Using Kids as Canaries?
Carter’s taste in food? Crunchy.
At four years old, he’s developed a strong preference for crackers, Oreo cookies and crispy turkey bacon — very crispy.
Carter is autistic. His mother Sakia Colón knows his likes and dislikes well. Following a routine in their Bronx apartment has helped him avoid the kind of tantrums that have characterized his first few years of life.
All of that began to change when Colón took Carter to a doctor’s visit last December. A number of routine blood tests revealed an elevated lead level of 14 micrograms per deciliter. The Centers for Disease Control raises the alarm bell when a child tests above 5, although it also maintains that no level of lead exposure is safe.
“I got scared,” Colón recalled. “Just hearing that doctors say any amount of lead in your body is harmful to your body, I automatically got scared.”
Unfortunately, Carter is one of many. In just the past year, nearly 5,000 children in New York City were shown to have elevated lead levels. And advocates for tougher lead regulations say their stories reveal a network of city agencies that lack adequate enforcement and a system that uses kids as canaries in homes with aging lead paint.
Local Law One
Days after she received Carter’s blood-test results, an inspector from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found old layers of lead paint on the front door of Colón's apartment, and on a windowsill in her bedroom.
Lead is a potent neurotoxin, and for much of the 20th century it was a key component of household paint. In the United States, an estimated six million metric tons of lead was spread on walls, molding, furniture and other surfaces before its use was banned in 1978 (New York City was one of the first cities to do so in 1960).
At that time, pediatricians routinely encountered lead’s worst effects — seizures, coma, death. But as rates of lead poisoning have declined — thanks to policies that not only removed it from paint but also phased it out of gasoline — researchers have found deleterious impacts at lower and lower levels of exposure. Even in small amounts, lead can cause permanent brain damage, including lower IQ and hyperactivity.
In 2004, New York City vowed to completely eliminate childhood lead exposure by 2010. The city council passed a sweeping set of measures known as Local Law One that requires landlords to keep their buildings lead free. And while the number of children with elevated lead levels in the city has dropped by close to 90 percent over the past decade, it didn’t entirely succeed. Thousands of kids each year are still poisoned, and the vast majority of them — 97 percent — are in privately-owned housing.
“This is a failure of government,” said Council Speaker Corey Johnson at a hearing last fall. “Even one child whose potential is ruined is a tragedy. Even worse, this is a preventable tragedy and all of us here today are the ones who can prevent it.”
Last year, the city council introduced 25 pieces of legislation aimed at strengthening Local Law One, including proposals that would require the testing of soil and drinking water in city parks.
On Wednesday, the council is scheduled to vote on an initial tranche of ten bills. Among a variety of measures, they would bring the city’s action level for childhood lead exposure in line with CDC guidelines, requiring the health department to conduct inspections whenever a child tests at or above 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.
The legislation would also significantly reduce the threshold for lead in aging paint and household dust that requires landlords to make repairs. For instance, the current standards for lead dust on floors is 40 micrograms per square foot. If it becomes law, the council’s legislation will lower that level to 5 micrograms, making New York one of the strictest cities in the country.
Need for Tougher Enforcement
Many housing advocates and public health experts applaud the renewed attention from city officials. Earlier this year, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his own plan for reducing lead exposure known as LeadFreeNYC. But some also worry politicians are simply tinkering around the edges of what they believe is truly holding the city back from eliminating lead exposure: Enforcement.
“To say that we need to completely revamp the law, without figuring out why the existing law isn't working, I don't think is is making very good public policy,” said Matthew Chachère at his office in Washington Heights.
Chachère is a lawyer with the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation (NMIC), a non-profit that provides legal services and assistance to community organizations. He helped write much of Local Law One as it stands today.
“If you don't look at the enforcement issues, it really doesn't matter what the numerical values are of lead dust or lead in paint,” he said.
For example, according to the existing law, the lead that was found on Sakia Colón’s front door and bedroom window was supposed to have been removed when she first moved into her apartment five years ago. Doors and windows are what are known as “friction surfaces” under Local Law One. Opening and closing them creates large amounts of lead dust and landlords are required to remediate any lead from such areas at vacancy.
In theory, if Colón’s landlord had followed the regulation, her son might never have been exposed in the first place. But data from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) — the agency responsible for enforcing the law — revealed a widespread lack of enforcement, according to a report by NMIC and other advocacy organizations.
“Our analysis of the city's data shows that the city has written someplace in excess of 300,000 violations for peeling lead paint since Local Law One of 2004 went into effect, and yet placed exactly one violation in all that time for a failure of a landlord to abate lead based paint at vacancy,” said Chachère.
The current law also already requires landlords to conduct annual inspections for peeling and deteriorating lead paint and to retain records of those inspections for ten years.
“This was going to be the primary enforcement mechanism is to shift the burden to private property owners to say, 'Keep your buildings safe,'” Chachère said. “It’s the only provision in there that actually says the failure to do that is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. The city has never placed a violation for this at all. So until the city gets serious about holding landlords accountable for doing what they're supposed to do, I don't see how the plan works.”
In response to these criticisms, a spokesperson for HPD said it will be ramping up enforcement as part of the mayor’s LeadFreeNYC plan to be more “aggressive with bad landlords.”
Tenant v. Landlord
Colón’s landlord, a building owner named Ved Parkash, is no stranger to Local Law One. In 2016, WNYC reported Parkash Management had over a hundred open lead paint violations across a number of buildings. In the past, he’s been at the top of the city’s worst landlords watchlist.
Parkash was required to fix Colón’s door and window using a contractor certified to safely remove lead paint. Colón was told she and Carter could remain in the apartment while repairs were done. But in January, shortly after the health department’s inspection, the building’s super began scraping lead paint off her windowsill one evening before Carter’s bedtime.
Colón’s first instinct was to take out her phone. Her video shows Carter running around her bedroom in his pajamas, bouncing against the bed as the super sweeps up a pile of paint chips and dust on the floor, potentially exposing Carter to even higher levels of lead.
“I started freaking out,” Colón said. She and Carter quickly fled the apartment and were unable to return for nearly three weeks. They bounced around, staying with family and friends and breaking Carter from his routines before repairs were finally completed by a certified company.
“My son had about almost a year without catching meltdowns. And ever since this whole process started, the meltdowns started again, and these meltdowns could go on for up to two hours. So it's not something that's easy to deal with,” said Colón. “He was diagnosed with autism at a year and a half, so our struggle from then to now, it’s already been hard enough. So now this is like an added problem.”
In a statement to WNYC, Parkash Management said it was unaware of the lead paint violation when the super began scraping Colón’s window. That’s despite the fact that the health department's inspector had stamped all lead surfaces in Colón’s apartment with the words “lead paint” in red letters.
Colón is suing Parkash for Carter’s lead exposure. In turn, he’s suing her for two months rent she refused to pay since the ordeal began. In that case, Matthew Chachère is now representing her.
In many ways, Carter’s story is a classic example of how the system is designed to work. A child tests high for lead. The city sends someone to investigate. They force landlords to fix the problem. The health department has hired additional inspectors over the past year and it’s using a variety of methods to get as many kids tested for lead as possible, including subway ads in a number of languages.
“That’s definitely a good thing to do,” Chachère said, but at its core, that system presents a flaw, a fundamental misreading of the problem, of “using children as the mechanism to detect lead… as opposed to inspecting the housing.”
“When a child is lead poisoned, there's not much you can do for them, other than to make sure that they're no longer exposed to it,” said Chachère. “Whatever damage has been done to the child is not going to be undone. So the real focus has to be on inspecting the house and keeping the housing safe before these kids are exposed.”
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