460 Kids Poisoned By Lead In 2 Years

A young mom vacated a Fair Haven apartment where flaking lead paint poisoned her 3‑year-old. Then she found out that her new apartment across the river in Fair Haven Heights is also covered with the heavy metal, and her child is at risk again.

“This is ridiculous, honestly,” she said, running inside to tell her partner, after she learned about the news from a reporter about the chipping lead paint in her new dwelling. (She asked to remain anonymous because she fears retaliation from her landlord.) ​“This is unbelievable.”

Newly released records show just how widespread lead paint remains in New Haven, with hundreds of kids poisoned every year.

In 2016 and 2017, New Haven’s Health Department opened 458 lead poisoning cases, according to records the Independent obtained through the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

“Wow, that’s a lot of kids,” said David Rosner, a Columbia University professor who studies the history and ethics of public health. ​“That’s a lot of kids who are at risk of minimal brain damage, hyperactive disorder, various attention deficit disorders, learning disabilities, IQ loss. And these kids have a lot of problems anyway, because they’re probably living in lousy houses” in poverty.

In 2015, the last year for which the state’s official numbers are available, New Haven recorded the most poisoned children of any city in the state, with 2.1 times as many as Hartford and 1.2 times as many as Bridgeport.

The number of new cases in New Haven has fluctuated up and down, spiking in 2016, suggesting that the city hasn’t solved a longstanding environmental hazard more than 40 years after lead paint was banned.

In part, that’s because public health experts have lowered the limits for what’s considered ​“poisoned,” based on the understanding that no lead exposure is safe.

With more information about its devastating and irreversible effects, municipal health departments are now expected to jump into action when they find children with as little as 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, compared to 60 micrograms when regulations were first introduced.

Even as the state has cleaned up the worst conditions, agencies are now turning their attention to less noticeable defects, like flaking paint and gathering dust — inconspicuous toxins that account for more than four-fifths of the state’s lead poisonings.

1 In 8 Kids

Since 2013, New Haven’s Health Department has opened 1,183 new lead poisoning cases, the Independent found by analyzing state and city records.

In a city with roughly 9,200 children under five years old, the Health Department’s caseload could mean as many as one in eight children in the Elm City might be poisoned with lead by the time they enter kindergarten.

That estimate comes with a few qualifiers.

On one hand, it likely overestimates morbidity by doubling up on repeat poisonings, without accounting for new children who move into the city each year.

On the other hand, it could underestimate the rate by leaving out children who don’t regularly show up in doctors’ offices, where New Haven catches most lead poisonings.

By state law, pediatricians are required to administer two blood tests before a baby turns 35 months old. But historically, only 55 percent of the state’s 3‑year-olds actually receive both screenings.

That second test may actually be more important, because toddlers are more mobile, making them more likely to ingest lead paint through hand-to-mouth behavior that’s expected at that age.

Unlike in Flint, Michigan, New Haven’s lead problem lurks in its walls and windowsills, not its pipes. State inspectors found paint to be an issue in 84.4 percent of the cases they investigated, while barely any — 0.7 percent — traced back to a drinking-water hazard.

Like most industrial cities in the Northeast, much of the Elm City’s housing stock is old. Nearly 37,600 houses and apartments in the city were built before 1960, when companies started cutting back on the concentration of lead in their paint.

Decades after it was applied, that paint is starting to flake, leading to an epidemic that the city hasn’t figured out how to proactively address.

“Unfortunately, [the number of poisonings] is not surprising, given the housing stock here in New Haven,” said Carl Baum, director of Yale’s Regional Lead Treatment Center. ​“We had an opportunity back in the 1920s to get rid of this problem, but we caved to industry and lead remained in residential paint. We’re still paying the price today and sacrificing our children’s health by having these persistent lead levels.”

Lead, Mold, Lead

The tenant in Fair Haven Heights facing repeated lead exposures said she brought her boy in for a screening when she previously lived on Woolsey Street. The tests showed he had eight micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, higher than the CDC’s reference level of five micrograms.

She moved a few blocks over to Bright Street, where mold creeped up from the basement into her first-floor unit.

“This guy, he came and basically brushed it under the carpet. A month later, it came right back,” she said. ​“My lungs got really bad. It felt like I was dying; it almost caused me bronchitis.” After a year, she moved in with her mom, while she looked for places.

Across the Quinnipiac River, she finally found the apartment in the Heights. The rent for the one-bedroom was $700, affordable between her two jobs.

She didn’t like the place much, but it seemed OK. Until a reporter knocked on her door last week and informed her that a child had been poisoned one floor above.

“These New Haven landlords,” she said. ​“It gets to the point where you have no choice. You have to settle for a piece of crap apartment, just because there is no decent apartments that are a good price. I’ve been through it so many times with different landlords that try to take advantage.”

Worrying about lead and mold stressed her out. She had to take time off work to go to court or call up the Livable City Initiative, the city’s anti-blight agency.

The landlord, who lives in West Haven, said he’d just received the Health Department’s inspection results in the mail. He wasn’t sure how extensive the renovations would need to be, nor how much they would cost. He said he planned to call the Health Department to find out what to do next.

Who’s Your Landlord?

Interviews with landlords and tenants at eight buildings in Fair Haven and the Heights over the past week revealed wide disparities in how quickly landlords respond to lead-paint hazards.

At family-owned units, where multiple generations shared floors, there was often a clear urgency to make repairs, but the cash wasn’t always readily available. At investment properties with out-of-town owners, landlords fixed at most the minimum that the city required, leaving hazards for neighbors and future tenants.

That difference was clearest at two buildings just a few blocks apart: a two-story house on Chatham Street owned by grandparents and a four-story complex on Rowe Street owned by one of the city’s biggest landlords.

At a quaint, century-old house on Chatham Street, which was still decked out with Christmas lights, both of Joselyn Vallejo’s children, a 6‑year-old girl and a 1‑year-old boy, were coming down from elevated blood lead levels.

For four years, her daughter’s blood lead levels hovered far above the level of concern — up to 26 micrograms of lead per deciliter of her blood, five times over the CDC’s limit — from holes in the home’s walls.

When the health department’s inspectors arrived in December 2013, they confirmed that the house, built in 1900, had dense amounts of lead in its walls, windowsills and door casings.

“I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but after they told me, I was sad and I was scared,” recalled Vallejo, who works as a cashier while enrolled in a nursing program. ​“It was overwhelming. People were coming over to my house all the time, and I had to do a lot of check-ins.”

The health department cleared the house as lead-safe 16 months later, despite a city ordinance that requires abatement to begin within one week. The city waited until July 2014, seven months after they found lead throughout the property, to approve a $16,450 loan. A contractor’s cleanup and another round of inspections took an additional nine months.

The daughter’s blood levels didn’t go below normal for years, until her most recent test three months ago.

Vallejo said she felt the city acted quickly, that it was ​“for the most part, very helpful and attentive.” But she also said she felt lucky that her in-laws own the property.

“Their grandmother wanted to fix the issue,” she said, but ​“I can only imagine other people that have these slumlords that don’t really care.”

Even though Vallejo’s house was encapsulated, her children weren’t immune from lead. Her newborn son was poisoned in October 2017, after breathing in dust at an aunt’s house, Vallejo suspects.

Compare that to a rundown, asbestos-shingled apartment owned by one of Mandy Management’s holding companies on Rowe Street.

A child was poisoned in a basement unit two years ago. In August 2016, a health department inspector found off-the-charts quantities of lead in 74 spots, mostly on the building’s exterior window sills and casings.

But the city didn’t push Mandy Management to make repairs until this year.

In February, a year and a half after they’d known about lead throughout the building, the city approved a $6,370 loan to encapsulate the windows with a special lead-blocking paint.

“Once we get notice of any knowledge about the presence of lead, we get on it right away. We work very closely with inspectors, abate the unit and go on from there,” said Lily Rodriguez, Mandy’s leasing manager. ​“Whatever the issue is has been removed and replaced, like it was brand new.”

Three weeks ago, in late March, one unit in the building was cleared. But the other 15 units in a building that’s known to have lead haven’t been abated.

Tenants from three units, two of whom had children, said that they didn’t know about any lead poisonings in the building. They said that their apartments hadn’t been repainted in the last two months.

A mother of two said the city recently forced Mandy Management to put in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. But no one had mentioned lead paint. She said she felt upset and worried she’d end up like the tenants on Norton Street, suddenly kicked out of a condemned building.

Rodriguez pointed out that Mandy Management did everything the city required. She said they’ll check the other units on Rowe Street between vacancies, because it’s not practical to abate a whole building with units in varying conditions.

“When we purchase properties, some already had been lead abated. And just because you abate a unit now doesn’t mean that it won’t come out,” she said. ​“As soon as we hear an issue, the city comes out and inspects. If they find lead, we go out there and take a look at it.”

Pike International, another big landlord in New Haven, paid a $121,000 settlement last summer after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that it did not inform tenants about the risks of lead paint or take precautions while making repairs at eight properties.

Across the state, lead poisonings often fall along racial lines, affecting black and brown children at almost twice the rate of whites. Statewide, black children are 2.3 times as likely to be poisoned as whites, and Hispanics are 1.6 times as likely to be poisoned as non-Hispanics.

Although the state doesn’t collect income data, officials found that the cities with the highest number of households below the poverty level are also the ones with the highest number of childhood lead poisonings.

Health Department Silent

While lead poisoning remains an issue nationwide, other cities have figured out how to drastically cut down on poisonings, by screening buildings rather than children. But it’s hard to tell whether New Haven is taking any proactive measures of its own, because health department employees refuse to give out any information about their cases.

Four months after the Independent filed a FOIA request, neither the health department, which conducts lead inspections and issues abatement orders, and LCI, which relocates tenants and manages federal remediation funds, has complied with the request.

New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA), which sued the city twice last year for failing to do its duty to respond to lead poisonings, also hasn’t had any luck cracking open the city’s file cabinets and is appealing to the state Freedom of Information Commission. Last November, it took an order from a Superior Court judge, midway through a trial, for legal aid lawyers to get a chance to review a lead inspector’s complete file.

“All of our systemic concerns remain, and none of our questions have been answered to our satisfaction,” said Amy Marx, an NHLAA staff attorney. ​“When we raised this issue a year and a half ago, the Health Department told us we were making it up, that they didn’t want to talk with us because they were doing everything correctly.”

But Marx added that NHLAA is not giving up the issue, just because it can’t get a straight answer. ​“It would be such a shame if we have to wait for more kids to be poisoned and more resources have to be utilized, if we have to bring a class-action suit agains the city, before we can all sit down and pursue a common mission,” she said.

The health department declined to comment for this article, saying it believed answering a reporter’s questions might be illegal.

“Following advice from its Office of Corporation Counsel, the City will not respond to these inquiries until its concerns about compliance with HIPAA and applicable state statutes are resolved,” mayoral spokesman Laurence Grotheer said.

HIPAA, a federal privacy law passed in 1996, prohibits doctors from releasing patients’ medical records without their consent. However, the law explicitly says that agencies can release de-identified data, like aggregate statistics, and it does not prohibit a city agency from discussing housing conditions and enforcement actions so long as they’re decoupled from health records.

Policy Fixes

While it remains unclear what the city’s doing, a proposed state task force might consider bolstering regulations and funding. A bill creating the task force made it out of committee earlier this month on a 10 – 9 party-line vote, with Republicans in opposition.

The task force could look at how other cities across the country are addressing lead paint before children get sick — or even move into the building. They treat the issue as an environmental hazard, before it becomes a medical ailment.

Lead poisoning is ​“a pervasive environmental disease” that ​“doesn’t fit the typical medical model,” Yale’s Baum said. ​“The medical model is to make a diagnosis and then give medication to correct the problem. But in this case, the treatment is really dealing with the environment.”

In Rochester, N.Y., Toledo, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland, the city government requires lead paint inspections before families move into rental housing. In Rhode Island and California, the state government sued paint companies to pay for remediation before families move in.

New Haven once maintained a lead-safe house for children who’d been poisoned, but that facility shuttered after state funding dried up. Since then, the city has turned to fixing up properties. New Haven has received a $3.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to remediate 150 occupied units and 50 vacant units. Their plan is to maintain a registry of lead-safe homes that families can check.

However, the registry can quickly become outdated. A family in a Whalley Avenue apartment, listed as safe by the city, found that out the hard way, when its 2‑year-old son tested at 36 micrograms per deciliter, seven times above the CDC’s threshold for alarm.

The family, the Guamans, who battled the city in Superior Court to fix up their apartment, argued that the health department never took their son’s poisoning seriously. The parents said the agency failed to conduct a thorough inspection and monitor the landlord’s abatement, leaving a child ​“suffering irreparable harm,” according to the complaint Marx filed. The city denied the accusation.

After hearing about the health department’s failure to abate the property, a judge ordered the city to take control of repairs. John Rose, the city’s corporation counsel, promised the city would be done with everything within a month, but fixes still aren’t complete. The repairs were taking so long that the Guamans were forced to relocate to another apartment. No word on whether that apartment, too, has lead.