A program to pay landlords for complying with Cleveland’s lead safe law will soon come to an end.
Since 2020, the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition – a partnership of nonprofits and local government officials working to reduce the number of children exposed to lead at home – has offered $750 to $1,000 rebates to landlords whose homes earned a lead safe certification from the city. The certificates are issued after an inspection proves a home has no active lead hazards, which can damage a child’s developing brain, leading to irreversible delays and behavioral issues.
The incentive program is closing because its funding – primarily, federal COVID-19 recovery dollars – is nearly exhausted. By the time it ends, the program will have handed out about $8.9 million worth of incentives, nearly double its original budget.
“We kind of view this as a resounding success, because we definitely have impacted and reached far more people than what we originally anticipated,” said Ayonna Blue Donald, a member of the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition’s executive steering committee.
The federal pandemic money is just a fraction of the more than $90 million the coalition has raised in total. But the other dollars come with parameters, and Blue Donald wrote in a statement that the coalition does not have any remaining funds that can be used for incentives to landlords. The incentive program wasn’t designed to last forever, she added.
Some lead safety advocates wish the incentive program would continue.
“It would be great if the private funds could continue to flow to [make] the program a success,” said Spencer Wells, a co-founder of the volunteer group Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing.
Dr. David Margolius, the city’s public health director, recognized that the end of the program might be difficult news. But he said it would allow remaining funds to be invested in direct efforts to keep kids safe, like removing lead from their homes.
“It’s clear to us now that any dollar spent to reduce lead poisoning has to go to directly helping children – whether it’s fixing their homes, or helping them relocate, or operating the resource center to be able to answer questions from folks,” Margolius said.
Blue Donald estimates that the program will pass out incentives to about 9,000 units in total. Just about 28,000 rental units in the city had an active lead safe certification as of early December. That’s less than a third of the estimated total rental units in Cleveland.
Without the incentive, Blue Donald said it’s possible that compliance with the lead safe program could slow down. But she pointed to Cleveland’s recent push to ramp up its civil ticketing as a way to keep the heat on landlords to follow the city’s lead safe law – a bigger stick as a carrot disappears.
“Over the last few years, it was really incentives alone that were driving a lot of the improvement,” Margolius said. “And then over the past three or four months, we’ve increased the penalties for not doing it, and that’s helped.”
The incentive program will stop accepting new applications on Feb. 3, though interest forms will still be available up until money completely runs out.
Lead safe incentives popular
The Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition created the incentive program after Cleveland City Council passed its lead safe law in 2019, to encourage landlords to comply. At the outset, the coalition budgeted $5 million for the program.
But it grew in popularity, and the coalition received $13 million in COVID relief dollars from the city in 2022. That allowed the coalition to add more money to the incentive program, Blue Donald said. The coalition also reallocated dollars from some of its other ARPA-funded programs.
When the incentive program officially closes later this year, it will likely have spent $8.9 million in total. Since 2020, about 1,100 landlords have received an incentive, according to the coalition. About three in five of those have mailing ZIP codes in Cuyahoga County.
In the last several years of the program – between May 2023 and December 2025 – a little more than half of the incentives went to landlords with self-reported income of less than $75,000 a year.
Zack Cofer is a co-director of programs at Environmental Health Watch, the nonprofit that actually distributed the incentives to landlords. He said he’s seen the incentive program help reduce the lead safe law’s financial burden on landlords, like the cost to get one’s home assessed or to make necessary repairs.
Rick Bias is a local landlord who received rebates for at least three homes he owns in Cleveland. He said private companies and individuals who offer lead testing – a service landlords have to pay for – have used the incentive as an advertising tool and now may lose that.
“In the end, you know, taking the incentive away will really shift that burden to the tenant,” Bias said.
Are there other options?
Right now, leaders of the Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition say there’s no other money that can fund a landlord incentive program. Blue Donald said the coalition would be open to continuing the program if they had a funding source and there is need for it.
Unspent COVID recovery dollars from the City of Cleveland are already assigned to other programs. That includes a relocation assistance program, which pays for families living in homes with unsafe lead levels to stay in a hotel or find a new home entirely. Another piece of the funding went to improve the percentage of children in Cleveland who get tested for lead poisoning. There are also programs to make child care facilities and housing lead-safe.
“At this point there are no more dollars that we feel comfortable reallocating to this bucket of work, because we still have to complete those other buckets of work,” Blue Donald said.
Plus, federal spending deadlines for the COVID recovery dollars are approaching this summer.
Then there’s the private money. It comes from all sorts of places – with some of the largest donors being the Cleveland Clinic, the George Gund Foundation and the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation. Blue Donald wrote in an email that the coalition does not have any remaining funds that can be spent on landlord incentives.
Much of the private money is supposed to go to grant programs that landlords or property owners can apply for to fix up their homes directly, Blue Donald said. In July, the coalition said that it had removed income limitations and caps on the amount of money it could give per unit.
The coalition has struggled to pass out grant dollars. A report by former Cleveland City Council Member Rebecca Maurer found about 8.5% of the money the coalition had to spend on grants got spent between July 2020 and December 2024. Last July, the coalition laid out a plan to ramp up that spending.
Currently, though, the coalition is not accepting grant applications from landlords and homeowners because it has a backlog of applications it needs to work through.
