The Department of Housing and Urban Development has for years neglected to enforce its own environmental regulations, resulting in lead poisoning of children in at least one public housing development and potentially jeopardizing residents’ health in thousands of other federally subsidized apartments near contaminated sites, according to an inspector general report obtained by The Washington Post.
The agency’s watchdog reviewed HUD’s efforts to identify and mitigate health risks to residents of public housing near toxic waste dumps after the East Chicago, Ind., apartment complex, where tenants had been living with lead contamination for more than four decades, was deemed uninhabitable in 2016.
The West Calumet Housing Complex was declared a Superfund site in 2009 and demolished in 2019, its 1,100 mostly Black and Hispanic residents relocated.
The inspector general found that HUD and other agencies failed repeatedly to alert residents and remedy unsafe environmental conditions at the public housing development, built in 1972 atop a former lead smelting plant that turned refined copper and lead into batteries.
HUD’s field office in Indianapolis did not conduct the required environmental reviews, even after the Environmental Protection Agency discovered high levels of lead in 1985.
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