How Children Became a City’s Lead Detectors

Milwaukee parent Domininck Tompkins has lived in rental units with lead hazards for many years.

(Darren Hauck for The Hechinger Report)

In Milwaukee, a child’s blood test is too often the first housing inspection.

M ilwaukee —When a doctor told Domininck Tompkins that her 1-year-old’s lead level was too high, she immediately suspected her child was being poisoned at their home, a poorly maintained rental with chipping paint.

A few weeks later, when her landlord pulled up in her truck to collect the rent, Tompkins told the woman about a letter from the city confirming that lead detected in her daughter’s body posed significant health risks for the girl. Tompkins recalled that the landlord uttered just three words as she rolled up her window: “I don’t care.”

After that, Tompkins said, the landlord always sent someone else to collect the rent.

In the decade since, Tompkins has moved several times and been homeless twice. Most of her rentals have included unaddressed lead paint, lead dust, and other hazards, she said. Tompkins now has three daughters—11, 7, and 2—with another on the way, and her oldest daughters have struggled with developmental delays and behavioral challenges that doctors say likely stem at least partly from lead poisoning.

Yet Tompkins—who tested high for lead herself as a child—has felt powerless to secure her family a lead-free home. Milwaukee, like countless other cities, lacks any requirements that most rentals get inspected for lead. Landlords too often ignore complaints without consequence, just as Tompkins’s ultimately did.

As the persistent lead problem in Milwaukee rental homes underscores, there’s a long-overlooked connection between tenants’ rights and the health and well-being of young kids. High lead levels, for instance, are associated with developmental delays and conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and learning disabilities. A Milwaukee-based study found that even low levels of lead are associated with poorer third-grade academic performance. This held true even when controlling for other factors, such as mothers’ income levels or children who were born prematurely.

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In their conclusion, the authors stressed the importance of home lead abatement efforts to strengthen the academic performance of Milwaukee’s children. Yet, for untold numbers of renters, those abatement efforts come too late—if they come at all.

Children are the “lead detectors,” people here often say, since city officials typically only intervene with landlords after a young child tests high for the toxin. Though no amount of lead exposure is considered safe, the federal government established a blood lead “ reference value ” of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter to flag children with lead levels that are higher than most. In Milwaukee, when a child under the age of 6 tests above 3.5, the City gets notified and follows up with the family.

But it’s usually only for kids who test at 10 micrograms or above that the city will get deeply involved: assigning a nurse to the child; investigating to find the source of the exposure (which usually turns out to be the home, despite a well-publicized school lead crisis last year ); and, in many instances, pushing for lead abatement work, like replacing windows, covering furnaces, or demolishing a garage.

Last year, the city oversaw 250 of these renovations for clients who were mostly between the ages of 1 and 3—the largest number of abatement projects in years. City officials would love to see this number continue to grow: More than 2,000 kids under 6 in the Milwaukee area tested high for lead in 2025. Most of these cases were in rentals, said Tyler Weber, the city’s deputy commissioner of environmental health. The city wound up using federal grants and city dollars to foot the bill for much of the work—because the landlords wouldn’t pay, and the city is severely limited in terms of how much it can fine recalcitrant homeowners.

“Sometimes we have to throw money at the property even if the landlord is going to benefit,” Weber said. “Do you hate the landlord more than you love the child? That’s often the situation we are stuck in.”

Nearly 60 percent of Milwaukee households rent rather than own, a percentage that rises significantly for low-income Milwaukeeans. In his landmark book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City , sociologist Matthew Desmond immersed himself in the lives of struggling Milwaukee renters and their sometimes cutthroat landlords, making a persuasive argument that evictions—there are more than 12,000 eviction filings a year in Milwaukee County, which has a population of just over 900,000—are a leading cause of poverty, not just a consequence of it.

As Milwaukee’s lead crisis shows, the conditions that allow evictions to flourish can cause lasting harm to young children as well.

Over 10 percent of tested children in 51 of the county’s census tracts between 2018 and 2021 turned up positive for lead poisoni…