Cleveland’s trouble managing federal housing dollars has cost it a new $7.8 million grant to make homes lead safe, a city official said — even though the city had picked up the pace of work this year.
Federal officials rejected a recent application for a new lead grant because they deemed Cleveland too risky to manage the money, said Community Development Director Arin Miller-Tait. That rating reflects how the city handles several federal housing grants, not just those for lead hazards, she added.
Last year, the city nearly lost three federal grants meant to reduce lead hazards and other housing issues because it spent the money too slowly. It wasn’t the first time: The city has a long history of struggling to spend federal dollars on lead-safe housing, including losing a $2 million federal grant in 2012.
This time around, the federal government gave Cleveland additional time to spend the money. Reports from earlier this summer show the city successfully got the program moving. Miller-Tait said the city completed 100 housing units in the past year — after completing 40 in the five years prior.
“We worked so hard on these things, and it is really disheartening, especially in a city with as much need as Cleveland has,” said Miller-Tait of the federal government decision to pass over the city.
Hundreds of kids in Cleveland each year test positive for elevated levels of lead in their blood, largely due to the city’s aging housing stock, which is slathered in lead paint. The city has one of the highest lead poisoning rates in the country. The grant paid to fix up properties by removing or mitigating lead hazards, focusing on homes where young children or pregnant women live. Without it, property owners who can’t afford or get a loan for a clean-up could be limited to seeking financial assistance from the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition’s grant program, which has a wait list due to high demand.
Cleveland City Council Member Kris Harsh, the vice chair of council’s development, planning and sustainability committee, wrote in an email that the federal government’s rejection of Cleveland was “terrible news.”
“We need every dollar we can get — and spend — to stop” lead poisoning in the city, Harsh wrote. “We urgently need to figure out how we keep our lead abatement efforts going and how we get back in HUD’s good graces.”
Miller-Tait said that the city is working with the federal government to learn whether it can appeal the decision. The first step is a debrief meeting, where the city will learn more about why the federal agency overseeing the funding — the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — scored them high in some places and low in others. The city doesn’t have all the details at this point, Miller-Tait said.
The letter that HUD sent to the city simply said that it denied Cleveland a grant due to a “risk review,” which looked at “current and past performance, including experience managing federal awards, timeliness of reporting, achievement of planned goals, audit findings, and timely completion of activities.”
In the meantime, Miller-Tait said, the city is looking for other opportunities to pay for lead mitigation work, though she did not specify the alternative funding sources. The city also wants to prepare for the federal government’s next round of applications, but she does not know when that will be, she said.
Feds note ongoing concerns in other grant spending
The federal government’s decision to reject Cleveland as too risky was not solely rooted in the city’s past performance on lead, Miller-Tait said. Federal evaluators looked at risk ratings across all of the city’s HUD grants, she said, including Community Development Block Grant funds and several others.
The city gets millions of dollars a year in community development block grants — $19.2 million in 2025. The money is supposed to go toward projects like affordable housing, eliminating blight and supporting economic development. [Correction: An earlier version of this story had the wrong total for Cleveland’s 2025 block grant amount. It was updated at 6 p.m.]
“This department has had, let’s call it, struggles, to effectively manage the grants,” Miller-Tait said. “There’ve been some reporting challenges. We’ve had some less-than-ideal internal control processes.”
In August, Miller-Tait alerted Mayor Justin Bibb that the federal government had identified several areas of concern in how Cleveland spent community block grants, including a lack of sufficient citizen participation.
The central issue is that the city gives each council member a lump sum of those dollars, without a requirement that they report up-front how and where that money will be spent, according to an independent law firm hired by the city. That makes the money difficult to track. Going forward, the city is working to establish a process where council members will identify specific projects before they’re funded. The law firm the city hired found that HUD may stop giving the city community block grants, or significantly reduce them, if they don’t fix these issues.
Miller-Tait wrote in an email that she can’t say definitively how closely concerns about Cleveland City Council’s spending were factored into HUD’s decision not to give the city another lead grant. She hopes to learn more in the debriefing.
Council Member Harsh pushed back on any insinuation that the federal government rejected the city’s lead grant proposal because of City Council’s community block grant spending.
“It’s hard to imagine that Council’s block grant allotment had anything to do with this, since we were operating the same way every year we received lead funding from HUD,” Harsh wrote in an email. “All the same, Council continues to work on a proposal that will change the CDBG process to satisfy HUD.”
Harsh said he feels “optimistic” about that proposal. The committee he helps chair oversees Community Development Block Grants. It held two hearings at the end of October, in which city staff laid out a new process council members can use to request CDBG funding for projects. City staff did not address the recent news about HUD’s rejection of their application for a lead grant in those meetings.
City of Cleveland spokesperson Jorge Ramos-Pantoja wrote in an email that the “City Council President was briefed” when the city got the news about the lead grant’s rejection.
“It was decided that the hearings should focus on CDBG until such time as we understood our next steps in the debriefing and/or appeals process,” he added.
Where are the other three lead grants
Over the past several years, the City of Cleveland has been trying to spend down three federal lead and housing grants:
- A $9.7 million grant focused on reducing lead hazards in the Glenville neighborhood, which is set to close out at the end of November
- A $5.7 million grant to reduce lead hazards citywide, which will close next July
- A $2 million “healthy homes” grant that could help fix housing issues like mold or unsafe wiring, which will close out next June
The federal government gave all three a “red” designation as recently as March 2025, meaning the city was not completing enough work or spending enough money.
But Miller-Tait said that, since then, HUD reclassified all three grants as either yellow or green. Data she shared with Signal Cleveland show that the city anticipates fixing up the targeted number of houses, or more, by the end of each grant.
Similarly, the city anticipates spending the majority of the money from each grant: over 90% of the citywide and healthy homes grant, and 70% to 90% of the Glenville grant. But, it cannot yet say with certainty how much of each grant has been or will be spent.
Update: This story was updated at 1:43 p.m. on Monday to accurately state that the citywide lead grant will end next July.
