This past spring was particularly chaotic for Janeese Gunn and her family. 

Her 12-year-old son, who has a rare congenital condition, was in the hospital after rejecting a kidney transplant he had received. Her 13-year-old daughter ended up in the ICU with the flu. And when she took her youngest — two-year-old twins — to a check-up at the doctor, she found out they had elevated levels of lead in their blood. 

It was that last point that set off a whirlwind of change, frustration and fear in Gunn and her families’ life. In Cleveland, lead poisoning is often caused by lead paint inside homes. Gunn’s family lived in a private rental paid for with a Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority housing voucher. After the agency learned about the lead poisoning, Gunn’s home was inspected.  

Soon after, Gunn remembers getting a letter from the housing authority informing her she needed to move out in 30 days. Her rental had lead hazards, and she needed to find a new one that accepted her voucher. 

“They tell you to go stay with family,” Gunn said. “…But having six kids and a husband, people are not about to let you come stay. You know, that’s a lot to deal with. That’s a whole family.” 

The decision put Gunn’s family on the verge of homelessness, but she knew it was also a matter of safety for her children. Lead can damage young children’s brains and disrupt their growth and development. And Gunn was concerned that her twins weren’t walking and were barely talking.

That health and safety concern is why the CMHA responds strongly to lead hazards, said CMHA’s Chief of Staff, Jeffrey Wade. If the agency finds lead in a home, it gives landlords 30 days to make the home lead safe. The housing authority has to tell tenants to move. if they don’t act in that time 

“If that owner is not willing or is unable to correct those conditions, then … we have to end that relationship,” Wade said. “More importantly, for the family’s safety, they need to get out of that home.”

When this happens, Wade said, tenants are given a list of potential units and a website to research other housing. He said he wasn’t aware of staff telling residents to stay with family. 

The challenge was that finding new housing for Gunn’s family was not an easy feat. Gunn said many landlords were skeptical of taking a voucher at all, especially from a family with a lot of kids. She was also trying to find something safe and clean: a home without lead and without mold. For a few weeks after moving out of her rental home, Gunn and her husband paid for the family to stay in an AirBnb.  

The week before her AirBnb stay was set to end in May, Gunn got a call from Environmental Health Watch. The nonprofit had opened a new emergency relocation program for residents displaced by lead, and they could put Gunn and her family in a hotel until they found a long-term solution. The program – a year-long pilot – would last through the end of June 2026. The goal was to help 100 families. Gunn was one of the first. She connected with the program just in time. 

“Not a lot of parents probably have like two, three thousand dollars sitting aside just in case they’re about to have to move,” Gunn said. “So here you are, you’re at home with your child … and now you have to hurry up and move. … It’s very rough.” 

Emergency housing program long needed for lead hazards

For years, city officials and others working on lead issues in Cleveland have recognized the tension between lead safety and keeping families in stable housing. When the city passed its landmark lead legislation in 2019, it required the city to establish a board to support families who must relocate as a result of lead hazards. (In 2023, Signal Cleveland shared the story of one mother who struggled with homelessness after her child was poisoned by lead.)

There are a number of ways in which a Cleveland resident can be told to leave their housing because of lead poisoning. In addition to CMHA, the city’s public health department may order landlords to vacate homes because of lead hazards.  

After a lead hazard is identified, the health department traditionally points residents to city or county grant programs, said Dr. David Margolius, Cleveland’s director of public health. That didn’t always solve families’ immediate housing problem. 

“The kind of nature of some of those applications is … the family has to go and fill out all this information,” Margolius said. “It’s just really challenging, and there are too many hurdles.”

Margolius hoped to see a program that could help more quickly. In 2022, the city moved toward that. Cleveland gave a large chunk of money to the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition, a public-private partnership dedicated to lead safety. Around $800,000 of that fund was set aside for an emergency housing assistance pilot program, said Ayonna Blue Donald, a member of the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition’s executive steering committee.  

After it received the money, the coalition had to find a nonprofit — Environmental Health Watch — to administer the program. By spring 2025, it was ready to launch. 

Goal of new relocation program? Respond quickly

The program is designed to have a minimal number of barriers. There’s no income limit. And it is offered to a wide swath of residents dealing with lead problems. People like Gunn, whose children already experienced lead poisoning, are eligible. So are tenants and homeowners whose properties are being renovated to resolve lead problems. 

The goal is to respond quickly when a resident is in need. 

“When you’re in a property that has lead hazards and you need to relocate, it’s like – you need to relocate now,” Blue Donald said.  

To get help, residents can call the Lead Safe hotline or fill out a form on the coalition’s website. Other agencies and people can also make referrals to the program: the city’s Department of Public Health, the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, landlords and community-based nonprofits.  

Hospitals are a particularly important place to connect families with the relocation program,  since that’s where children with extreme lead poisoning get treated. Dr. Matthew Tien, a pediatrician at MetroHealth who has treated children with lead poisoning, said doctors don’t want to send those families back into the home where they were poisoned. But in the past, there hasn’t always been a clear option for what to do. 

“It often happens where we’re scrambling,” Tien said. They run through options with patients: Are there relatives that they can stay with? Sometimes, emergency funds allow the hospital to temporarily pay for a hotel room. There’s also an emergency shelter for children for kids.  

Tien said the new relocation program, which he’s used at least once, is a better and reliable option.

Program offers short-term and long-term housing assistance

When a family like Gunn’s needs a place to go, fast, the relocation assistance program manager, Omayra Colón, and her colleague, Erica Jones, typically move them into a hotel. 

The program has 12 hotel partners across the city, on both the East and West sides. Colón said they tried to choose places with kitchenettes, so residents didn’t have to entirely resort to eating out while there. 

Housing isn’t the only support families get. The program will help pay for a number of things that might present as barriers to moving out of the house, like storage, pet boarding and ride-share services.

“These things can come up during an assessment, when they say, ‘Well I would go – but I can’t, because I have this situation where I have pets,” Colón said. 

Colón and Jones also work with the school district to get transportation for kids to go to school.

A hotel stay is step one of the program. Some families, like those who are waiting for their landlord to make their house lead safe, are able to stay for a few weeks then move back home. Others, including Gunn, don’t have a safe home to return to. Perhaps the home has been condemned, or the city has ordered it vacated. 

The relocation assistance program works with those families to find a new place to live. The program can cover the cost of a security deposit, first month’s rent and movers. There are fewer of those families, said Zackary Cofer, director of programs at Environmental Health Watch. Staff have to be careful when setting up a client to sign a lease on a new place.  

“If somebody is locked into a lease agreement, we can’t just, like, give them a new place,” Cofer said. “Because then that could create a problem, if they’re locked into two different lease agreements.”

Gunn finds a new home  

Gunn, her husband and her six children moved into a hotel in May. The family split between two rooms. 

The stay was “hectic,” Gunn said. The close proximity overwhelmed everybody, especially her teenagers, who couldn’t escape from the youngest kids. Her 13-year-old daughter had to take school online because of the disruption.  

Throughout the process, Colón and Jones kept checking on the family. The pair brought “heart” to the work, Gunn said, and clearly cared personally about their clients. Meanwhile, she kept searching for new housing that would fit her family and the budget that her voucher allotted her. She found a landlord who was responsive to her concerns about lead and sent her the up-to-date lead safe certificate for the house. 

The family moved into their new home on June 24, after about a month and a half in the hotel. The relocation program helped pay a security deposit. Her teenagers were ecstatic to move in. 

“The minute we got the keys, they were willing to sleep on hardwood floors,” Gunn said. 

Life still has its challenges. Her 12-year-old son, with the congenital condition, is on dialysis. Daycare is hard to find. But several of her children are back in school in-person. And she’s noticed her twin girls reaching new milestones: walking and talking.  

“Now, they won’t stop talking,” Gunn said. 

The program Gunn relied on will end next June. At that point, Blue Donald said there will be an assessment of the relocation assistance program: Was it truly needed? What worked about its operations? The answers will help the city and other funders determine: Should the program continue? 

Margolius hopes so. 

“I hope that this program never goes away,” Margolius said. “I mean, that’s the dream. That’s our dream here at the health department. We need to keep this going one way or another.” 

How to access the lead relocation assistance program

• Call the Lead Safe Hotline: 833-601-LEAD (5323)
• Visit the Lead Safe Resource Center: 4600 Euclid Ave. (3rd floor), Monday through Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Fill out a form on the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition’s website.