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GHHI Detroit-Wayne County in Detroit Unspun

Local news blog Detroit Unspun recently wrote up our door-to-door programs that help make residents’ homes safer. Check out the whole article here!

Federal housing policy leaves poor kids at risk of lead poisoning

December 31, 2015 | Chicago Tribune

When Lanice Walker moved in 2012 from public housing to a private rental in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, she thought she finally had secured a safe, cozy place for her family to live.

Not only did the Chicago Housing Authority provide a taxpayer-subsidized voucher that paid most of Walker’s rent, the agency sent an inspector to ensure the narrow frame house had adequate heat and plumbing, working smoke detectors and no […]

State’s handling of Flint water samples delayed action

December 24, 2015 | Detroit Free Press

LANSING — Lead levels in Flint’s drinking water would have spurred action months sooner if the results of city testing that wrapped up in June had not been revised by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to wrongly indicate the water was safe to drink, e-mails show.

The records — obtained by the Michigan ACLU and by Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech researcher who helped raise concerns about Flint’s […]

Adapting the Midtown model to the neighborhoods

December 22, 2015 | Model D

Four neighborhoods meet at the intersection of Livernois Avenue and McNichols Road in northwest Detroit. The University District, a collection of some of Detroit’s finest brick homes, stands at the intersection’s northeast corner, a largely stable and generally well-to-do neighborhood, though some vacant and boarded up homes dot its tree-lined streets. On the other end of the neighborhood-stability spectrum is the Fitzgerald neighborhood, located to the southwest of Livernois/McNichols […]

Could home demolition program be spreading lead dust?

December 19, 2015 | Detroit Free Press

Detroit’s ambitious demolition program, which has been razing thousands of unsightly and unsafe houses and other structures per year to fanfare and criticism, may be replacing one danger in neighborhoods with another: toxic clouds of lead dust from old paint.

The city, which already has one of the country’s worst rates of blood-lead poisoning in children, also has some of the oldest housing stock of any major U.S. city. […]

Flint’s ‘toxic soup’ polluted water worse for children than thought, doctor says

December 17, 2015 | The Guardian

The doctor who discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were at risk of irreparable brain damage from lead poisoning in the city’s water supply has warned that the problem of “toxic soup” coming out of their household taps may have affected many more than originally thought.

Read more from The Guardian

In Flint, Mich., there’s so much lead in children’s blood that a state of emergency is declared

Decemeber 15, 2015 | The Washington Post

For months, worried parents in Flint, Mich., arrived at their pediatricians’ offices in droves. Holding a toddler by the hand or an infant in their arms, they all have the same question: Are their children being poisoned?

Read more from The Washington Post

Knocking down Detroit to revive it comes at a price

December 15, 2015 | Reuters

Nowhere in America bulldozes derelict homes with Detroit’s ferocity, as the city that has become a byword for U.S. urban decay seeks to engineer a recovery by tearing itself down.

A year after the city exited the biggest-ever U.S. municipal bankruptcy, a plan to demolish half of its nearly 80,000 blighted or deteriorating structures — nearly one in three city buildings — is showing some signs of success.

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AFL-CIO to rehab, sell up to 300 vacant Detroit homes

November 23, 2015 | Detroit Free Press

The AFL-CIO will invest up to $30 million to rehab as many as 300 vacant homes in Detroit in a partnership announced today that also aims to provide job training and career paths to Detroiters.

The AFL-CIO’s Housing Investment Trust said its Detroit Neighborhood Home Repair Program will aim to stabilize neighborhoods over three to five years, using union labor to fix up homes. The arrangement is […]

Early Lead Exposure Linked to Sleep Problems

November 23, 2015 | Scientific American

Lead exposure in early childhood is associated with increased risk for sleep problems and excessive daytime sleepiness in later childhood, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania, US.

The findings, which will be published in the December but are already available online, are based on data from a longitudinal study of more than 1400 Chinese children that began in 2004 to examine the influence of lead exposure […]