Toxic Inaction: Oakland’s Lead Funding Languishes as Residents Live With Serious Health Risks

Millions in settlement funds have remained unspent for years, despite the dire crisis affecting Latino immigrant neighborhoods.

Little Leyla Avelar says she wants to be a vampire for Halloween. Or the Disney Princess Belle. She hasn’t decided just yet. In the meantime, she wears the plastic princess jewelry her grandmother bought her to see if she should settle on Belle. Her mother, 30-year-old Yazmin Alvarez, helps pull Leyla’s hair back with a clip so she can show off her big red earrings. 

Leyla isn’t shy. She talks about how skeletons don’t scare her and how, in fact, she’ll be the one scaring people on Halloween. Alvarez is happy to let Leyla have her fun because the day after Halloween might be tough for her. The four-year-old will be having blood drawn for her first blood lead level test to determine if, or to what extent, the young girl has been exposed to the toxin at home or while in utero. 

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Though Alvarez hopes the levels in her daughter’s body will be low, she expects that Leyla’s results will show at least some amounts of lead in her system—Alvarez said her own blood lead levels were elevated when she was pregnant with her daughter. 

The years leading up to Leyla’s test have been the most challenging of Alvarez’s life. She learned that her kidneys were failing in 2020 at 26 years old. She learned she was pregnant three months into her treatment. Then she learned of her elevated blood lead levels while undergoing her treatment. She still doesn’t know if the lead exposure is related to her kidney failure. 

With back-to-back upheavals in her life, she said, she didn’t have time to process the news of the lead in her bloodstream. Back then, Alvarez said, she didn’t know much about the dangers of lead exposure. “Even now, I’m not too sure exactly what are the repercussions of having lead in your system,” she said. She just knows that it’s bad, she added.

She had to quit her job as a site manager for a construction company and her education at Chabot College to manage her health. She also had to plan for her future child. She had no reason to think lead poisoning should be her top concern. 

After she received her test results, Alvarez was instructed by her doctor to ask her landlord to test for lead in the home she rents with her mother, husband and younger sister. At the time, she was undergoing dialysis three times a week. Overwhelmed by the changes in her life, she never followed up to ensure the testing happened. Four years later, Alvarez still relies on dialysis for survival and is waiting for a kidney donor.

She lives in Bancroft/Havenscourt, an East Oakland neighborhood home to predominantly low-income Latinos and immigrants like Alvarez and her family. The area is a lead hot spot in a city filled with them. Fifty-four children under six years old who lived in Bancroft/Havenscourt had elevated blood lead levels between 2018 and 2022, according to the California Department of Public Health. The neighborhood has older housing, which is at higher risk of containing lead in paint and plumbing.

An estimated 80,000 rental units, about 83% of Oakland’s rental housing, may contain lead because of when the housing was built, as might 12,000 accessory dwelling units, according to a 2024 Housing and Community Development report. Neighborhoods where more people of color live and incomes are lower than average also have more dilapidated housing, increasing the risk of lead exposure. The city of Oakland determined in 2021 that the neighborhood where Alvarez lives is in the top 5% of lead risk state-wide. Another mostly Latino neighborhood, Fruitvale, the report highlights, has more lead-poisoned children than Flint, Michigan.

Alvarez still does not know for certain the source of her lead contamination. Children such as Leyla, who are covered by Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, are required to be tested at ages one and two for lead, but a 2020 state auditor’s report found that only about 27% of the children enrolled in Medi-Cal were screened as required. In Alvarez’s census tract alone, more than 520 screenings for children receiving Medi-Cal were missed between 2013 and 2018. Leyla’s lead test also fell through the cracks in her early years of life, when Alvarez was in and out of the hospital and Alvarez’s mother frequently cared for Leyla. Instead of being tested at age 1 or 2, she’ll be tested at age 4.

“I’m just hoping [my daughter’s test results] are not too high where we can do something about it now,” Alvarez said.

While she hopes for a low lead level result, her home was built in 1910, County Assessor’s Office records show—which increases the likelihood that the home contains lead paint. Alvarez noticed a strange taste to the water a few years ago and doesn’t let her daughter drink it. But they do cook their food with the water. Preliminary at-home tests conducted by El Tímpano indicated lead in water and paint in Alvarez’s home, and El Tímpano is sending samples for evaluation by a certified lab.

"I’m just hoping [my daughter’s test results] are not too high where we can do something about it now."

Yazmin Alvarez

If Leyla’s blood lead levels test high, a remediation process will be triggered. Her pediatrician must notify Alameda County, which runs a team of nurses to provide consultation and identify the source of the lead contamination. But that process, and its funding, is only for children. For Alvarez, whose weakened health leaves her more vulnerable to the effects of lead poisoning, no such resources are available unless the source of her contamination was her workplace. Landlords are required to remediate lead hazards, like chipped or peeling paint—but there is no proactive system to identify lead hazards or code violations. The tenant must complain before a landlord is compelled to take action.

Oakland city officials understand that the city’s residents, especially those who live in low-income communities of color, face a significant risk of lead exposure.

The city’s own Racial Equity Impact Analysis, published in September 2021, confirmed that lead exposure disproportionately affects people who live in Oakland’s predominantly Latino and Black neighborhoods. In fact, all of the predominantly Latino census tracts in Oakland are considered high risk for lead exposure, according to Marybelle Nzegwu Tobias, an attorney and the author of the city analysis.

“They are extremely burdened,” she told the Joint Powers Authority (JPA) Board of Directors, an intergovernmental agency that oversees Alameda County’s lead abatement efforts, on Sept. 8, 2021.

Decades of using lead paint and leaded gasoline, combined with a long history of polluting factories concentrated in Black and Latino neighborhoods, created the toxic contamination. On top of harmful environmental exposures, people who live in these neighborhoods are also more likely to be facing other challenges to their health as a result of disparities in income, language barriers, or lack of access to affordable health care.   

“Within a given family, you might see several things—health conditions happening that you don’t see in other populations or other communities,” said Allison Appleton, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University at Albany College of Integrated Health Sciences, “and it’s because of this clustering of multiple different types of social and environmental exposures in one kind of place in time.”

Darlene Flynn, executive director of Oakland’s Race & Equity Department, said while presenting the Racial Equity Impact Analysis to the JPA in September of 2021 that communities of color are now experiencing the impacts of decades of policies, like redlining, that created and reinforced racial inequality. “We’re now dealing with those outcomes, and that’s why we have to do this intentional equity work in order to address those impacts,” she said.

But despite this knowledge and a fund of millions of dollars allocated to lead abatement, members of the community, officials in Alameda County and even Oakland city council members acknowledge the city has done little to nothing to solve the problem, creating delays that could have a lifelong effect on the thousands of people who live in Oakland’s lead-contaminated neighborhoods.

The delays in progress, an El Tímpano investigation found, have been caused by city government dysfunction. Through a series of public records requests, interviews with Alameda County officials, some members of Oakland City Council and an analysis of public meetings, El Tímpano has found that a pattern of city staff turnover and distrust between city and county officials have led to years of inaction on lead poisoning despite funding that could begin to address the problem. 

Meanwhile, Alvarez’s daughter, Leyla, has lived in a home containing lead for most of her life, preliminary tests suggest. Now in her first year of school, Alvarez is watching her closely for any signs of developmental delays or struggles with learning—symptoms that are often revealed at Leyla’s age and are associated with lead poisoning.

“I noticed that it’s hard for her to concentrate sometimes, like, she moves from task to task, or like, if it doesn’t have her interest, she’ll just, like, wander off,” Alvarez said.

City dysfunction slows urgently needed response

Experts agree that no amount of lead in the system is safe. Lead can be especially harmful for young children, who are likely to ingest the toxin through the dirt they play in, or the toys and other items they put in their mouths. For children, lead exposure can cause severe damage to brain development. In both children and adults, it can also cause kidney and nervous system damage, according to the Mayo Clinic. And during pregnancy, a fetus can very easily absorb lead.

“It might impact the pregnancy in terms of being able to carry to term, miscarriage is higher among lead-exposed and lead-poisoned people during pregnancy,” Appleton said. “Babies can be born early, preterm, and have these kinds of neurodevelopmental problems later on related to their lead exposure.”

In addition to the physical impacts, the financial impact of lead poisoning is steep. Lead poisoning is estimated to cost Oakland residents upwards of $150 million annually between medical costs, long-term disabilities and lost wages, according to Oakland’s Racial Equity Impact Analysis, which referenced a previous report by the city’s Office of Planning, Building and Neighborhood Preservation.

More than five years ago, the city of Oakland and Alameda County were allocated funds to help address the profound economic and health damage linked to lead contamination. 

In 2014, The Sherwin-Williams Company and other paint companies were found liable for selling a product they knew was toxic.  The companies were ordered to pay $1.15 billion in damages to the 10 California cities and counties listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, originally brought in 2000. But after more back-and-forth litigation, the plaintiffs settled for a much lower payout of $305 million. Two jurisdictions, Alameda County and the City of Oakland, were allocated roughly $24 million in combined settlement money. 

In December 2021, after years of negotiation, the city and county agreed on how to split the funds: The city of Oakland received $4.8 million right away, Alameda County was allocated $9.6 million to use for efforts outside of Oakland, and it was decided that Alameda County would hold onto the remaining roughly $9.6 million to be used for the benefit of Oakland residents once the city negotiates a spending plan.

"Babies can be born early, preterm, and have these kinds of neurodevelopmental problems later on related to their lead exposure."

Allison Appleton, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University at Albany College of Integrated Health Sciences

Numerous requests for interviews with Oakland city officials involved in the lead settlement fund went unanswered over several months. In mid-October, Oakland officials responded to some questions via email. Through public records requests, El Tímpano confirmed the funding sent to the city, $4.8 million, had not been spent and had been accruing interest as of mid-August. The fund had grown to around $5.1 million by then. The city of Oakland also received an additional $500,000 from a paint company that settled in 2011, but those funds do not appear in the city’s dedicated account for lead settlement funds.

After several years with the funds in hand, Oakland has officially hired a consultant to analyze local existing lead programs and develop an equitable lead hazard abatement program, according to Citywide Director of Communications & Engagement Sean Maher.

“With this rare opportunity with the Lead Paint settlement resources, the City must thoughtfully design a sustainable program that will support the needs (of) all of the Oaklanders who reside in the highest lead burdened census tracts in the County of Alameda,” Maher wrote in an emailed statement.

The slow process, however, has prolonged a crisis that East Bay officials have long known affects low-income people of color disproportionately. Some members of the City Council told El Tímpano that there has been a lack of transparency and they have had trouble getting answers to questions about where the money has been stored, if it has been spent, or if it is accruing interest. 

Oakland District 5 Councilmember Noel Gallo, who also sits on the JPA Board of Directors, has asked several times at JPA meetings going back years about what has happened to Oakland’s Lead Settlement funds. The city’s governing structure doesn’t allow city council members to interact directly with city staff tasked with developing a plan for the funds.

Turnover and vacancies cause delay

The city of Oakland recently signed a contract with a consultant who will have until mid-2025 to provide recommendations on how to launch an equitable lead hazard abatement program, which would work in tandem with a proactive rental inspection program to put the onus on the city and landlords to address habitability violations. 

The city received $4.8 million of the lead settlement funds in mid-2022 after coming to an agreement with the county on how to split the funds at the end of 2021. The intention was to hire a consultant quickly to develop a plan for the settlement funds dedicated to Oakland residents, according to some involved in the negotiations. 

“When the money was allocated to Oakland … it was of an urgent nature because there were things that had to be addressed urgently. Now that was two-and-half years ago,” said April Williamson, the interim deputy director of Alameda County Healthy Homes Department, which has for the past 34 years been the agency that works to educate the public and remediate childhood lead exposure across the county.

"When the money was allocated to Oakland … it was of an urgent nature because there were things that had to be addressed urgently. Now that was two-and-half years ago."

April Williamson, interim deputy director of Alameda County Healthy Homes Department

However, a year after Alameda County and Oakland officials reached an agreement, the city didn’t have a set timeline to hire a consultant, according to a January 2023 email written by Caleb Smith, a program analyst with Oakland’s Department of Housing and Community Development. 

In January 2024, the city posted a call for consultants. In the summer of this year, the city began formulating a contract with the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, according to internal emails, and the nonprofit will have about a year to analyze existing programs and develop a plan for lead remediation in Oakland.

City officials confirmed that a contract for Green and Healthy Homes Initiative was recently signed.

In June and August, Councilmembers Carroll Fife and Gallo told El Tímpano that they were frustrated with the city’s slow steps toward a plan for lead remediation.

“I don’t need a consultant to tell me how to do (lead abatement) because I have the county that has been doing this for years,” Gallo said in an August interview. “We need to be able to get the job done.”

Internal documents show that the city paused meetings about the initial $4.8 million from the lead settlement in 2022. It did not resume drafting a request for proposal for consultants until mid-2023 because turnover caused “limitations to capacity in key departments,” according to an undated Lead Settlement Fund Working Group brief shared with El Tímpano. Oakland officials confirmed this in an email to El Tímpano Oct. 15, stating that staff was not assigned to create a bid for consultants until 2023.

Oakland’s City Administrator’s Office, Department of Housing and Community Development, Planning and Building Department, and the Race & Equity Department have all been a part of conversations about how the funds should be allocated. However, a plan must ultimately be agreed to by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and Oakland’s City Council. 

El Tímpano found that the city has had five city administrators since paint companies settled in June 2019. Since 2021, two Housing and Community Development directors have come and gone, according to the Lead Settlement Fund Working Group brief.

Nicole Neditch, the Governance & Economy Policy Director of the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, said hiring in the public sector has been challenging for municipalities around the country, including in Oakland. 

Nearly 28% of Housing and Community Development Department and 26% of Planning and Building Department positions were vacant, according to a December 2023 staff report. As of September 2024, a “Lead Paint Program Development” director had not been selected, according to an org chart of Oakland’s City Administrator’s Office.

“It means that people who are working in government are being sort of stretched to fill lots of different positions, because we don’t have as many people within these offices,” Neditch said.

City and county officials wrangle over funds

The relationship between the city and Alameda County has also hampered efforts to remedy Oakland’s decades-long lead problem.

Scheduling challenges and city staff departures slowed initial talks about how to split the funds.  The county and city had different proposals for how much of the funding should be spent in Oakland, which also slowed progress, according to former Alameda County Healthy Homes Director Larry Brooks.

Brooks said that when initially negotiating with the city, he felt the county should have received half of the funds. “But I had to swallow my pride and say, ‘Look, we’ve been negotiating for almost three years, and children are being lead poisoned.'”

With the settlement funds, the county has boosted its existing health services for lead-poisoned children, educated the public and further promoted their lead hazard remediation services outside of Oakland, according to Mariana Real, head of Program Development & Community Engagement at the Alameda County Healthy Homes Department. So far, the county has used $1.5 million of their Alameda County allocation of settlement funds for these services.

"I had to swallow my pride and say, ‘Look, we’ve been negotiating for almost three years, and children are being lead poisoned.’"

Larry Brooks, former Alameda County Healthy Homes Director

Brooks said the county offered to provide enhanced services within Oakland city limits with lead settlement funds allocated to the benefit of Oakland residents. The city has not taken them up on the offer. 

“The response back has been, ‘We’ll get back to you when we have a consultant who could come up with a spending plan,'” Brooks said.

Williamson, who now leads the department, said the county’s decades of experience in lead abatement has also gone untapped.

“I think that taking the information and the experience that we’ve had for over 30 years doing this work, we could have sped up the process a little bit,” Williamson said. “We don’t have to recreate the wheel. We know how lead programs work.”

Alameda County’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program and Oakland’s existing Lead-Safe Home Program offer grants to hire lead-certified contractors to paint over older coats of paint that contain lead—a temporary but effective approach to addressing lead hazards. The city’s Racial Equity Impact Analysis instead recommends prioritizing the complete removal of lead-based paint by scraping all lead paint from a home.  

“Shifting lead elimination efforts to permanent solutions is important to protect low-income communities that may lack the resources to maintain interim controls, which can expose them to recurring and new environmental hazards,” Oakland’s Racial Equity Impact Analysis reads. 

Removing lead rather than painting over the problem is the gold standard for lead safety, but Alameda County officials said the cost is significantly greater and funds are extremely limited.

Painting over lead-based paint in older and poorly maintained homes can cost upwards of $30,000 per home, according to Real. Alameda County’s program provides funding to paint over lead-based paint, up to $12,000, but Brooks said sometimes that is not enough. 

In 2023, Oakland increased the grant amounts given out through its own Lead-Safe Home Program, which is available only to low-income homeowners, from $15,000 per project to $30,000 per project to account for the increasing cost of hiring lead-certified contractors to paint over existing lead paint.

Brooks said removing the hazard, and even remediating the issue, will take significantly more money than the payout from the lawsuit: “By no means is there enough money in the lead settlement to address all the needs.”

A 2024 Oakland Housing and Community Development report also notes that “the available settlement funds would fall quite short” for their plans. 

Internal emails obtained via a public records request show that the issues, however, go beyond a difference in whether to paint over or remove the contamination. Oakland officials also expressed concern that the county was not explicitly focused on equity or committed to assisting vulnerable communities equally.

“Darlene said she was mostly just glad to hear that there was some movement on this item and warned us to not outsource the program to Alameda County or invite them to interfere in our program design. It was clear she didn’t have much confidence in their lead paint program or trust the County staff involved,” a July 2023 email written by Smith reads, likely referring to Race and Equity Department Executive Director Darlene Flynn. 

In an emailed statement from Maher and an internal email obtained through public records requests, city officials said that Alameda County could not provide sufficient data to evaluate who their programs served and if they served Oakland communities equitably.

“Naturally, we’ve been reluctant to move forward with releasing lead settlement funding to the County for use in Oakland until they can show us A) their programs are an effective use of funds, and B) that a fair share of their existing federal resources are going to address the needs of vulnerable Oakland communities (because if that’s not the case, any provision of lead settlement funds to county programs would risk helping them perpetuate that inequitable treatment of Oakland residents),” an internal email obtained through public records requests reads.

When asked about distrust between city and county officials, the Alameda County Healthy Homes Department said in an emailed statement that the department strives to work in collaboration with Oakland and is “proud of our long-standing history of addressing lead hazards and our ongoing partnerships with local municipalities, including the City of Oakland.”

El Tímpano has filed a public records request and is waiting for additional emails related to the lead settlement funds from five previous city administrators and Assistant City Administrator LaTonda Simmons.

Inequity in Oakland

In 2021, amid negotiations between the city and county, Oakland’s Race and Equity Department hired Environmental/Justice Solutions to conduct a racial equity analysis of lead hazards and abatement options in Alameda County and Oakland. The analysis, published in September of that year, laid bare just how serious lead in Oakland is. 

“Lead poisoning caused by lead paint remains a dire threat to public health, well-being and life outcomes in Oakland and Alameda County,” reads the opening line of the report. “The problem is so large that the rate of lead poisoning in some Oakland zip codes is higher than in Flint, Michigan at the height of its lead in the water crisis.”

All Oakland census tracts with predominantly Latino populations, the report also found, are in the top 15% of lead risk state-wide. 

The analysis, according to Brooks, was used by Oakland officials to secure a higher percentage of lead settlement funds, but didn’t spur the immediate action it was intended to do, he said. At the time, several JPA members said they wanted to see the funds be put into motion right away.

“I want to make this very clear, I don’t want us to just continue to talk about equity. I actually want to make sure that we get going on implementing,” JPA Board Director and Alameda Councilmember Malia Vella said at the Sept. 2021 meeting where the analysis findings were presented. “The money that we spend now can make a huge difference and the longer that we wait the more likelihood that there’s going to be continued lead poisoning.”

‘If they have the money, they should just put it to use’

The urgent need for lead remediation in Oakland was once more spotlighted in early August, when parents were notified by the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) that water pipes at dozens of schools were found to contain lead. Oakland City Council held a special meeting at the end of September to hear from OUSD officials about their work to remediate the lead in the schools. Testing and remediation at all OUSD schools remains ongoing.

Many renters in Fruitvale who spoke to El Tímpano after the news of lead in schools broke said they were concerned about lead in their own homes, but were unsure about getting their homes tested for fear of retaliation by their landlord. Some accepted El Tímpano’s offer to test their homes for free, but many others declined.

Landlords are required to provide an Environmental Protection Agency-approved pamphlet about lead and disclose any known information about lead on the property for housing constructed before 1978. Landlords aren’t required to fully remove lead paint, but in California, they are required to address lead hazards, such as chipped, peeling or disturbed lead paint and if landlords do repairs or renovations on pre-1978 housing, they must use a lead-certified contractor. 

However, tenants are not always aware of lead risk until a child in their home has been tested. This puts the burden on tenants to identify lead hazards and notify their landlords of the issue.

“It points to the need for policy and community level intervention, so that the onus, the responsibility, isn’t on the individual who’s dealing with a lot to advocate for their own change, to advocate for what they need,” Appleton of the University at Albany, said.

Oakland city officials are in the process of establishing a Proactive Rental Inspection Program (PRIP), through which rental units would be regularly inspected for code violations, ideally eliminating the burden on tenants. City officials have said the goal would be to launch a proactive rental inspection program and a lead hazard abatement program simultaneously so that the city could identify code violations, including lead hazards, then abate the issue. 

But the city has been talking about establishing a PRIP for nearly a decade, another example, Alameda County officials say, of slow city action. 

When El Tímpano explained that Oakland received funding from a lead paint settlement, Yazmin Alvarez said what many others have said for years: “If they have the money, they should just put it to use for what it’s for,” she said. 

She wonders aloud if the high levels of lead in her system contributed to her kidney failure—she has no explanation for what caused her condition, and a biopsy was never conducted, she said. “Did that make me sick?” she asked, her voice rising. “I lived a pretty healthy lifestyle, I coached, I did exercise, I did sports, I ate decently good, you know, I took care of myself. I cheered. I was a cheerleader. Like, what the hell?”

Though it is unclear what caused Alvarez’s kidneys to fail, Diana Kwong, a nephrologist at UC San Francisco, said in an emailed statement to El Tímpano that lead exposure has been associated with progressive reduction of kidney function leading to kidney failure. And, she added, “Because lead is cleared by the kidney, patients with chronic kidney disease…may be more susceptible to lead toxicity.”

Because of her condition, Alvarez is often tired. But her daughter, Leyla, keeps her up and about. “I just hope I stick around long enough for my daughter, you know, for a couple more years,” she said. 

For now, the family is preparing to take Leyla to a rock concert in the next few weeks—the 4-year-old is a fan of heavy metal music, including System of a Down, which she struggles to pronounce—and buy her a Halloween costume. Leyla says she’ll likely choose to be a vampire.

Have you been exposed to lead?

El Tímpano will continue to report on how lead contamination has impacted Latino immigrant communities in Oakland over the next several months. Have you or someone you know been affected by lead exposure? Let us know by filling out this short form (Spanish version here) or text PLOMO to (510) 800-8305.

How we reported this story

To build a more complete picture of lead exposure in Oakland, the East Bay Academy for Young Scientists (EBAYS), a program by UC Berkeley, began collecting soil samples from homes and public spaces throughout the city and testing their lead levels. In July 2024, El Tímpano partnered with EBAYS in order to conduct testing of homes resided by Latino immigrants.

Through a community workshop, tabling at local libraries and special events, door-knocking, and inviting our more than 5,000 SMS subscribers to provide a soil or paint sample, El Tímpano has been able to provide information about the risk of lead in Oakland and listen to community concerns, like those of Yazmin Alvarez. Alvarez’s mother, Minerva Flores, was one of the dozens of SMS subscribers who responded to our callouts offering free lead testing.