Cleveland’s Silent Danger: Lead Paint

While other little kids were out playing, Erika Jarvis was being taken to a health clinic on the East Side of Cleveland to get her blood drawn. 

Jarvis, then age 5, was hospitalized for elevated lead levels alongside her sister. While growing up in an older home in Cleveland, the pair had fallen victim to a silent danger — lead paint. 

“I was poisoned by lead as a little girl. My sister and I were poisoned,” Jarvis said. 

A study by Case Western Reserve University compared the lead levels of children in Cleveland to those from around the country and found that Cleveland had one of the highest percentages of children with elevated lead levels. To put it into perspective, in 2016 Flint, Michigan reported elevated lead levels in children of 7% to 10%, while Cleveland is seeing around 12% to 13% of children with elevated lead levels, with some neighborhoods reaching rates near 25%, according to the CWRU study. 

Testing children is a priority because the symptoms of lead poisoning have to be caught early in order for it to be properly identified, according to the Director of Public Health for Cleveland, David Margolius. 

“The individuals who are at the highest risk of lead poisoning are also the ones who are at highest risk of being damaged from lead poisoning, and that is 1- and 2-year-olds,” Margolius said. “So if we were testing adults, it would not be as relevant, because A, their brains are already formed and B, you know, they're less likely to be crawling around on the ground, ingesting paint dust and so it's a less meaningful metric. And so that's what it is. It's paint dust and paint chips that kids are consuming, and that's how it's happening.”

A common misconception is that lead pipes are causing the problems in Cleveland. Around 9.2 million lead pipes make up the national service line infrastructure, according to a report from the Environmental Protection Agency. There’s a heavy concentration of lead pipes in the Rust Belt, with Ohio and Illinois listed as two out of the 50 states with the highest levels of lead service lines. 

Lead pipes have been making headline news after President Joe Biden announced in October that water utilities would be given 10 more years to replace almost every lead pipe in the country, according to The New York Times. Margolius says that this news is important, but it won’t help the children of Cleveland because it’s not the pipes that are the problem, it’s the paint.

“The reason we know it's from the paint, not the water, is because when we have a case of lead poisoning, we go to the home to investigate the source and we test the water. The water is fine. And so we go to the home and identify a paint hazard that's caused the lead poisoning. And specifically, where the paint hazards are coming from, are usually old windows that have been painted over doors and porches,” Margolius said. 

The federal government banned lead paint in consumer products in 1978 because it was proven to cause brain, kidney, nerve and blood damage. In Erika Jarvis’ case, she suffered lifelong mental and physical damage. 

“I did not suffer academically, but I had to take speech therapy in first and fourth grade. Also, things that are small to others enraged me a lot. My grandmother would tell people ‘she has moments sometimes, just let her be’ because she didn’t know. My bones would hurt. These things have affected me my whole life and I'm still dealing with the effects of it to this day,” Jarvis said. 

Jarvis’ story isn’t just a one-off case. In 2023, about 700 kids on both the West and East sides of Cleveland had high levels of lead in their blood, according to a data brief by the Cleveland Department of Public Health. 

Jarvis’ symptoms are a textbook example of what lead poisoning looks like in young children, according to Margolius. 

“When you are a child with high lead levels, you're not going to have any symptoms until later in life, around school age,” Margolius said. “And maybe in preschool you might notice behavioral disturbances, learning disabilities and other related neurodevelopmental challenges. But unless the lead levels are really high, you're not going to have symptoms.”

Because the symptoms of lead poisoning can be hard to pinpoint, it is important for children in cities such as Cleveland with old homes to be regularly tested. Almost 90% of Cleveland’s housing stock was built before 1978, according to a research study by Case Western Reserve University. Margolius says this is why kids are suffering from elevated lead levels.

“In Cleveland, there are hundreds of thousands of old homes built before 1978 with lead paint, so that's a lot of homes that need to be tested and treated and abated, which is the process of getting the lead all the way out of these homes,” Margolius said. 

While Cleveland’s homes continue to get older, the amount of children being tested for lead poisoning continues to go down. The latest data shows that only about 35% of Cleveland’s children are tested for lead levels, and not all of those who test positive are treated, according to research by Case Western Reserve University. 

In 2019, the city of Cleveland tried to combat the problem with a Lead Safe Certification law, which was supposed to make it so landlords would voluntarily register their homes to make sure they were lead safe. But, due to a lack of incentive and enforcement, landlords were not holding up their end of the deal. 

“We have set up regulations and rules that the property owners have to do. If they want to rent the property, they have to prove that their home is safe and lead-free. But the compliance rate is low,” Margolius said

Part of the reason property owners are able to get away with this is because these older homes are typically found in lower income minority communities, according to Margolius. 

“The lead problem tracks along with all the redlining maps and so for Black residents in Cleveland who were able to buy homes because of redlining, because of structural racism, they weren't able to pull out favorable loans to do home improvement in their properties because they were valued so low, just by nature of being in predominantly Black neighborhoods,” Margolius said. “So what you see is wealthy white suburbs handling homes, but those homes have been able to appreciate value, get loans and get home improvement. And so the homes that have been left to deteriorate are more likely to be ones in predominantly black neighborhoods.”

As the Director of Public Health for the city of Cleveland, Margolius is responsible for trying to find new solutions for a very complex problem. He has found it difficult to come up with an answer for a problem that encapsulates so many factors including environmental, economic and racial injustice. 

“My role in this space is twofold,” Margolius said. “Number one, any health challenge that disproportionately affects Clevelanders is going to be my problem, and our department's problem, to sound the alarm, to track the data, to build awareness. And number two is, we have a team within the health department who is charged with reaching out to every family that's affected by lead poisoning to help identify and alleviate the source of lead poisoning.”

The two main solutions that Margolius and his team at the Department of Public Health have tried to pitch are simple: testing and funding. 

“Not every family's testing, not every doctor is offering the test, but that's something we're working on, increased testing rates,” Margolius said. 

Testing is also something that Jarvis, now age 37, is an advocate for, as she said that the only thing scarier than lead poisoning in children is being ignorant to what the child is suffering from. She is now a member of the advocacy group CLASH, Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing, whose main goal is to educate the public on the signs of lead poisoning. If the parent is able to get their child tested and identify the problem, then there are groups in the city who are able to give them the resources they need in order to help their child, according to Jarvis. 

“The more people are educated the more power they have,” Jarvis said. 

The other major factor in Margolius’ solution is simple — money. 

“What we need is a level of federal investment similar to what's happening for lead pipes, where the federal government is saying, ‘We want all the lead pipes out, all the way out,’” Margolius said. “And we need that same approach and investment and attention paid to the number one cause of lead poisoning in our country, which is lead paint. We were kind of moving in that direction. Lead pipes got their funding through the infrastructure legislation, but that funding hasn't yet followed for paint.”

The city of Cleveland owes its children the opportunity to grow up in safe homes, and that starts with removing all lead paint.