Lead law fallout

There was an ominous pause at the other end of the phone line, the kind of conversation break that had become familiar in the previous weeks of apartment hunting. The owner of a promising place near Davis Square was asking how many people would be living in the apartment.

There would be three of us, I said, my husband and I and our young son.

When the owner finally spoke again, I knew what was coming: His apartment, he told me, was not deleaded. As parents, he said, we surely were worried about the risks of lead paint for young children and would not want to consider his place.

When I pointed out that state law prohibits discrimination against families with children, even in apartments with lead paint, he said he wasn't discriminating; he was just being ethical.

"I just couldn't take a chance with something like that," he said. "It would be on my conscience."

More than three decades after the state's first lead paint laws were passed, the incidence of children suffering from lead poisoning has been dropping dramatically. But a new hardship has emerged for families: many landlords, fearing the costly deleading process -- or worse, liability for a lead-poisoned child -- don't want them.

The law "really puts significant pressure on landlords to discriminate," said Rafael Mares, a lawyer at the Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center, a Harvard Law School clinical teaching facility in Jamaica Plain. "If you put an ad on Craigslist and asked for people who are experiencing discrimination, everyone with a child under six would tell you they've experienced discrimination."

People are often reluctant to speak publicly about such experiences, because they fear trouble with landlords. But charges of discrimination filed by families with children who say they were turned away from apartments with lead paint are among the most common kinds of housing discrimination complaints received by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination each year. Meanwhile, more than half the housing discrimination charges filed with the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston involve children and apartments with lead paint, said Stephan Choo, a fair housing coordinator at the center.

Choo said his office investigates the claims by having volunteers who say they have children inquire about the apartment and compare their experience with that of volunteers who say they don't have children. If the center believes the landlord or realtor illegally discriminated, it helps families file claims with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, the courts, or the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But Mares and others working with families who have been denied housing because they have children say most families do not file complaints or seek legal help. And enforcement is lacking.

Still, the health benefits of getting rid of lead paint have been striking, especially among poorer residents. In 2003, the number of children suffering from lead poisoning in Massachusetts was less than a third of the number eight years earlier. Robert Madden, a Dorchester deleading contractor, said more landlords, hoping to attract tenants, have deleaded as the rental real estate market has slowed.

Lead paint is still a particularly thorny problem in Massachusetts, which has the country's second-oldest housing stock. More than two-thirds of the housing was built before 1970, when lead paint was still widely used. The problem is not new. State officials first considered restrictions on the use of lead paint in homes in 1933, but were convinced to drop the effort by industry representatives, according to research by Richard Rabin, an advocate for lead-paint removal activist groups.

In Massachusetts, a state law passed more than 30 years ago says that children under 6 years old cannot live in apartments that contain lead paint on certain high-risk surfaces, such as windowsills and baseboards. And if children suffer lead poisoning, landlords are legally liable. But state law also clearly says that landlords cannot discriminate against families with young children because their apartments are not deleaded. The only way landlords can comply with the law is to delead their apartments, a process that can easily cost $10,000 per unit. (There are some exceptions: Landlords who live in the building and rent out only one other unit, as well as some elderly landlords, are allowed to refuse families with children.)

"Most people don't do this voluntarily," John MacIsaac, president of ASAP Environmental, said of the deleading process. He estimates that he has inspected 19,000 houses for lead paint, including many in Boston. "It tends to cost a few dollars."

Grants and low- or no-interest loans are available to property owners; landlords who delead also get a $1,500 tax credit. But the burden can still be heavy.

"A lot of landlords are having a difficult time funding deleading a unit," said Allen Hebert, with the Massachusetts Rental Housing Association. "It's a big task. It also indirectly drives up the cost of housing."

A quick spin through apartment ads makes clear that some landlords advertise illegally that children are not welcome. Last week, the owner of a $1,500 two-bedroom rental in the "safest neighborhood in East Boston" added on his Craigslist entry: "Not a good family environment. The apartment has lead paint..." The owner of a $1,600 three-bedroom apartment in West Roxbury wrote: "Has NOT been tested for lead paint."

In January, the owner of a two-bedroom in Hyde Park said the "unit is not deleaded and would not work out with children under 6." The problem is not limited to the city. An ad for a $1,700 carriage house in Wellesley included this line: "The house is not deleaded so no children."

So where are families with children supposed to live? As we searched for housing, one realtor told my husband simply that the law says the apartment we were calling about could not be rented to anyone with young children because it had lead paint. He neglected to mention that the law prohibits discrimination.

Still, our story had a happy ending. We found a wonderful deleaded apartment -- only one of two we saw in our price range after weeks of intense searching -- in a quiet Cambridge neighborhood.

For other families, the ending isn't so sweet. "It creates a problem where sometimes families are forced to choose," said Ryan Torres, executive director of the Lead Action Collaborative in Dorchester. "Maybe they take an unsafe place. We need to change that."

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com