote in June of 1999, replacing all other legislation
dealing with lead.

Lead poisoning activists were incensed. Local Law 38, they charged,
was nothing more than a “landlord protection bill, ” one which would
decrease landlord responsibility in dealing with lead paint hazards.
Supporters of the bill maintained that it was a practical way to serve
the public interest.

In October of last year, Justice Louis York struck down the new law,
ruling in favor of the Coalition, who had brought the lawsuit against
the city. Justice York ruled that the city did not properly address
the bill’s environmental impact before voting on it. The city has
since appealed this decision; a ruling will probably be made early
next month. Chachere feels that there is almost no chance the decision
will be overturned. He says that those who are in favor of Local Law
38 “try to make it sound like something new, when it curtailed prior
responsibilities. … It eradicates lead dust as a hazard even though
all experts agree that lead dust is dangerous.”

Frank Ricci, the director of government affairs with the Rent
Stabilization Association, sees things differently. He believes
that most critics of Local Law 38 are trial lawyers who are afraid
that, under this new law, they would have has a much higher burden
of proof when bringing cases against landlords. “Under 38, the lawyers
would have to prove that the child got poisoned in the apartment,”
Ricci explains. “Some advocates are very sincere, but trial lawyers
are often masquerading in sheep’s clothing. That’s as plain a truth
as you’re going to get.”

Andrew Goldberg, an attorney for NYPIRG, feels the new law was deeply
flawed for a number of reasons. First of all, he says the new law
would only have addressed lead-poisoned children under the age of
six, when “Health Department records show that ten percent of lead
poisoned children are over the age of six.”

Even more disturbing, according to Goldberg, is that the new law
did not address lead dust as a potential hazard. The law also failed
to require a clearance test–a dust wipe test–to determine if a once-contaminated
area is free of lead dust. “This testing is the gold standard,” Goldberg
says. “It is the only way of knowing if an area is safe.” Instead,
the new law contained provisions for a limited clearance test, to
be done only if work was done on windows or doors.

Finally, Goldberg explains that who actually performs the lead abatement
is an
target=new>extremely important issue. The work must be done by trained workers,
he says, because “they know how not to poison themselves, how not
to contaminate the apartment further, and how not to contaminate their
own family.” Local Law 38 did not contain a provision that the work
be performed by trained workers. “The landlord lobby knows that clearance
testing and trained workers is a one-two punch,” Goldberg believes.

But Ricci feels that claims such as Goldberg’s are not grounded in
fact. He says that 99 percent of lead dust is tracked into an apartment
from outside due to its presence in soil from years of using leaded
gasoline. The dust-wipe test that advocates like Goldberg call for
simply “doesn’t correspond to the condition of the apartment,” according
to Ricci.

Ricci also says that lead abatement would still require trained experts,
but that Local Law 38 calls for specific cleaning procedures, which
could be done by the landlord, that constitute preventive maintenance.
He points out that the city, HPD, and owners’ groups have been running
training courses for landlords and supers.

Councilman Archie Spigner (D-Queens) strongly supported Local Law
38, and says he “would rather bet on a horse race” than guess whether
Judge York’s decision will be overturned. As for the critics of 38,
he says “people are entitled to their opinions.” He says he believes
Local Law 38 would “safeguard the health of children without placing
a fiscal burden on housing that is already on shaky fiscal ground.”

Spigner defends Local Law 38’s various specific provisions, which
he says were passed “after exhaustive testimony.” But he also feels
that legislation alone is not enough: “I think education is as important
as legislation … one without the other will never do the job.”

NOW WHAT?

What do activists advocate in lieu of Local Law 38? Carol Hill feels
the city needs “something kinder than Local Law 1, but more strict
than 38.”

Matthew Chachere believes that one good alternative was Intro 205,
which was written a few years ago by Councilman Stanley Michels (D,
Manhattan). “People will say that Local Law 1 is over-the-top,” he
admits. “But 205 says to take the appropriate action on a case-by
case basis.” NYPIRG is currently drafting a new proposal to cover
lead issues. Goldberg believes that it is important to have a strong
mandatory enforcement program, health-based standards, and liability;
in other words, if a landlord is negligent in his duties, he should
be liable.

Frank Ricci, however, doesn’t see any possibility of compromise.
He says, “They will never be happy. Thirty-eight was the compromise.”

But some important issues have not been covered by legislation. For
example, residents of buildings with fewer than three apartments have
no protection or recourse until a child is actually lead poisoned.
And some feel that small-time landlords should be offered monetary
compensation as an incentive to do the right thing. One solution,
according to Andrew Goldberg, is to offer tax breaks to landlords
who do building upgrades and repairs. This would help encourage landlords
who may not otherwise be able to afford it to maintain their buildings
properly.

The (relatively) good news is that, according to Goldberg, given
the age of New York City housing, the prevalence rate of lead poisoning
is lower than in many other cities. This, he says, is a credit to
the programs that have existed. “New York City is not the worst place
in the world,” he says, “but still we are talking about thousands
of children a year.”

To Cordell Cleare, even one lead-poisoned child is too many. Her
son deals with the results of his lead poisoning every day. That is
what led her to the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning,
which she now co-chairs. Her activism has been ignited, in fact; she
also serves as Council member Bill Perkins’ director of constituent
services. She believes that lead poisoning has a ripple effect. “It
costs us all around,” she says. “Housing, education, medicine. I feel
fortunate that I got in touch with a good group. But there are people
for whom it never worked out.”

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