Nationally, the steady decline in cases of childhood lead poisoning is considered a major public health success story. But a Chicago Tribune investigation revealed that lead hazards are festering in the same parts of Chicago that have given the city a national reputation for violence and academic failure. Alarming levels of the brain-damaging metal are poisoning more than a fifth of the children tested each year in parts of low-income, predominantly African-American neighborhoods, even as lead poisoning has been largely eradicated in more prosperous areas of the nation’s third largest city. After years of decline, the rate of lead poisoning was higher in 2013 than it was five years earlier in more than a fifth of the city’s census tracts. The series told the stories of families affected by lead poisoning and clearly outlined the growing body of peer-reviewed research linking early childhood lead exposure to struggles in school and violent crime later in life. In impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods like Austin, Englewood and Lawndale, more than 80 percent of the children tested in 1995 had dangerous lead levels. Today, those kids are in their early to mid-20s, when criminal behavior peaks. Politicians and policymakers have yet to catch up to this underappreciated factor in Chicago’s seemingly intractable problems, treating the toxic legacy of lead paint and leaded gasoline as a scourge of the past. Chicago now spends more each year on software licensing and expense accounts for aldermen than it does combating lead. Some teachers and reading specialists know that kids exposed to lead as toddlers are more likely to act out, have trouble staying on task and struggle to work well with classmates. Yet it doesn’t come up in the debate about how to improve schools or fight crime. The Tribune series also documented how federal and local housing policies leave poor kids at risk. Private landlords in the housing voucher program known as Section 8 can still receive taxpayer-funded subsidies after lead hazards are discovered, while residents are forced to stay in hazardous houses. Tougher sanctions don’t kick in until a child is poisoned at levels four times higher than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention standard for intervention, a policy that hasn’t been updated since the Reagan administration. Moreover, Chicago leaders have been slow to embrace efforts to prevent children from being poisoned in the first place. Another story in the series described a computer model developed at the University of Chicago that combines nearly two decades of childhood lead tests and home inspections with publicly available data on housing and demographics in the city’s neighborhoods. By aggregating massive amounts of disparate information, scientists hope to identify homes or apartments where pregnant women or children are most likely at risk for lead exposure. Mayor Rahm Emanuel promoted the model as an example of his administration’s commitment to new ideas to solve old problems, but the Tribune found that city officials have failed to follow through on the mayor’s promises. A pilot state program eliminated lead hazards in hundreds of Chicago homes, but despite a glowing review Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner and state lawmakers declined to keep funding the program.
