Fair housing experts held a lead safety training Thursday at the Northeast Hawley Development Agency, aiming to fill lead-safety gaps in tenants’ homes.
The training, prepared by CNY Fair Housing and NEHDA, comes at a time when tenants in the city of Syracuse and Onondaga County are experiencing significant issues with housing disrepair and lead poisoning. About 1 in 10 children tested in the county show elevated levels of lead in their blood, according to County Health Department data.
Tenants huddled in NEHDA’s building received a bucket of cleaning supplies, and sat for a presentation on the effects of lead poisoning in children, as well as a briefing on the most common sources of lead contamination in the home.
Lead contamination in county homes can occur via water dispensed through aging lead pipes, chipping and peeling lead paint on walls and other surfaces, the dust that coats leaded surfaces like window sills and door jambs, and the soil directly below homes painted with lead paint.
The county, and specifically Syracuse, have issues with an aging housing stock that was built using lead paint. About 90% of the city’s housing stock was built prior to 1980, which is two years after the federal government outlawed the use of lead paint.
Additionally, the city has a large inventory of lead pipes that leach into the water delivered to the outlets of thousands of city homes and businesses. About 77% of the water service lines that the city has accounted for in a state-mandated inventory are made out of lead.
Public health officials across the board have said there is no safe level of exposure to lead, a neurotoxin that can cause “nervous system damage, learning disabilities, hearing problems and impaired blood cell formation and function in children.”
CNY Fair Housing and NEHDA’s training is part of a partnership to help tenants understand how to best deal with the presence of lead in their homes.
“The more people out in the community who are sharing the information with their friends and family members, the more we will be able to combat this thing together,” said Julie Madden,
NEHDA’s programs coordinator who led the training. In addition to the commonly known sources of lead — water and surfaces painted with lead paint — Madden highlighted the presence of lead in families’ backyards as a lesser-known source of contamination.
Oftentimes, Madden said, families will track lead in the soil back into their homes. Lead can enter the soil as rain and other weather conditions peel it off the exterior of a home painted with lead paint, she added.
In some instances, lead poisoning is one of the determining factors that pushes a family to relocate. CNY Fair Housing has recently ramped up its mobility counseling program, which pairs Section 8 voucher holding families with children with a counselor who can help households assess their housing options away from the city in areas classified by New York state as “well-resourced areas.”
Typically, the homes families move into in these well-resourced areas follow property inspection standards that differ from those required by the city and county. Known as housing quality standards, this set of guidelines specifies that the property needs to be free of lead paint.
Homes and Community Renewal, the state’s affordable housing agency, designates these areas based on an index that combines economic, educational, demographic, and environmental health factors. In the county, only the Syracuse suburbs are classified as well-resourced areas, according to a map on the agency’s website.
HCR’s index of factors for designating areas as “well-resourced” are weighted mostly by academic scholarship research that shows children living in better-resourced neighborhoods are more likely than their peers to find financial and social successes as adults, according to HCR.
The CNY Fair Housing program can provide families enrolled in the program with financial assistance to cover a security deposit, application fees, and moving costs.
They also help improve residents’ credit scores to be able to clear property owners’ screening processes. The program also helps families find resources like recreation programs, and facilitate school enrollment for children in the household.
“We’ve had tenants who are leaving their apartments because of lead, or who have been trying to get lead remediation in their apartments,” said Lydia Marino, CNY Fair Housing’s mobility program coordinator.
Jenia Newman, a mother of three who lived in a West Side three-bedroom apartment when one of her children was poisoned by lead, is now moving to an apartment in Mattydale. Her West Side apartment, she said, was in a home that was built in the 1950s. She learned that her children’s rooms were probably the source of contamination about a year ago, when her children’s doctor found elevated blood lead levels in her son.
“The house is old, and the chipping is coming from either their room, the windowsill in their room,” Newman said. “And now there is mold in the bathroom… I knew we had to go.”
Much like other parents who discover their children have been poisoned by lead, Newman said she had to learn new ways to clean the home to prevent further health issues for her children. Part of the NEHDA and CNY Fair Housing training focused on how to wipe down surfaces with potential lead dust, carefully so as to not spread the dust. Madden also provided tips for mitigating the risk of lead in water, instructing tenants to run their water briefly to flush out the pipes, using water filters certified to remove lead from water, and using cold water for drinking and cooking.
CNY Fair Housing’s mobility program is one of several resources available to help tenants live in homes that are lead safe. Oftentimes, however, remediation and full abatement of lead hazards fall on the hands of property owners. The county alone has spent $25 million in lead poisoning prevention, remediation, workforce development, testing, outreach, and housing initiatives since 2022.
While there are several programs to fund remediation work and tenants’ assistance, tenants continue to fall through the cracks, Marino said.
“It is still a very pervasive issue in the city,” Marino said.
Read more of Central Current’s coverage
Agencies launch lead-safety training for Onondaga County tenants
Housing advocates hoped to empower tenants dealing with lead in their homes.
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