A program to provide temporary housing for Cleveland residents displaced by lead hazards is scaling back, limiting emergency options for residents.
The relocation pilot program began last May. It was the solution to a problem that has long dogged Cleveland leaders working to address lead poisoning, which is often caused by lead paint in older homes: Where should families go if their house is the source of their health issue, and who pays for it?
Answering that question hasn’t been easy. But the first phase of the relocation program — overseen by the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition, a group of nonprofits, government agencies and funders — provided some insight.
Leaders called the program a success and said earlier this year that they were raising money to continue it. The pilot program had relied on one-time funding from the City of Cleveland, but it ran out in June, at which point the program stopped taking referrals.
New funding to restart the program is on the way from the Cleveland Clinic, a major donor to the coalition. The next phase of relocation assistance won’t look the same, though. While the pilot program helped a wide range of people, the revamped program will significantly limit who can benefit.
The first iteration of the program took in residents under all sorts of circumstances. Some only needed a brief stay at a hotel because construction workers were addressing lead hazards in their home. Others were searching for new housing altogether — and often seeking it as soon as possible — because their child had elevated lead levels caused by their current home.
The program will no longer help relocate families looking for new housing after their child is exposed to lead. Instead, it will focus on temporarily housing families while their homes are getting repaired as part of a coalition grant program to make them lead safe, wrote Candace Goforth DeSantis, a spokesperson for the coalition, in an email.
Organizations that made referrals to the program as well as its operator said they’re grateful the program will move forward in some capacity. At the same time, some said that the cutback means losing a vital resource.
“It’ll be just like where we were before [the program] started” for families needing emergency housing due to lead poisoning, said Dr. David Margolius, Cleveland’s director of Public Health.
Signal Cleveland asked the coalition and the Cleveland Clinic about the new focus on temporary relocations for homes under construction instead of emergency housing. Goforth Desantis wrote that the coalition “welcomes partners interested in sustaining and expanding relocation support for families affected by lead hazards.”
A spokesperson for the Clinic wrote in a statement that its support for the program is “intended to help ensure families have access to safe temporary housing while lead hazards are being remediated in their homes.”
Relocation team served residents dealing with lead hazards, eviction and elevated blood lead levels
The relocation program helped residents in a wide variety of scenarios.
The majority were people with homes temporarily under construction as part of the coalition’s lead grant program, said Zack Cofer with Environmental Health Watch, the nonprofit that operated the relocation assistance program. That’s important because construction work to reduce lead hazards can in some instances disturb lead dust, making it dangerous for residents to be in the home.
A number of other groups also relied on the relocation program, though.
Doctors called when a child showed up at the hospital with very high levels of lead in their blood, fearful of sending the family back home. Cleveland’s public health department can order landlords to vacate homes because of lead hazards; the relocation program gave city staffers a resource to give tenants in the wake of this disruption. The Legal Aid Society of Cleveland used it to help tenants facing evictions whose kids also had elevated lead levels. At least one tenant with a federal housing voucher connected with the program after the housing authority told her to move within 30 days because her child had elevated lead levels.
“We wouldn’t be able to help families in those types of situations” under the new phase of the program, Cofer said.
These residents are often looking for new housing. While there are legal options to try to force landlords to make the existing home safe from lead hazards and for them to pay for temporary housing, the process is long and rarely used by tenants, who have often been told to leave anyway, said Bobbi Saltzman, a senior attorney at Legal Aid who is also a co-chair of the organization’s team addressing lead. The referral program helped because it typically responded to the fast-moving situations within 24 hours, she added.
Permanent relocations made up less than 20% of the people assisted through the program, Cofer said. But he doesn’t believe that’s due to lower demand. Instead, Cofer said it takes time to build relationships with the agencies referring families, and the program was only open about a year.
The next phase also seems to move away from an idea leaders of the coalition said they were pitching earlier this year: leasing out handfuls of units across the city that would be available on a dime for residents when needed.
When will people be able to get relocation help again?
The narrower relocation assistance program is expected to open back up soon — ideally, within the month of August, said Wyonette Cheairs, program director of Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing nonprofit that helps lead the coalition, in a recent meeting the coalition hosted.
The Cleveland Clinic funded the new program for one year, after which it will evaluate its impact and future funding needs, a spokesperson for the hospital wrote in an email.
At the same time, some city leaders say more work will be required to fill the gaps that have opened up as a result of the shrinking program. Rebecca Maurer, the city’s senior advisor for lead accountability, said that the city is actively working on finding solutions to expand relocation options.
“With the end of the pilot, we don’t have a direct place for people to go after a critical moment like a hospitalization for a really high lead exposure,” Maurer said. “That’s a gap that we’re committed to filling. And we’re pursuing every option to make sure it’s funded, either through the public side or the private side of our public-private partnership.”
She did not provide details, saying that she is in the midst of working on proposed changes to legislation the city passed to regulate lead in housing in 2019.
