07/22/03

Regina McEnery
Plain Dealer Reporter
 

At 3:17 p.m., a train barrels past tiny Easton Park in Cleveland's Kinsman neighborhood and whistles. It's the second freight in the last 15 minutes -- one of 20 that day -- but the children shooting basketballs and dangling from blue and green swings ignore it.

Trains are part of their daily white noise, as commonplace as the rumble of 18-wheelers and the chirping of birds.

Nearly a century ago, Kinsman was an industrial hub, a company town where people walked to work from wood-frame houses to the east and north.

Lead smelters, paint companies, chemical plants and dozens of smaller manufacturers surrounded one of the busiest rail lines in the city.

The freight trains still pass by, but factories that once employed thousands of workers have gone away, leaving behind a sprawling wasteland of illegal dumps, fire-ravaged buildings and crumbling foundations.

The rise and fall of this enclave, which is now choking from poverty, has had a profound effect on the health and safety of children.

Homes bleed coats of lead-based paint that poor families can't afford to fix, while toxic mold lurks in damp basements and around leaky kitchen and bathroom pipes. Children live in homes with loose or missing windows and broken smoke detectors.

You can find the legacy of industrial failure throughout Ohio. But the blight in Kinsman, where more than half of the children live in poverty, is gut-wrenching.

About 2,400 children are growing up within a mile and a half of a desolate stretch of industrial Cleveland known as the Forgotten Triangle. The wasteland straddles Kinsman Road and Union Avenue and adjoins the 44-year-old Garden Valley Estates public-housing project.

Children walk their dogs on the fringes of shattered factories, play baseball next to a former dump, sink their hands into soil contaminated by lead paint and ride their bikes across busy railroad crossings.

They go to sleep in homes with peeling paint, broken windows, cockroaches and rodents.

More than half of the children in this neighborhood live in poor housing, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of 2000 census data on household income, age and value of homes, and rental status. On some streets, the number is as high as 85 percent.

The age and condition of a home can lead to asthma attacks, lead poisoning and injury or accidental death in the home, health and environmental experts agree.

The Plain Dealer analysis also found that:

A square-mile section of Kinsman, defined by the census as a neighborhood block, contains nine known or suspected hazardous waste sites -- more than any other census block in Ohio.

More than half the hazardous waste sites were abandoned by the 1980s and early 1990s after years of illegal storage or dumping of hazardous materials, including lead and lead byproducts.

"Parents should be concerned about living next to any known or suspected hazardous waste site," said Rod Beals, a manager with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency's Twinsburg office. "If a company goes out of business, and there is no longer any industrial activity, there is a chance of children trespassing on old abandoned sites where waste or contamination exist."

The same square-mile section of Kinsman has reported 34 building fires since 1999, more than any other block in the city. Some were in decaying industrial sites and warehouses littered with flammable material.

But more than half of the fires were in homes where children were playing with matches, electrical wiring failed, space heaters ignited or someone committed arson. Fifty-two percent of the residential fires broke out in buildings with missing or nonworking smoke detectors, a violation of city code. One two-family house fire left 11 children homeless.

Ninety cases of childhood lead poisoning were reported in Kinsman in 2000, yet the city health department that year inspected only two homes in the neighborhood. Kinsman is not unusual. The city inspects only about 10 percent of the homes where children develop lead poisoning, according to city and state records.

Asthma rates in Kinsman were fourth highest among participants in a citywide program run by Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital. The data from February 2003 reflect only a small percentage of the children with asthma in Kinsman and the rest of Cleveland, where disease triggers -- such as rodent and cockroach droppings, mold and space heaters -- are more prevalent than in the suburbs.

Families complain that trucks cut through residential streets, spewing diesel fumes that aggravate their children's asthma. They say the midnight dumping of garbage attracts rats. And they say cockroaches infest some units of the Garden Valley Estates public-housing complex, where exterminators spray every other month.

Though genes play a key role in developing asthma, insects, dust mites and rodents aggravate this chronic condition. Since 1996, asthma has killed 28 children in Ohio, according to state health records; six of them lived in Cleveland. One of them was 14-year-old Shania Stevens of Kinsman.

Shirrea Stevens, 23, watched her sister Shania die while they lived in Garden Valley. Shania's lungs often rebelled against pollen, tobacco smoke, insects, pet dander and dust. Her mother took a class to help

Shania better manage her daily medications. She also stopped smoking around her daughter, but nothing seemed to help.

In February 1998, Shania collapsed at home and died the next day at St. Michael Hospital, on her father's birthday. Shortly after, the family moved out of their unit on the project's fringes.

"She had asthma since she was born," said Shania's mother, Janice Stevens. "We tried to keep our house asthma-proof, but there is only so much you can do.

"Despite the blight, City Council President Frank Jackson, who represents Kinsman, said the neighborhood actually had improved in recent years. He bristled as he recalled how illegal dumps used to stretch higher than houses.

And he pointed out that Hemisphere Development, a Beachwood company that specializes in redeveloping brownfields, is building a $25 million industrial park in the neighborhood.

Indeed, parents in Kinsman hope for a better life for their children. They turn vacant lots into vegetable gardens or use them to store firewood. Their flower boxes bloom with impatiens and geraniums. They try to rid their streets of litter and unwanted visitors.

"See that house across the street?" factory worker Sheryl Anderson said, pointing to an abandoned duplex on Fuller Street. "They had to board it up and remove the front steps because crack addicts were hanging there."

Three homes on Anderson's tiny street were destroyed in fires last year. The skeletons of two still stand; the third has given way to yet another vacant lot.

Two doors from that lot, though, is a duplex sided and refurbished seven years ago with money from a U.S. Housing and Urban Development lead abatement grant. The house was upgraded after lead was removed. The federal government typically fixes up homes when a child is found with lead poisoning.

But the system doesn't always react this well. When Anderson's 8-year-old son tested positive for lead several years ago, the city didn't even inspect the house. The reason? Cleveland lost two of its five full-time inspectors after federal grants dried up.

With more work than it can reasonably handle, the city rations inspections based on the age of the child and the severity of the poisoning.

Though Anderson's son had a lead level above standards set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it wasn't considered high enough to trigger intervention even though studies show that low levels of lead can drop a child's IQ several points.

More than 10 years ago, former Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White declared war on lead poisoning; Jane Campbell, his successor, did the same two years ago when she took office. Last month, she said the city needed to stop using children as lead detectors for contaminated houses.

She has also tried to combat asthma. In April, she appeared alongside U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman to unveil a secondhand-smoke campaign aimed at mothers.

But while city leaders have promised to improve housing and environmental conditions, lack of money often prevents poor cities like Cleveland from delivering on the promises.

Clearing lead totally from homes is expensive -- an average of $15,000 per home to remove the lead safely and repaint. Since 1995, HUD has funneled $9.7 million to Cleveland, barely enough to clear lead from 693 housing units -- about 20 percent of city homes known to be contaminated.

Cleveland, like most cities in Ohio, also does not require that day-care centers be screened for lead or pests before opening for business.

Child care providers based in homes with peeling paint, loose windows and inadequate heating systems can also threaten children's health.

Local agencies are trying to reduce some of the most common housing-related asthma and lead triggers -- toxic mold, lead paint, lead dust, cockroach infestation, combustible appliances -- with a variety of methods, including lawsuits against landlords, lead abatement and screenings of homes and children.

But Jackson, pediatric lead experts and environmentalists want more help from the industries whose products contributed to the environmental mess.

These were industries that flourished a century ago, with powerhouses running prosperous factories in Kinsman. But the gradual decline of Cleveland's oil and steel industries after World War II was a blow to related chemical industries.

High labor costs and foreign competition drove away some jobs. Expensive upgrades to water and sewer plants, along with the cleanup of contaminated waterways and land, also hurt the bottom line of local industries.

Almost overnight, some of Cleveland's factories became abandoned, polluted properties. The sites were so contaminated and so difficult for trucks to reach that they did not seem worth the cost of redevelopment, according to The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

Jackson believes the industries shouldn't be allowed to walk away.

"They should pay whatever it takes to allow that child to have the same quality of life that they would have for their children," he said. "That is what they should do."

While abandoned factories litter Kinsman's landscape, many homes still contain lead-based paint produced in the early 1900s by, among others, Cleveland-based Sherwin-Williams Co. and Benjamin Moore. Lead-based paint was banned in 1978.

Sherwin-Williams plans to start a program this year selling discounted paint to help cities maintain their oldest homes in a lead-safe manner. The company said Detroit is one of the half-dozen cities on its list, but the company won't disclose the names of the others until it launches the project.

Sherwin-Williams, along with Benjamin Moore, also helps pay for projects that teach residents how to reduce lead hazards in their homes by, for example, washing floors and cleaning lead dust with special vacuums. The projects are in nine communities, though Cleveland is not one of them.

But critics say the companies' efforts are not nearly enough.

"It's cleaning up the lead dust, which is important, but the evidence is that if you don't address the source, then recontamination will occur," said Stuart Greenberg, executive director of Environmental Health Watch in Cleveland, an agency that tries to reduce lead poisoning and asthma.

Sherwin-Williams insists it has tried to combat lead poisoning.

"We have supported federal, state and local initiatives which would encourage property owners to maintain their properties in a lead-safe manner," said company spokesman Conway Ivy.

As for soil and groundwater in Kinsman, many factory owners responsible for polluting them when environmental laws were lax or nonexistent have abandoned their plants. Environmental regulators do not believe the contamination is a health threat today, in large part because the city does not depend on wells for its drinking water.

But few industrial developers are willing to reclaim these sites because the liability and cleanup costs are too great. So residents like Kenya Mitchell are left to wonder what future their children face.

On an unusually warm spring afternoon, the 29-year-old store clerk rattled off the mounting problems in the fading yellow-shingled house her grandparents bought in the 1960s and where she now raises her four children: bad plumbing, broken windows, peeling paint. Two of her children wheeze from asthma.

As she fired up the grill and began coating chicken and steaks with barbecue sauce, she was distracted by a neighbor's young son standing on the edge of an abandoned property littered with broken glass. Mitchell ordered him home, then returned her gaze to the grill.

"I'm thinking of filing for bankruptcy," she said. "I can't afford to fix my home up."

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Thomas Gaumer, computer-assisted reporting editor, contributed to this story.

Contact Regina McEnery at:

children@plaind.com, 216-999-3505