Because the strategy is elimination, lead remediation is a huge expense and has driven landlord behavior to embrace incredulous ignorance. There’s actually an incentive to not maintain property in some cases - remediation may exceed the value of the property.
A smarter strategy imo would be to reduce harm. Do stuff like pay landlords to replace windows and paint trim to encapsulate older lead paint. In poor neighborhoods, you could use this to incentivize section 8 enrollment which gives the government more power to drive other remedies for different problems.
I grew up in an 1890s home and live in a circa 1918 home today. There is almost certainly lead present in both the water supply lines and in various painted structures. Because the homes were/are maintained and the water system isn’t run by criminally negligent people, my kids do not have any lead exposure.
In my city, if I pull a permit for any type of work, it triggers a bunch of nonsense including licensed remediation, etc. Depending on the inspector and the contractor, that could be a big deal.
I have genuine, actual trouble maintaining faith in humanity when I hear about people like this existing. It just makes me incredibly depressed and bummed out about life.
That’s because a few IQ points in black and poor people is not considered more important than not using tax money to solve the problem.
Arguably, the added IQ points times the number of people affected would most likely have a positive effect on the GDP and would pay for the fix in a couple decades.
That we even think that we’d need to do the math to justify it is deeply depressing.
1) alter representation in poorer neighborhoods, as in, black people wouldn't be so heavily represented, but then you would still have the problem of somebody being exposed to lead paint and apathetic landlords
2) the additional demand would wind up pushing people to the bad neighborhoods anyway, some part of me thinks getting right back to square one, but there are a ton of variables there. (Like maybe the higher prices would have incentivized more developers, or even the landlords of bad buildings to renovate)
the outcome that has occurred is still messed up. a lot of race based discrimination in the US against black people has had an economic rationalizing, I wonder if the increased pricing was a factor, alongside more clear cut segregationist idea.
Europeans go what? I'm thinking of all my friends and family and out of hundreds of houses I've been in I can only think of a handful that were built after 1978. I'm not sure why lead isn't a problem so much though, maybe phased out earlier? .
The highest blood lead levels are seen in children living in denser population areas at or below poverty thresholds. Homes in these largely urban, low-income areas are disproportionately built before 1978 and subject inhabiting children to a significantly higher lead exposure risk. In 2014, it was estimated that 90 percent of all DC homes were built before 1978.
Despite Baltimore leading the charge to inform the public concerning the risks of environmental exposure to lead by banning lead-based paint (but not plumbing or other construction products) in 1951 following a clinical study from Johns Hopkins University, many Baltimoreans, primarily Black, continue to face excessive exposure to lead. The US would not follow Baltimore's example and ban lead-based paint until 1978, because lead lobbyists continued to disrupt regulation efforts.
Lead remediation is an expensive process and even with programs that help or completely cover the costs, many people may not be aware of the programs to take advantage of them.
You can start to see why the problem disproportionately impacts the Black population.