While it sounds wonderful on the surface to say let's have a Minneapolis ordinanace that requires lead paint abatement and even provides some small assistance in that direction, the problem isn't that simple.
I'm not denying that breathing or eating the dust of pulverized lead paint will cause elevated blood level levels. And I surely don't deny that lead is harmful.
How many of those 33% of the kids in Minneapolis for lead actually had potentially dangerous lead levels? I know one family whose two daughters had such elevated levels. They live in a turn of last century Victorian house. As with the vast majority of homes in Minneapolis (since most homes were built here prior to 1970), they have lead paint.
What's worse, we gutted and rehabbed several rooms, no doubt spreading paint dust all over the place. However, after pursuing a variety of lead abatement procedures, their daughters still had elevated lead levels. Where could it be coming from? Long story short: outdoors. Once they started having everyone who entered the house remove their shoes, the lead levels in the girls blood dropped to normal.
Where did that lead come from? Gasoline. Up until the 1980s, virtually all gasoline had lead in it. In older neighborhoods in Minneapolis, leaded gasoline powered cars have been regularly driving along the streets for maybe 80 years or more. Some of the lead in the exhaust accumulates on the ground. Along busy streets in Minneapolis, a big ground pollutant to this day is still lead.
How bad is it? The reason that Lake Street and Lagoon Street in Minneapolis were made into one-way streets in the 1980s was because the Lake Street / Hennepin Avenue intersection had some of the worst air pollution in the state. A major contributor? Particulate lead.
As much as I hate to find myself agreeing with Craig Miller, I find myself highly skeptical of the idea of adding a fee to rental property owners under the auspices of fixing the lead problem in Minneapolis.
Almost all homes in Minneapolis have lead paint in them. Up until a few years ago, all copper plumbing pipe solder had lead in it. Up until the 1980s, gasoline had lead in it. To this very day, the garbage burner spews lead into the air when it burns anything contaminated with lead, and rain brings it back to earth somewhere. Aviation gasoline still contains lead -- I know, let's get MAC to pay for lead abatement, too!
If we're really worried about lead, let's find out how big the problem really is, and where it's really coming from.
Chris Johnson Fulton
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