Thursday, 18 February 2021_The toxic pollution of the public housing developments in the United States has raised concerns about the health of the citizens who are living in the subsidized apartments.
A federal watchdog group says the negligence of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) towards enforcing its own environmental standards has resulted in lead and arsenic contamination of residents in an East Chicago housing complex with mostly Black and Hispanic residents.
The tenants of the West Calumet Housing Complex had continued to live in unsafe conditions for decades and lack of adequate oversight by the officials of HUD led to the poisoning of children, according to a report by the Office of Inspector General of HUD, obtained by The Washington Post.
The complex, which was built in the early 1970s on the top of a former lead smelting plant, was demolished in 2019 after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that the lead concentration in the region’s soil is 237 times more than normal level.
The HUD and other agencies are still neglecting to alert the residents and improve the hazardous environmental conditions of other similar complexes, the report added.
In response, the HUD claimed that the organization is actively working with the EPA to identify sites with the greatest risk of human exposure to toxins.
“HUD takes its oversight of environmental review seriously, especially when there is a potential risk to residents. The ‘one mile radius’ standard discussed in [the inspector general] report was an initial screening method and does not mean there is a current hazard to residents,” HUD spokeswoman Meaghan Lynch said in a statement. “HUD will continue its work with EPA to improve information sharing and to jointly evaluate the proximity of other HUD-assisted housing to contaminated sites, and will publicly release its analysis this year.”
The federal law of the United States clearly states that housing must be safe and free of toxic materials and radioactive substances.
It also obliges the HUD authorities to pay special attention to the housing sites that are located near dumps, landfills and industrial complexes that might contain hazardous waste.
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