A Neglected History In Los Angeles: The Environmental Crisis of Lead-Based Paint Degradation

INTRODUCTION

Ever walk around the residential streets of urban Los Angeles and paid attention to the homes around the area? You probably have or maybe not, but if you haven’t let me try to paint the picture for you. Urban LA consists of small and tight spaced homes with palm trees decorating them in the background because the building aren’t too big. There’s a liquor store on too many corners of its streets and if you were to walk around you would see kids playing outside their homes. South LA only has one acre of grassland per every thousand homes in the areas unlike other parts where its seventy acres.1 After noticing the kids playing the next thing that will catch your attention is the chipped paint and paint-less spots all over the homes. Most of these homes in South LA are old and deteriorating, some of them might even look like they could be abandoned because landlords don’t maintain them properly. I mean it’s just old degrading paint and some rusty gates what harm can it cause. Truth is, too much harm has been caused by the lead based paint degradation to the point in which it puts the lives of children at risk.2 This environmental crisis has been such a problem to the LA population that 20 years ago Los Angeles and many other cities in California filed a lawsuit against Sherwin Williams and other paint companies. These cities argued that they consciously advertised lead based paint in the 1920s even when they knew about its health hazards.3 Degradation of lead based paint has caused severe consequences on children who were raised in LA for the past half century creating an environmental issue which the public is still dealing with now and has not been resolved.

Picture of a house with paint degradation

PI THE PROCESS

When I began the process for this project I chose to write about lead poisoning in general but in the process of ten weeks I managed to gather fourteen sources. While researching about this specific environmental issue I learned that it was part of a bigger problem of contamination. Before gathering fourteen sources, I began to thin I might have bit off a little more than I could chew. Therefore, it’s important to highlight that the amount of information pertaining to the issue of paint degradation in Los Angeles is very disappointing. It’s disappointing considering that most of the house built in South LA have been painted with lead based paint from the early to mid 20th c. When I finally chose to make this my research project I made the decision because I casually stumbled upon an article that informed us about the settlement between California cities and paint companies. As I continued, I found the Sherwin William Petition For Writ of Certiorari a good primary source that explained why Los Angeles had filed a lawsuit against Sherwin-Williams and other companies twenty years ago. Another source that helped me understand the progress being made against lead based degradation was the Legislative History of Lead Based Paint because it worked as a timeline and taught me that the first national legislation didn’t happen until 1971.4 In the process of looking for visual sources I found some books that talked about the history of lead based paint degradation being a problem but most of that information was about the eastern side of the U.S. Until I found the Potential for Atmospheric-Driven Lead Paint Degradation in the South Coast Air Basin of California by Alexander Cohan who described potential threat of this environmental issue in detailed numbers.

Baby Surrounded By Chipped Paint

HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

Although the history of lead poisoning in children via paint degradation is arguably most recent in California than the rest of the country, there isn’t really anything that points to the first case in this region. The history of lead-based paint degradation roughly begins in the early 20th c. when a five year old kid is taken to the hospital and is diagnosed with lead poisoning but as soon as he was treated he was sent back home. The kid was fine for a while until he was taken back to the hospital showing the same exact symptoms as the first time with the same illness as well. After a while the doctors finally found out where the lead was coming from but, they only found out because the child was reported dead after ingesting lead based paint. Not long after, many cases of childhood lead poisoning began to be reported and the number one cause was leaded paint as reported in 1926.5 This same year the Dutch Boys company got witty and even advertised their paint on children’s books which was a common thing back in the early 20th c. The next two decades would be detrimental as the 30’s and 40’s became a period of time in which many doctors tried to understand lead poisoning. During and after WWII doctors conducted studies on children regarding the possibility that lead poisoning could cause a lot of damage to the brain. Consequently, by the 50’s and 60’s it was widely known that lead was indeed poisoning children across the nation and it was becoming an environmental crisis.6 By this time Baltimore was leading the fight against lead poisoning not only due to paint degradation but, as an industrial threat to its communities and many other cities in the East joined Baltimore.

(Click on me) Paint Ad from early 20th c.

Dutch Boy Book Cover

We know that at least 25 million homes out of 38 million built before the 1960’s from coast to coast suffer lead-based paint hazards.7 Which makes sense as to why communities and environmentalists in the east coast had been fighting for years against lead poisoning and the industries that perpetuated this poisoning. However, Los Angeles was barely going to begin its battle. Luckily just as I have, they knew how to stand up to industries, paint companies, and government officials by learning from the cities in the east coast. Therefore, when people began to realize that paint degradation wasn’t the only thing poisoning the community with lead. Communities learned that they were chosen by factories and policies like redlining to become the victims of environmental racism. Although this is a great topic, most of the policies and racist decisions that caused the scandal with Exide and housing disparities between white people and people of color are the same reasons that paint degradation became an issue. Which is why my focus is on the specific actions that tried to remediate paint degradation. It wasn’t until people and other organizations in LA saw the bigger picture, that lead poisoning via paint degradation became a civil rights concern and it was addressed in the Clean Air Act.8 What happened here was that leading activist groups conflated paint degradation with the rest of the environmental concerns among the residents of Los Angeles. It seems like it was the best idea considering that between the mid 60s and more recent decades the US was going through many legal changes so activists took this a moment to address all related issues under cohesive demand.

A Kid Living In A Paint Degrading Home

In the latter half of the 1900s, lead contamination was an issue that affected everyone but it was more correlated to factories and leaded gas before residential attention was gained. And even when it did get attention at the beginning, there was those who argued that paint degradation was not really a threat to anyone. There’s something to unpack here because there might be some correlation between the lack of information regarding the work done between the 1950s and 1970s in Los Angeles to alleviate the growing problems of paint degradation. When we consider that most homes in LA were built before the first legislation in 1971 which acknowledged based paint degradation as its primary hazard being chipped paint then they would have to agree that it was a major threat to residential life. This is just theoretical, but there is a possibility that information coming out at the time of combating paint degradation, could’ve been swept under the mat. It’s not too much of a long shot when we know that this has happened in other situations and it probably happened here again because officials and paint companies didn’t want to deal with the expensive and time consuming project to remediate this problem. To show the size of the problem refer the picture below taken from the EPA ejscreen which gives us an idea of the amount of houses built before 1960. The Potential for Atmospheric-Driven Lead Paint Degradation in the South Coast Air Basin of California by Alexander J. Cohan and colleagues at the University of California Irvine engages in the potential threat of paint degradation by using “photochemical air quality modeling” in the last three decades of the 20th c. Even when the use of lead based paint was coming to its end between 1973 when the federally allowed amount of lead in paint dropped to 0.06 % before being banned in 1978 for residential use.9 If you take into account that 3,400,000,000,000 grams of lead have been used on homes in the form of paint at least half of these homes were built in urban cities.10 Then Cohan and colleagues suddenly become more reliable when they tell us that Ozone and Nitrogen dioxide degrade lead based paint at an accelerated pace causing a contamination to be released into the environment and consequently affecting LA and OC the most.11 We already know that NO2 and O3 have been a long time threat to the general public and in the mid 1900s LA was a city who personally experienced what is known as the smog attack created by the smog contamination deriving from the use gasoline for cars among other things. At a time when many children were being lead poisoned but, it wasn’t 100% clear that paint degradation was the cause of their poisoning. However, with more recent studies and correlations like the ones mentioned above we realize that paint degradation has been a silent killer for the past century and has mainly affected the lives of children either by causing their deaths or neurological damage.

(Click on me)

Visual Representation of Home Built Before the 60's

IMAGE ANALYSIS

These images provided are meant to expose the situation in a visual manner to those who didn’t know about the environmental concerns that lead-based paint degradation pose on urban areas. The picture of the chipped house is purposely placed as the first image to really convey the fact that many homes just like this one exist in our current time. And it pertains to the specific issue that houses like these were built and painted with leaded paint and have threaten the lives of urban residents. Portraying the indoors environment that children lived in between the 1960’s to our present day is really important and this is why the second picture is relevant to the topic. It really digs into the fact that paint degradation was a daily factor in children’s lives so much as to making their home an unsafe place. Paint ads became part of this project after I learned about settlement between California and paint companies for advertising hazardous leaded paint. So I added the Shewin Williams ad to show how ads contributed to century long crisis. The Dutch Boy’s book cover became detrimental to portray what was previously said because not only does it promote the use of leaded paint but, it also promotes the paint as a safe use around children which was the complete opposite. I added one more picture portraying how society didn’t pay attention to the underlying issue of degrading paint as the kid contagiously smiles without knowing that the wall next to bed was deadly. The last image relates to the topic because with the help EPA and its data, it creates a map that works as a lead paint indicator and the amount of houses built before 1960 which would most likely contain leaded paint.

CONCLUSION

Throughout my research process, I wanted the reader to take this information and be conscious about the hazardous contamination that threats the daily life of people in urban cities like South LA. The course asked to view a environmental event through a historical lens and not only is it historical because lead poisoning by means paint degradation has been a continuing issue since before the first half of the 1900s. Pertaining to California, I chose to focus on its paint degradation effects and legislative progress made to fix this environmental crisis because at least in LA it has heavily and predominantly hurt poor people of color.12 In 1989 Dr. Papanek stated that progress was being made in regards to containing lead poisoning and that almost all of adult poisoning happened at the workplace but there was still some concern over other forms of lead poisoning like leaded paint.13 This shows the significance of this project, because even 30 years ago people still didn’t see the full on threat of lead-based paint degradation. Today there is still a lot of work to do because even though lead based paint is banned for use, nothing really states that lead-based painted building are not allowed. Now that I’m at the end of the project I think the importance relies on researching more and really dig into the history of paint degradation. So readers should take away that a lot of the information that could help us understand what was done in the previous decades to stop the lead poisoning via paint degradation is still uncovered. And that this is only the beginning as we acknowledge that the actions of society half a century ago are just now going to be understood. I hope that more people are inspired to do some research which I’m sure that as time goes on and resources are provided we can really illustrate the history about this environmental that has caused so much death and neurological damage.