This story was originally published by Verite News.
This four-month investigation was supported by a Kozik Environmental Justice Reporting grant funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute. It was also produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship Fund and the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.
Lead in playground soil, water pipes, and paint peeling off old buildings is pervasive in New Orleans and poses significant public health risks, particularly for children, an investigation by Verite News has found. But approaches taken by two cities and one state that faced similar problems may give the cash-strapped Big Easy a roadmap for lowering those risks.
Verite News tested soil samples from 84 city parks with playgrounds in its four-month investigation conducted at the end of 2025 and found that at least 46 had lead concentrations that exceed the 2024 federal hazard level for soil in urban areas. Verite also obtained city records that show nearly 7 in 10 homes that voluntarily tested their drinking water in the last three years had detectable levels of lead.
New federal funding and tighter regulations on lead have helped communities reduce their lead exposure since 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, though some of the money and rules have been rolled back during the second Trump administration, according to national anti-lead advocates. Since October, the Environmental Protection Agency has partially rolled back protections against soil contamination and Congress has agreed to cut funding for lead pipe replacement by $125 million.
“ We’ve seen the Trump administration say positive things about its commitment to lead, but then take actions that undermine that,” said Tom Neltner, the national director of Unleaded Kids. He said, despite rollbacks affecting lead contamination in soil, paint and air, progress is still happening at a local level.
No level of lead exposure is safe, according to federal environmental officials, and in recent years, more states and cities have started intense lead cleanup efforts to protect people’s health.
Tulane University professor Felicia Rabito, an epidemiologist who researches the toxic metal and its sources, said New Orleans leaders should do the same.
“ We don’t need to do research on lead anymore,” Rabito said. “What we need are policies to get the lead out of the environment.”
Verite News spoke with experts in Michigan, Indiana, and Rhode Island to learn how their communities implemented successful lead reduction efforts in recent years, with the aim of finding options that could be applied in New Orleans.
Benton Harbor, Michigan: Lead pipes begone
Benton Harbor spent three years out of compliance with federal drinking water standards. The predominantly Black beach town sits on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. In 2018, residents grew concerned over their water quality. Because of corroding pipes and plumbing, more lead leached into the water. For three years, the city’s attempt to treat the water to prevent corrosion failed until residents petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency in 2021, finally garnering a robust response from state and federal officials.
“ We were at the point of, you know, this is ridiculous. Nobody should be drinking lead in their water for this long,” said Elin Betanzo, one of the engineers who provided the residents with technical support.
That same year, federal officials issued an enforcement order for the city to bring its water supply into compliance, and the state required the city to replace all of its lead pipes within 18 months. The governor also committed to securing funding in the state budget to help fund the full $35 million replacement, including bottled water distribution and paying outstanding water bills for low-income residents. The state, alongside the city, allocated money, secured regional water loans and cobbled together grants from several federal programs to cover the total.
By the end of 2023, city officials had succeeded. Now it’s one of 21 small cities in Michigan that have replaced all of their lead pipes. Benton Harbor, with a population of 9,000, had the most pipes to replace of all those 21 cities. Where it took Benton Harbor less than two years to replace its 3,100 pipes, a similar effort in larger Flint took nearly a decade.
Flint, population 80,000, whose water system gained national notoriety in 2014 when it became contaminated with lead and other toxins, began replacing its lead pipes in 2017 under a federal court settlement. The city completed its legal obligation last July, but that didn’t mean that all of its lead pipes are gone.
The legal settlement didn’t include requirements for vacant houses, and nearly 700 homeowners refused to have their pipes replaced. The Natural Resources Defense Council, which successfully won the 2017 court order, attributed that to the homeowners’ deteriorated trust in city government.
Though the Benton Harbor pipe replacement was long overdue, Betanzo said its completion was a success.
“ That’s huge. You’re a very small water utility that’s understaffed in the first place, like they didn’t have any capacity, no program, and then they got it done,” she said.
While most U.S. water systems aren’t facing federal enforcement action like Benton Harbor, she said there are still lessons that other systems can learn from as they look to replace their own lead pipes. The federal Lead and Copper Rule, which was strengthened in 2024 under the Biden administration, requires water systems in the U.S. to replace all of their lead water lines by 2037. Utilities sued the federal government in an attempt to overturn the rule, and the Trump administration has said it would defend the mandate.
Betanzo said Benton Harbor’s approach was efficient. Typically, a water system must dig up and visually inspect its pipes to determine if they’re lead, unless there’s a prior record. Because city officials knew most of its pipes were lead, they went street by street, inspecting and replacing simultaneously.
“It made complete and total sense to just dig up everyone and systematically work through the whole system,” she said.
Concentrating the mass replacement in one zone at a time made the contracts more cost-effective, she added. Contractors bid on zones in the city, and multiple contractors worked in different neighborhoods at the same time. City officials also published their progress on a public database for transparency.
The city required contractors to flush the lines at each address, a process that residents can do incorrectly and unintentionally trap leftover lead in their faucets. The city also passed a law requiring lead lines to be replaced, including those on private property, so residents couldn’t opt out. All residents had to allow the contractors onto their property at the risk of disconnection. The residents didn’t pay for the line replacements.
Reducing barriers and replacing lines efficiently are the key takeaways, Betanzo said.
“ The health benefits of lead service line replacement are greatest the sooner you get it done,” she noted, referencing a 2023 study she co-authored. “ If you do it wrong, you can absolutely increase exposure to lead through a lead service line replacement.”
Benton Harbor’s completion of full pipe replacement is rare across the country due to the cost, poor service line tracking, time and other priorities.
With the strengthened Lead and Copper Rule, more cities, like New Orleans, are embarking on their own replacement programs. In New Orleans, the process could require up to $1 billion of investment over 10 years, according to the Sewerage and Water Board. Nationally, Congress allocated $15 billion to lead pipe replacement under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that’s set to expire at the end of this year. The Republican-led Congress redirected $125 million of the pool for lead pipes to wildfire prevention.
Other cities have focused on another source of lead exposure: soil.
Indianapolis, Indiana: Safe dirt for kids
In 2024, a study published in the academic journal GeoHealth estimated that nearly a quarter of homes in the U.S. have unsafe levels of lead in the soil by federal standards of 200 parts per million.
Indiana University School of Science professor Gabriel Filippelli led the study and has researched the risk of lead exposure through soil for years. He said his city, Indianapolis, still has a lot more work to clean up the legacy of lead contamination, but it has made progress that other cities can learn from.
New Orleans has taken a reactive approach to the problem. The last time the city conducted a survey of a limited number of parks was in 2011, in response to outcry from parents after their kids recorded high blood lead levels. In Indianapolis, Filippelli said the city has proactively tested soil in some parks and playgrounds where children can be easily exposed to the toxic metal.
The Indy Parks & Recreation department partnered with Filipelli’s team to test a dozen parks relatively close to a Superfund site in the city, formerly home to the National Lead Industries smelter. He said the agency’s director decided they would rather know if there was a problem than not.
Filippelli’s team only found one hot spot for lead out of all the parks they tested, beneath an old bench whose lead-based paint had flaked off into the surrounding soil.
The parks department followed Filippelli’s suggestion for a cost-effective remediation. The agency replaced the bench and added concrete, a thick layer of mulch and plants over the contaminated soil so kids wouldn’t play directly in the dirt.
“It was a relatively low-cost intervention,” he said, estimating it cost a few thousand dollars. The ground wasn’t excavated and new dirt wasn’t brought in. “If you deal with it by dilution and by capping, (and) remove the source, you’re solving the problem for today and probably many, many years to come.”
The contaminated dirt may need to be removed in some cases before replacing it with clean soil, such as after severe, widespread pollution from industrial sources. But Filippelli said such extensive remediation can be impractical and too expensive for cities to undertake if it’s not part of a federally-recognized Superfund site.
“It’s a mix between the practical implementation of mitigation and then the industry standard,” he said.
Where full remediation is cost-prohibitive, Filippelli said there are cheaper solutions, like landscaping, covering the area with new dirt, or mulching. These methods won’t eliminate the lead entirely, but they will significantly reduce exposure risk.
In another case, Filippelli worked with two local groups to test a proposed site for a community garden. It tested high for lead. Instead of excavating and replacing the dirt at an estimated cost of $250,000, the local groups opted to build raised beds and a greenhouse on top of a thick layer of mulch. It wasn’t ideal for plants with deep roots that struggled with the mulch layer, but it allowed the project to move forward safely and affordably, he said.
Filippelli said he hopes his city and others start taking a more comprehensive approach to soil remediation through creative methods like free mulching and gardening programs as part of beautification grants.
“You can eliminate the hazard at a fraction of the cost,” he said.
Cities could also mimic New York City’s free Clean Soil Bank program, placing soil leftover from construction projects in neighborhood-level banks for volunteers to distribute, he said.
Though, similar to the old bench, mitigating contaminated soil isn’t effective if the main source of lead still exists. The area will just be recontaminated.
“You don’t get out the mop first, right? You turn off the water to make sure it doesn’t continue,” he said.
Rhode Island: Stopping lead at the source
New England, home to some of the oldest housing stock in the country, has led the U.S. in working to mitigate lead paint, one of the largest ongoing sources of lead contamination.
In 2023, the Rhode Island legislature passed a package of laws strengthening state enforcement of protections against lead. Similar to New Orleans, most of the state’s homes were built before lead paint was banned in 1978.
DeeAnn Guo, a community organizer for the Childhood Lead Action Project, said prior to the 2023 legislation, the state had long required most landlords to have their property inspected to ensure the house is “lead-safe.” Although no level of lead is considered safe, replacing windows and doors with lead paint, painting over all interior and exterior walls, as well as mitigating soil contaminated by lead paint significantly reduces the risk of exposure. No peeling, chipping or chalking paint allowed.
But for years, compliance and enforcement were low.
“There was no incentive to do it aside from it being the right thing to do,” she said.
Now, landlords can be fined if they don’t have an active lead certificate on file for homes built before 1978. To ensure the mitigation is maintained, the property has to be re-inspected every two years to renew the certificate. The state has steadily seen a decline in the level of lead found in children’s blood, going from 33% of tests finding levels above 5 micrograms per liter in 2002 down to 2% in 2024. Guo hopes these stricter regulations will further reduce blood lead levels.
“More lead safe homes will mean more safe environments for children to grow up in,” she said.
Before the new law, less than 15% of rentals were certified. In late 2025, that had increased to 40%.
Guo said it helps that the state has federal funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to subsidize its “lead safe” housing program. If a homeowner or landlord owns an old house, they can apply for the state to send an inspector. If lead is found, the state will then send a certified contractor to remediate at little to no cost to the property owner.
Rhode Island prioritizes low-income households and homes with pregnant women or children under 6 years old due to the heightened health risk. It can also help pay to remediate homes if a child living there has elevated levels of lead in their blood.
For other states and communities looking to start their own lead paint abatement program using HUD money, Guo said strong enforcement combined with education about the risk of lead to residents and public subsidies are critical to success. It also helps to include the community members in the planning process, she added.
Under the Trump administration, however, it might become harder for more communities to receive money for a “lead safe” program. Last year, HUD asked Congress to eliminate new funding for its lead hazards program, stating it would be restored in 2027. But advocates for more lead protections argue once funding is lost, it is unlikely to be approved again.
“It shows the White House’s hypocrisy, where they talk about lead as being important and then propose eliminating the funds that are essential to cleaning up affordable housing,” Neltner said. “This administration talks about the importance of children, and then seems to be careless about children’s brains.”