News Story (California)
Daniel Ross
Guardian
October 1, 2016
READ THE FULL STORY HERE
Tags: Housing: Discrimination, Lead Poisoning
Organizations mentioned/involved: Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA)
DETAILS
The US housing and urban development secretary recently proposed lowering the level of lead that must be detected in children’s blood before triggering federal cleanup action. The proposal would affect an estimated 2.9m subsidized and public housing units built before the country’s 1978 ban on residential lead paint.
For decades, the former industrial site in Jordan Downs hosted a steel mill and later a truck and storage repair facility, before the housing authority purchased the site in 2008 to begin a billion-dollar redevelopment project to transform the existing homes into 1,800 mixed-income units. In 2011, lead was detected there at levels as high as 22,000 parts per million (ppm). The residential soil lead threshold for cleanup in California is 80 ppm.