By Jeff Stier, Esq.
Posted: Tuesday, June 8, 2004

EDITORIAL
Publication Date: June 8, 2004

June 8, 2004 — A broad range of groups, from landlords to the non-profit Community Preservation Corp., went to court last week to stop the city's new lead-paint law.

Here's hoping Judge Louis York grants the injunction before the law goes into effect Aug. 2 — because the law would make it harder for all New Yorkers to get housing.

It's already deterring investment in affordable housing, a reality that will leave more of New York's 40,000-plus homeless in shelters.

Why would the City Council pass a law to increase homelessness?

The plaintiffs argue that the council failed to properly evaluate the law's effects on the housing market.  It's also plain that the strict new measures aren't warranted by the medical facts about lead poisoning.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, the city health commissioner, is perfectly willing to back tough measures if he believes they're justified — as with the city's new smoking ban.  But he told the City Council more than two years ago that the lead law "in my scientific opinion, will decrease the effectiveness of the city's lead-poisoning-prevention efforts."

For too long, politicians, plaintiffs lawyers and activists have been getting away with frightening us about hyped-up health threats — including exposure to trace levels of substances like lead.

It plays well for politicians to go on the evening news and tell us, as then-mayoral candidate Mark Green did in 1999, that 30,000 city children have lead poisoning and that those numbers represent a health crisis that only the politicians can resolve.  But we don't have anything like that many cases of lead poisoning.

The reality is that while kids' exposure to lead at high doses can lead to serious health problems, the number of new cases of New York children with elevated levels of lead has fallen 77% from 1995 to 2002.

As for potentially dangerous lead poisoning, the 2002 data show 628 children with blood levels greater than or equal to the Environmental Intervention Blood Level, compared to 1,709 children in 1995 — a 63% drop.  The few real problems that do need our attention exist in specific locales, not citywide.

The City Council ignored solid medical fact in buying the activists' claim that there is "no safe lead level" of exposure to lead, so that "zero" is the only acceptable level.  This is an impossible standard to attain in the real world, and a foolish one to attempt.

The city has made the health gains cited above by holding to a tough "lead-safe" standard.  There are no health benefits to be gained by changing that goal to "lead-free."

But the law already promises to have a devastating effect on redevelopment plans.  The New York Times, no friend of developers, reported last month that the law "has caused nonprofit groups and private developers to shelve plans to redevelop buildings for low- and moderate-income tenants."

Federal assisted-housing money is going unspent because major developers won't bid on the projects — because the new law guarantees they'd show a loss on the deal, because it's driven insurance costs through their roof.

The problem is that the law requires an owner to disprove that his building was responsible for elevated levels of lead in a child's blood.

That's an impossible burden — so insurance companies raised their rates to cover the inevitable lawsuit losses.

Who's behind this bizarre proof requirement?  Activists, loosely allied with plaintiff's lawyers — lawyers who can expect to do a tidy business in can't-lose lawsuits as a result.

In other words, while others go homeless because of it, the special interests who wrote the law will be raking in cash.  The activists who provided cover for this shameless scam claim to be working in the public interest.  Isn't it time we held them accountable for doing the exact opposite?

Jeff Stier is associate director of the American Council on Science and Health.  See ACSH's report on real and imagined lead risks.

This piece originally appeared in the New York Post:
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/25329.htm

For more "Isn't it time we held them accountable?" articles, please see:

http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.322/news_detail.asp
http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.368/news_detail.asp
http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.369/news_detail.asp