Fair housing advocates are pushing substantial changes to the state’s Lead Law which, they say, has failed to keep children safe from poisoning and created “rampant” discrimination against renters with young children.
The Massachusetts Fair Housing Center has put a pair of identical bills (S.1430 / H.2346) sponsored by Acton state Sen. Jamie Eldridge, Worcester Rep. David LeBoeuf, and other Progressive state legislators at the center of its lobbying efforts this year, including a virtual lobby day held last week.
The legislation would create a two-step schedule to de-lead all apartments built before 1978 in Massachusetts between now and mid-2024 before they could be leased to any child under age 6. Units in communities with preexisting high rates of childhood lead poisoning would have to be de-leaded by July 1, 2022, while all other rentals would have to be in compliance by July 1, 2024. Rooming houses, which are exempt under the current Lead Law, would also be covered.
“If these changes had been a part of the original bill, tens of thousands of children would have been protected from lead poisoning and its lifelong disastrous consequences,” Fair Housing Center Executive Director Meris Bergquist said in an emailed statement responding to questions from Banker & Tradesman.
The original Lead Law, nation-leading when passed in 1971, made landlords remove or otherwise seal in lead paint in rental units where children under age six lived. However, both advocates and a prominent small landlord group say that many landlords have failed to live up to their obligations.
Bergquist cited Department of Public Health data stating only about 10 percent of rental units in Massachusetts built before 1978, when lead paint was banned, have undergone both lead inspections and de-leading. In recent years, Bergquist said, the number of children with lead poisoning appears to have plateaued in the last decade after declining since 2001.
Quattrochi said his group also spotted the same trend in lead poisoning data and asked Gov. Charlie Baker to convene the state’s anti-lead poisoning council to find solutions, but disputed the need for changes to the Lead Law.
“The law is very clear: A child cannot be living in a house with lead hazards. The moment a family with kids appears, you have to de-lead,” MassLandlords Executive Director Doug Quattrochi said in an interview. “Landlords have to take the most qualified applicant and that’s what a lot of families with kids are – dual-income.”
If a landlord hasn’t already de-leaded their unit, Quattrochi said, they have to scramble to arrange lead control measures if the most qualified tenant applying for the apartment has a child under six.
The situation, both Bergquist and Quattrochi said, is a recipe for discrimination against tenants with children, particularly in poorer, formerly redlined, largely minority neighborhoods by semi-trained landlords who either don’t want to bother with de-leading or aren’t aware that refusing to rent to someone because they have a child is illegal in Massachusetts. But Bergquist said time is up on the current law.
“Although we’ve had 50 years of training landlords and active enforcement efforts under the Mass. Lead Law, we have failed to prevent lead poisoning,” Bergquist said.
While more landlord education – which Quattrochi said MassLandlords is leading the charge on – and more aggressive enforcement of the Lead Law by state health and anti-discrimination officials are critical to fixing the problem, the biggest obstacle is money, he said, and criticized the proposed bills for not increasing the state’s $1,500 de-leading tax credit. MassLandlords estimates the average per-unit cost of de-leading an apartment is about $6,000.
Bergquist said the state could tap its nearly $5 billion in federal pandemic aid to fund such a boost to cover the roughly 1.8 million rental units in the state that have not yet been proven to be lead-free.
“We welcome anyone concerned about the future of young children and their families to join us to create lead-safe housing that is accessible to all families, free of discrimination and the consequences of systemic racism,” she said.
