The hidden poisoning of poor children at an L.A. housing complex

Her family — her husband and three children ages 13, seven, and two — had been living in incredibly cramped quarters, sharing one bedroom of a two-bedroom house and subletting the other to another family just so they could afford their rent.

That all changed when they got to the Jordan Downs public housing complex about two years ago. They moved into a unit that allowed each of her children to have a bedroom of their own. “When we moved here, we were really excited, because we can afford to live here with our whole family and have that whole space,” she said, speaking in Spanish through a translator.

That feeling of freedom and space has shrunk considerably since then, however.

Within a few months of moving in, Perez started hearing about health concerns from her neighbors, particularly about toxins like lead and arsenic. She didn’t get too concerned at first. But she started to get worried when the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), which owns and operates Jordan Downs, changed its messaging from saying the area was free of health risks to telling residents not to worry about carcinogens. “I knew something was different if now they were changing the message and talking about contamination,” she noted.

The Perez family lives steps away from the site of an old steel mill — the site is just outside their front door. While she hasn’t had her own yard — or her children’s blood — tested, she said some of her neighbors have found high levels of lead in their yards.

Perez has become so afraid of the health impacts on her children that she hasn’t let them play in the yard for almost a year. “They used to be able to go outside all the time,” she said. “But now they’ve stopped asking, because they know it’s dangerous.”

No one told her about the contamination before she moved her family to Jordan Downs. If they had, she might have done things differently. “I wish I would have been informed, because we would have made a different decision,” she said. “But they didn’t tell us anything about what was going on.”

She’s not the only one who’s worried. Health and environmental safety at Jordan Downs have been thrust to the forefront as HACLA has moved ahead with an ambitious billion-dollar project to demolish and rebuild all of the buildings in the complex, a project that includes new construction on a lot of land the housing authority recently purchased. That land is the former site of a steel factory and then a truck repair shop, and the soil is tainted with toxins including lead, arsenic, and cadmium.

And yet there is no plan to clean up environmental toxins at the residential site or to protect residents who live steps away from the construction sites and who might be at risk.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *