Poisoned at Home
Poisoned at Home
Syracuse’s ongoing lead crisis disproportionately affects communities of color, a result of redlining that segregated the city a century ago.
Darlene Medley walks the streets of Syracuse, looking for community events with only a suitcase in tow. Inside that suitcase are water filters specially designed to filter out lead.
Medley’s twin boys, now 9, were poisoned by lead at the age of 2 in their Pond Street home.
“Nobody ever came in before to talk to me and my family and deem (the home) unfit,” said Medley, West Branch leader of Families for Lead Freedom Now, chair of Lead SafeCNY and founder of Uniquely Free to Be Lead Free. “I had no idea until the health department showed up at my door.”
The mom was then told that her house was five times above the limit, but the Syracuse Health Department didn’t follow up. “A couple days go by, and next thing you know, Child Protective Services shows up to tell me that I’m letting my children stay in a lead-infested house,” she said.
Medley’s landlord at the time only provided her with $200 to find a place to stay for the weekend. A lawsuit against the landlord asked for $400,000 in fines for lack of compliance. The Pond Street home now sits vacant, but Medley’s experience led her to get a Lead Renovation, Repair, and Painting (RRP) certification. “I’m certified now; I can do it myself.”
Medley’s story is only one of hundreds similar in the Syracuse area, which has been a community fraught with frustration over government responses and a low housing supply.
Cost and effect
In July 2024, the city of Syracuse received $50 million in funding towards restoring the historic 15th Ward, a neighborhood created by force of segregation and discriminatory housing policies. Just a month later, the city of Syracuse released a statement citing that the city’s Department of Water “found elevated levels of lead in drinking water in some homes/buildings.”
Affected residents: This map of Syracuse census tracts shows the average percentage of elevated blood lead levels among tested children from 2020-2023 compared to the percentage of Black residents.
Many of the homes testing high for levels of lead were in the Syracuse South Side — a neighborhood of low-income housing that is primarily African-American residents and impoverished families. These communities have been economically marginalized for generations, making it harder for residents to access safer housing and escape the long-term health and financial impacts of lead exposure.
In Syracuse, the practice of redlining isn’t just shown on historical maps — its impact can be felt throughout communities today.
“It would be possible for there to be lead poisoning as a result of housing and not be a fair housing issue if it impacted every part of our community equally,” said Alex Lawson, policy director at CNY Fair Housing. “But it’s disproportionately impacting black communities and other communities of color, which makes it a fair housing issue.”
The practice stemmed from the Great Depression as an act of dividing neighborhoods by racial groups and the ‘safety’ of supplying a loan. The consequences of these discriminatory practices are still visible today — nowhere more clearly than in Syracuse’s lead crisis. Black communities, historically pushed into poorly maintained housing, are now facing the highest levels of lead exposure.
Elevated lead levels in water systems can have extremely damaging health effects, especially for developing children. According to the CDC, lead exposure can result in developmental and growth delays, hearing and speech problems, difficulty learning and paying attention, and in severe cases, sudden illness and death.
Dr. Travis Hobart, a pediatric doctor specializing in lead poisoning, says that lead exposure can cause irreversible damage to the developing brain.
“Kids who have been exposed to lead are more likely to become engaged with the criminal justice system when they’re teenagers,” Hobart said. “And we know they’re more likely to have pregnancies during teenage years as well. So, it’s things like that, where their decision-making capabilities have been altered, and they end up getting into trouble for it.”
Hobart says that it doesn’t matter where the source of lead is coming from. “We need to reduce the level of lead exposure period, so that involves both getting the (lead) paint fixed and getting the water pipes fixed,” he said.
Syracuse officials have begun efforts to gain funding from the state and public health initiatives, but local activists think it’s not enough and even compare the government’s response to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
Elin Betanzo, a founder of Safe Water Engineering, conducted a study on the city of Syracuse after a request from the nonprofit National Defense Resources Council. Betanzo found the local government’s response to be inadequate.
“I am very concerned that a large population in Syracuse is drinking elevated lead in their water, and they don’t know it,” said Betanzo. “They’re being provided reassurance that there’s not a problem when there likely is, which creates a big lack of information here. It’s a big black box.”
In times of crisis, Betanzo recommends that updated public records and thorough communication are a necessity.
Housing stock
The use of lead paint in homes wasn’t officially outlawed until 1978, and lead pipes weren’t banned until 1986. By this point, over 90% of the city’s homes had been constructed prior to this time.
The aging housing stock has been exacerbated by the public health emergency and is in desperate need of funding. No new homes have been built, and the ones on the market are decaying.
Karen Schroeder, chief communications officer for Home HeadQuarters, said Syracuse hasn’t benefited from enough housing investment in the years since lead was outlawed.
“The thing that Syracuse really never got to enjoy was the reinvestment,” said Schroeder. “We don’t have the population coming in to buy the homes and fix them up.” Home HeadQuarters helped to build a new residence in the city’s North Side, which was the first new construction in the area in over four decades.
For some residents of Syracuse, moving elsewhere isn’t in the cards.
The 2023 Syracuse Housing Study identified that most housing challenges in the area come from either a market gap or an affordability gap. The Syracuse government defines the market gap as “the cost of generating properly maintained residential real estate in Syracuse exceeds what many households are willing to pay for or improve their housing.” The city defines the affordability gap as “the cost of generating properly maintained residential real estate in Syracuse exceeds what many households are able to pay.”
The study found that some of the major contributing problems to the decaying housing stock have to do with severe underinvestment in real estate, as well as the historical ties to economic and housing segregation by race. When looking at distressed real estate, the study shows 28% of homes in Syracuse exhibit moderate distress, while 5% of homes exhibit a high level of distress.
These homes are concentrated in the historically impoverished neighborhoods in Syracuse, like Syracuse’s South Side.
Families, Schroeder said, “live in substandard and old housing that hasn’t been repaired, but a lack of dollars and incentives to repair the homes is ridiculously expensive to address.”
Home HeadQuarters recently bought a house on the North Side to renovate, and didn’t anticipate any major repairs past cosmetic fixes. After a lead safety assessment, the repair bill skyrocketed to $150,000 just to remediate the lead. “To move the needle is extremely difficult,” Schroeder said.
Alex Lawson, policy director at CNY Fair Housing, works to uphold the Federal Fair Housing Act and New York State Human Rights Law through his work.
“Redlining is the first instance in which the federal government, who now pours tons of money into home financing, are going to categorically deny [their] assistance to older neighborhoods where there are greater maintenance needs, because [they] just don’t think it’s worth the risk,” said Lawson.
The residents themselves often don’t have the funds to repair their homes and look to city officials to provide abatement assistance.
There is a clear similarity between the areas of Syracuse exhibiting high lead levels and deteriorating housing stock. Without the proper outside investment or demand to renovate the homes, those living under the poverty line in these neighborhoods unfortunately struggle to find better housing accommodations.
History of redlining
Redlining is when financial institutions withhold bank loans or financial assistance from those looking to buy homes in certain areas because they deem them to be ‘financial risks.’ Those deemed a financial risk were not given the financial support.
This practice has been done historically to keep white neighborhoods white or drive people of color out of their neighborhoods. In Syracuse, redlining was amplified by the construction of I-81. When it was built in the 1960s, it cut through the historically Black 15th Ward, displacing over 1,300 residents, devastating local businesses, and exacerbating issues within predominantly minority communities.
Only one overlap exists between an ethnic group and a commercial area, which is an area east of Downtown Syracuse – while classified as a manufacturing neighborhood, it is also the only designated African-American neighborhood. Factories were common in every neighborhood, but this is the only instance of an area where Black families resided but was not considered residential.
“From City Hall’s perspective, segregated white neighborhoods were ‘residential’ even if they included factories, but a neighborhood occupied by Black families was not truly residential,” reads a 2021 report from CNY Fair Housing. “Ideas about what makes a place ‘residential’ or ‘industrial’ were tied up with ideas about race.”
Zoning laws also play into the racial and ethnic boundaries in each area, which are regulations that determine if land should be developed as commercial or residential. In the early 20th century, there was mass immigration into the area, which also prompted a surge in industrialization.
Syracuse’s first zoning laws were passed in 1922, and the separations were very similar to the original 1919 map published by city engineers. These zoning codes further reinforced these racial boundaries and forced Black families to live in these neighborhoods, unable to move into segregated white neighborhoods. Looking down the line 15 years later in 1937, appraisers for the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation released a map for Syracuse. The key ranks areas from ‘First Grade’ to ‘Fourth Grade,’ listed with corresponding colors.
The lowest-grade sections are also seen in the neighborhoods labeled manufacturing and African American from the 1919 map. Families in this neighborhood would not receive federal or state funding towards their houses, which has had lasting effects on today’s housing market.
Almost 100 years later, the labeling on this map is a testament to the deep-rooted economic and racial segregation that has played a major role in the demographics of Syracuse’s housing market today.
About 8.25 million people live in neighborhoods identified by the federal government as “hazardous” and redlined 80 years ago, per 2020 Census Data. More than three-quarters of these Americans identify as belonging to a minority group. The majority of residents in the typical redlined area are Hispanic (30%) and Black (32%).
2022 data from the United States Census Bureau indicates that 29.6% of Syracuse residents are living under the poverty line, higher than the 12.5% national average. While there is a multitude of historical socio-economic divisions, the issue has become far more glaring when it comes to elevated lead levels, with higher percentages of lead levels being found in the more impoverished and African-American neighborhoods.
In 2024, 9.4% of children tested for lead in all of Syracuse had elevated levels. From 2020 to 2023, the three communities with the highest levels of lead tested in children were Census Tract 54, 58, and 59 — all of which are in Syracuse’s South Side area and heavily impoverished. The levels measured 24.7%, 21.5%, and 20.2%, respectively.
These homes in the South Side were classified as a ‘fourth grade’ security in 1937, and those early discriminations continue to be seen today.
Government response
Citizens have demanded that public officials do more testing and replace the water systems throughout the city. Due to ineffective communication from city officials, many local advocacy groups and families feel there is a lack of transparency and accountability within the local government.
During the original testing phase conducted by the city in October 2024, it was found that two Syracuse Department of Water employees improperly tested homes through exterior hoses. City instructions require that samples be taken from indoor faucets. According to Betanzo, the samples should be taken from water that has been sitting in the pipeline.
“New requirements that are supposed to, if we’re lucky, come into effect in 2027, will require them to sample the fifth liter out of the tap, which is more likely to be sitting in the lead line,” Betanzo said. “So, there are many reasons to believe that the lead data we have right now is an underestimate of the lead that’s potentially in Syracuse water.”
Two city workers were placed on administrative leave in October, as an investigation showed the two workers incorrectly sampling from homes. Instead of taking from indoor faucets, the employees took samples from exterior hose spouts.
Virginia Tech University engineering professor Marc Edwards told Engineering News Report that outdoor faucets often contain higher levels of lead. “It could definitely cause a false alarm,” he said.
The overall anguish towards the crisis is a combination of both the overall poor test levels in the housing stock and also in the Syracuse City Schools. Original testing in 2023 showed one of the district’s elementary schools with extremely elevated levels of lead, exceeding the local level of 5 parts per billion. Delaware Primary School, one of the elementary schools in the district, had one sink that exceeded the legal limit by 420 times.
Dr. Robert DeFlorio, the chief operations officer for Syracuse City School District, is at the forefront of handling the lead crisis within the school.
“We don’t want any lead in the water,” said DiFlorio. “We are required to reduce it to under 5 parts per billion, lower than the Environmental Protection Agency’s 15 parts per billion.”
He also identified three ways in which the district remediates the fixtures that test above the threshold, which he described as “removing the fixtures completely, installing lead filters, or doing a combination of both by replacing the fixture and adding a lead filter.”
That sink in Delaware Primary School was removed following the high levels.
Letters from citizens published on platforms like Syracuse.com have been highly critical of DiFlorio’s response to the lead testing.
“It is a communication problem; our schools are not where these children are being poisoned from,” said DiFlorio. The administrator described his own initiative he undertook to support the district, which involved blood testing all of the district’s preschool students. Out of the 400 students tested, only three came back with elevated blood levels. When a student with higher levels is identified, a third party will check the home that the student lives in to identify potential sources of lead exposure.
DiFlorio also further elaborated that the lead the children are being exposed to is not from the schools. Syracuse water comes from Skaneateles Lake, which has been shown not to contain lead.
To further address the crisis, Syracuse City School District has received donations of 30 bottle fillers, and they intend to purchase 160 more, which will be installed over the coming summer.
“We are telling the public the truth; we aren’t hiding the truth,” said DiFlorio. “We live here, these are our kids, these are the children we put to bed at night.”
Betanzo recommends a “filter first” approach, which she helped design for implementation in Flint, Michigan, during the water crisis.
“We know school plumbing is old, and when you sample, you’re going to find it,” said Betanzo. Part of the initiative in Flint requires that all water bottle filling stations in schools have certified lead-reducing filters. A cost analysis performed by Betanzo and other officials found that it is “more cost effective to filter first, than it is to sample and chase lead around schools.”
“You get the public health benefits and the safety of your children,” Betanzo said. “It’s a win-win.”
Many parents of children attending the schools have made public cries for action, turning their heartache and pain into motivation for change. Advocates of Families for Lead Freedom Now Oceanna Fair and Ellen Morrissey both have young family members who tested for elevated lead levels. The experience has prompted them to lead their respective South Branch and East Branch branches of the organization. Fair provided testimony in a New York State Senate Public Hearing on Childhood Lead Poisoning in November of 2021, the first hearing of its kind since 1994.
Fair’s brother was poisoned at the age of two in 1982, and now requires assistance with “cooking, bathing, and daily activities,” she told members of the public hearing. Fair’s brother is not the only family member who has been affected by lead poisoning, as her granddaughter was poisoned in her home.
“We know childhood lead poisoning disproportionately harms families of color; however, our voices are disproportionately absent from the discussion and design of policy responses,” said Fair. Later in her testimony, Fair calls for immediate change made by policy leaders while condemning the actions of landlords and sellers for neglecting to make lead hazards known to tenants.
Alex Lawson also further commented on the actions of landlords, describing that “they are still raking in rent, but no one has the guts to say it is uninhabitable. They don’t want to make people homeless.”
There are not enough resources in the city to help those affected by lead poisoning move them into safer homes, a time when the anti-homeless strategy has been called “slum lordship.” Despite attempts from groups like Home HeadQuarters to remediate homes for temporary housing, the scale of the problem is not enough.
“The smartest decisions for public health and eliminating environmental dangers,” Darlene Medley wrote, “are made by listening to and including those who deal with the consequences every day.”