Overlapping federal, state and city rules taking effect in coming months will leave few Maryland rental properties untouched, as regulators enlist the help of tenants and their doctors in identifying scofflaw property owners.
But a continuing trend of foot-dragging by many landlords is worrying health officials and raising the possibility of numerous prosecutions in the coming year.
“We’re talking about fines of $17,000 or more, per house,” said John Verrico, spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment, the state’s leading enforcement agency for the new regulations. “Landlords should know by now that if you’re not in compliance and we find you, you’re going to get hammered.”
The environmental agency has been much criticized in the past year for failing to impose meaningful fines under the state’s lead paint control law – House Bill 760 – and for tolerating widespread violations in Baltimore’s rental housing market.
The law took effect in 1996, directing landlords to register their properties immediately. But they were given five years to make necessary repairs. The deadline for compliance arrives in February.
It requires landlords to fix crumbling paint on windows, doors and walls to prevent brain-damaging lead dust from poisoning their tenants’ children. But officials acknowledge – with four months to go until the deadline – that less than 40 percent of landlords have even satisfied the basic registration rule.
No one knows how many substandard units have yet to be repaired. But the number is believed to be in the tens of thousands statewide, with the majority in Baltimore, where about half the population lives in rental housing.
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The city’s sprawling slums rank among the most toxic in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, poisoning children at 15 times the national average. Once consumed, lead paint dust is known to cause permanent learning disorders, hyperactivity and aggressive behavior.
Articles in The Sun this year have documented a growing body of evidence that suggests the toxin might be a factor in the city’s poorly performing schools and persistent violent crime.
An average of more than 1,200 predominantly African-American children have been poisoned in Baltimore every year for over a decade. Most are from low-income families trapped in rundown rental housing in the city’s east- and west-side ghettos.
But advocates note that poisoning rates in Dorchester, Somerset and Wicomico counties also are well above the national average. And local hospitals report that scores of middle-class white children continue to be poisoned every year by lead dust from improper home renovations.
Lead paint was banned in Baltimore in 1951 and nationwide in 1978. But more than 500,000 Maryland dwellings were built before the prohibitions. When poorly maintained, they shed the toxin in the form of chips and fine-grained dust that are easily consumed or breathed by crawling babies and pregnant women.
Rick Collins, who oversees the state’s lead enforcement effort, said the Department of the Environment has significantly improved its ability to both identify and prosecute neglectful landlords in the past year.
Not only has the agency doubled the number of lead inspectors to 10, it has also hired two full-time prosecutors to handle an expected surge in cases. Over the past month, the agency has sent out 23,000 warning letters to property owners known to be renting their houses or apartments.
“This is the shot across their bow,” Collins said. “What they’re going to see soon is a highly coordinated enforcement effort by the city, the state and the federal government against this problem.”
Collins said the agency has signed a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Baltimore Health Department to share data on repeat offenders and shadow operators who use layers of shell corporations to escape liability for their slum rental properties.
Democratic Del. Samuel I. Rosenberg of Baltimore added that the first installment of a planned $50 million aid package authorized by Gov. Parris N. Glendening earlier this year will also become available in coming months.
“None of this money has even been put into effect yet,” said Rosenberg, who has been fighting for tougher lead paint regulations for more than a decade. “When it does, there’s going to be real pressure to make sure it makes a difference.”
Trying to comply
Meanwhile, there is evidence the warnings might be working.
Tim Connor, vice president of Connor Environmental and Engineering Assessments Inc., one of Baltimore’s largest lead paint testing companies, said the bulk of his clients are apartment building owners – and most are in full compliance.
“It’s the smaller owners, and the guys who have marginal inventories, who are having trouble right now,” he said. “Unfortunately, the state has not enforced the law very well, and now it’s sending out these confusing letters demanding full compliance in the next four months.”
Shannon Cavaliere of ARC Environmental Inc., another major lead paint testing company, agreed.
“People are in a panic, especially the smaller landlords,” he said. “We’re getting a ton of inquiries and appointments as a direct result of the letters the Department of the Environment is sending out. I don’t have any hard numbers I can give you, but our secretary would tell you the phone is ringing off the hook.”
Landlords seeking to bring their properties into compliance with the rules have sparked a 138 percent increase in the number of lead paint dust tests analyzed by the state’s largest privately owned lab.
“There’s no question that the numbers are up significantly in Maryland – way up,” said Jim Bland, president of METS Laboratories in Waldorf, which processes more than 10,000 test kits monthly from around the nation.
“We have seen increases every month for the past five months … and most of it has been from the Maryland ZIP codes. Nationally, the numbers are up by about 20 percent. In Maryland, it’s seven times that number.”
Bland added that it’s not just landlords who are worried.
“The stories in the newspaper have definitely had a huge impact,” he said. “We’re getting more calls than ever before from parents wanting to have their own houses checked.”
“We’re also seeing significant increases in the numbers of prospective home buyers having them done as part of their routine prepurchase inspections.”
Earlier initiatives
Backed by the threat of an unprecedented enforcement campaign expected to take hold in the first quarter of 2001, the new rules are being applauded by children’s advocates and Maryland’s largest property owners association.
But they warn that similar initiatives have failed in the state over the past 60 years – usually through a lack of sustained enforcement and resistance from real estate and landlord groups.
“It’s another year later, and we’re still talking about the lack of compliance among certain landlords who are giving us all a bad name,” said Sam Polakoff, president of the Baltimore Property Owners Association, the state’s largest landlords group. “The time for talking about this is over.”
“The state only needs to get tough on a couple of these guys for everybody else to get the message,” he said, “but the state still hasn’t done that yet.”
Polakoff’s group tempered its historic opposition to lead control laws after winning concessions in House Bill 760 in 1994.
Under regulations that took effect two years later, landlords who comply fully are granted limited immunity from poisoning lawsuits that have cost the rental industry millions over the past two decades. In the event that a child is injured, the law caps payments at $17,500.
But Ruth Ann Norton, director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, notes that the law protects only landlords who are fully registered – and only if they have met the mandatory repair schedules.
For those who haven’t, the law not only requires stiff fines but also creates a presumption of guilt in the event of a lawsuit.
“The bottom line is this: Landlords have had at least four years to come into compliance,” Norton said. “And we’re now four months away from the deadline, and we know that 85 percent of the most severely poisoned children in the city are coming out of rental houses that haven’t even been registered yet, much less repaired. At some point, we’ve got to stop talking about it.
“What good is the law if we don’t enforce it?”
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Among other regulations, the following rules will soon apply:
The agency also recommends that owners of rental houses built before 1960 participate if they want protection from liability.
While not mandatory under the state law, dust testing is widely regarded to be the only the safe test available. Federal regulators and private testing companies say visual inspection is inadequate, if not dangerous.
At present, only 30 percent of the city’s children are tested each year. By requiring the total population to be tested, health inspectors hope to quickly develop a database of potentially dangerous addresses.
The federal repair requirements are similar to Maryland’s House Bill 760, with one important difference: Properties must pass both a visual inspection and a rigorous series of lead dust tests paid for by the agency.
City, state and federal officials interviewed recently say the real force of the new regulations is that they will lead to the creation of computer databases that will enable government agencies to share information on violators, much as police agencies do.
Harder to hide
“It’s not exactly going to be a seamless system,” observed Baltimore Health Commissioner Peter L. Beilenson. “But it will make it a lot harder for the scofflaws to hide. We’ll be able to spot them much more easily, and get after them much more quickly.”
As part of its investigation, The Sun has reported that landlords sometimes use shell corporations to disguise their ownership, including one property owner who set up more than 100 companies implicated in the poisoning of at least 70 children.
Beilenson said the city’s new mandatory blood screening law will help stop such abuses by recording every address where a child is even mildly exposed. At present, that category includes at least 7,000 Baltimore kids every year, according to the U.S. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.
City health inspectors soon will be routinely reporting their addresses to the state, triggering a registration check.
Automatic violation
“We don’t need to wait for a child to be poisoned before we take action,” said Collins of the Department of the Environment. “Under our law, you’re automatically in violation if you’re not registered.”
Likewise, it is a violation to rent a house without providing an inspection certificate. Regulators expect that as tenants become aware of the law, they will report landlords who offer undocumented units.
Ultimately, officials hope, scofflaws will be driven from the market.
“There’s going to be a lot of complaining in the months ahead when landlords start getting bitten in their bottom lines,” said Bill Apgar, HUD’s assistant secretary for housing. “For the guy who’s got a lot of rundown houses he can’t afford to fix – or refuses to fix – well, so be it.
“If he’s forced to take his toxic stock off the market … that’s a good thing for the children of Baltimore.”