On the second floor of a multi-family house in Central Falls in early February, Henry Severino, a construction specialist with Rhode Island Housing, was focused on doors. The damage was obvious: paint chipping off the frames, layers of old paint peeking through after years of wear and tear.
“Let’s replace these doors because the kid is probably running in and out of here all the time,” Severino said, explaining that the friction from opening and closing doors can disturb old paint. The building was built in 1900, so it’s likely some of that paint is toxic, made with lead.
On that February morning, four contractors followed Severino around the building, taking note of which windows needed replacement, which baseboards needed repainting, and how much it would all cost.
Rhode Island Housing, the state housing finance agency, is paying for the repairs in this Central Falls home through a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In 2019, the quasi-public state agency received federal funding to help landlords cover the costs of eliminating lead paint hazards in rental units. The city of Woonsocket also received federal funds that year, and funding for Providence followed in 2020.
In total, $16.8 million in federal funding to repair lead hazards flowed into Rhode Island in 2019 and 2020. Today, according to records obtained by The Public’s Radio, the majority of that funding remains unspent — and Rhode Islanders stand to lose out on millions intended to make homes safe for children to live in.
At the end of the grant period, not only will Rhode Island lose out on unspent funds, HUD’s lead program will lose them, too. The U.S. Department of the Treasury recaptures any unspent funding, according to HUD.
“We don’t get the money to send back out the door,” said Yolanda Brown, division director overseeing lead hazard control grants at HUD. “Whatever’s not spent goes back.”
‘Free, free, free’
Roughly three quarters of the housing stock in Rhode Island was built before 1978, the year the federal government banned lead paint. But the ban did little to address the paint already on the walls, doors and windows in tens of thousands of homes.
Exposure to lead paint in Rhode Island has decreased dramatically in the past thirty years. Still, more than 500 children have been lead poisoned annually in the state over the past several years, mostly the result of living with toxic lead paint. At high levels, lead exposure can lead to comas and seizures, but the substance is dangerous at low levels, too. Studies have shown lead exposure can lower IQ scores and lead to behavioral issues like ADHD.
Since the early 1990s, HUD has distributed grants nationwide to fund lead repair programs and help property owners pay to address those hazards. Grant recipients — locally, the cities of Providence and Woonsocket as well as Rhode Island Housing — use the funding to offer forgivable loans or grants to property owners who qualify.
Those dollars cover the costs associated with fixing up old housing that contains lead-based paint: the cost of lead inspections, certified contractors to do repair, and the supplies necessary to make units safe — paint, plastic sheeting, and sometimes, new windows and doors. It costs, on average, about $17,000 to fix a single unit, so property owners can receive tens of thousands of dollars to fix up an entire building.
“[It’s] free, free, free as long as they abide by the guidelines,” said Denise Henriquez, of the Community Action Partnership of Providence, which received funding to help administer the Providence and Woonsocket lead repair programs.
Between 2019 and 2020, HUD awarded three separate grants to public agencies in Rhode Island, each with its own funding level and timeline. But the Covid-19 pandemic and its ripple effects, stringent application requirements, and a limited supply of qualified contractors have all created roadblocks to spending the money.
In 2019, Woonsocket received $4 million to stand up a lead repair program for the first time. The city was supposed to spend that by July 2023, but ultimately received a year-long extension. As of mid-December, the city had roughly $3.4 million left to spend.
“We anticipate that we will be losing some of the federal funding that was awarded to the city of Woonsocket,” said Michael Debroisse, the planning director in Woonsocket.
Rhode Island Housing received over $8 million to spend in specific “high impact” zip codes where kids are particularly at risk of lead poisoning, building upon several previous HUD grants the agency has received to run its lead repair program. The agency has to spend that money by the end of the year. Providence received $5 million in 2020 to continue its longstanding lead safety program. The city has spent more than half the money already, and received an extension through the end of the year.
Both Rhode Island Housing and the city of Providence have received previous HUD grants to address lead paint hazards. This funding round, administrators in both organizations said, has been especially difficult.
“Shortly after the launch of this grant cycle, we did find ourselves experiencing a bit of pause,” said Emily Freedman, director of housing and human services in Providence, who also oversees the city’s lead repair program. “It was challenging to be doing these types of interventions in people’s households when folks needed to shelter in place for their safety.”
‘Overly stringent’ requirements
Like many other federal funding programs, qualifying for the lead repair funding requires significant documentation. For rental properties, HUD requires both landlords and tenants to submit detailed personal information and documentation with an application, records like warranty deeds, mortgage statements, pay stubs and bank statements, tax returns, copies of IDs, and more.
“If I were one [tenant] of a four-unit building, I’m like, ‘Why am I giving you my personal info?,” said David Banno, executive director of the Community Action Partnership of Providence. “I don’t own this building. It’s my landlord’s job to get it lead-free, not mine.’”
HUD’s Brown said the agency requires tenants to provide this documentation because the program is income-based: property owners only qualify if they are low-income, or rent to low-income tenants. Children also have to either live on or regularly visit the property.
The standards for verifying tenant incomes have been a point of contention in Rhode Island. In August 2022, Rhode Island Housing and the Attorney General’s Office co-signed a letter to HUD explaining that the federal standards were making it harder to spend the money, according to documents obtained by The Public’s Radio.
“Overly stringent tenant income verification requirements may have presented an obstacle to distributing grant money, with the end result that available funds are unused, often where they are most needed,” wrote assistant attorney general Keith Hoffman and Carol Ventura, executive director of Rhode Island Housing.
Dozens of applications to Rhode Island Housing were denied or withdrawn because tenants had difficulty providing the documentation agencies were asking for, the letter says.
Brown said the local grantees play a role in creating their own procedures for income verification, and that guidance from the federal agency presented “options,” not requirements. Other grantees, she said, have not had the same challenges as Rhode Island.
Part way through the grant period, Rhode Island Housing did shift what it called “self-imposed requirements” in the application process, like asking for more pay stubs than federal guidelines, according to Debbie Devine, who works in operations at Rhode Island Housing.
“We were doing sort of above and beyond, creating extra work for ourselves and delaying the application process,” Devine said.
Two years, no repairs
Rhode Island Housing didn’t repair a single unit using federal dollars until more than two years after receiving the grant funding.
As of December 2023, the agency had funded repairs in 33 units — a fraction of the 340 initially planned for. (Rhode Island Housing also administers state funding to repair lead paint, and has been faster to spend those dollars, using state funding to repair nearly 60 units so far.)
The HUD-funded program in Woonsocket followed a similar trajectory. At the end of the initial three-and-a-half-year grant period in July 2023, records show the city hadn’t repaired a single unit, despite spending nearly $200,000 administering the program.
Debroisse, the city’s planning director, said it’s been a struggle to retain staff as the program sputtered in its initial years. The pandemic, Debroisse said, threw the brand-new program off track, making an already labor-intensive project even more difficult. Since he became the planning director two years ago, Debroisse said the program has had three different managers and three construction supervisors.
“The recent ones that left felt that they didn’t want to be the ones that were mocked that it was a failure and jumped ship ahead of time before that happened,” Debroisse said.
Standing up a new program is always a challenge, HUD’s Brown said, and the pandemic amplified that. She said she would in the future encourage Woonsocket to apply for a “capacity building” grant, which would help the city create the structures to have a more successful program in the future.
“Especially because they have had so much high turnover, I would not want them to apply directly for another lead hazard control right away,” Brown said.
The pace in Woonsocket has picked up more in recent months. Between January 1 and February 20, the city completed 16 units – more than during the first three years of the program – and had an additional 31 scheduled to start work. Dozens of other units are currently in the intake or inspection process.
Still, Debroisse said while the program has seen more success in recent months, he expects the city will have to return some of the HUD funding.
“I still feel that the federal government has failed us [by] not allowing us to continue these programs further out than a one year extension,” Debroisse said.
Brown said HUD is not allowed to extend funding beyond one year.
‘We should make contractors’
On a brisk January morning inside a nondescript building off I-95 in Coventry, Jide Williams stood over an unpainted door clamped to a makeshift stand, learning to attach a hinge to a door. He owns a contracting company and has experience abating lead paint hazards. But there are skills he needs to refine.
Joe Klopfenstein was teaching him how to use a tool to cut a shallow depression so the hinge rests flush with the wood.
As Williams drew the machine over the edge of the door, woodchips sprayed onto his shirt and the floor around him. He slid the hinge into place and checked the depth.
“Nice,” Klopfenstein said. “Good job. Now, we’re going to put the hinges on.”
Klopfenstein is a retired contractor teaching Williams and other students how to remove, rehang, repair, and adjust wooden doors as part of a new effort from Rhode Island Housing to increase the supply of qualified lead-repair contractors. Doors matter because when they’re old, they likely contain layers of lead-based paint, which can chip off or turn to dust. To make a home lead-safe, old wooden doors and windows often have to be removed.
“We need contractors to do the work and we don’t have them,” said Christine Hunsinger, the chief strategy and innovation officer at Rhode Island Housing who took over running the agency’s lead repair program about a year ago. “In the same way one of the car companies just started to manufacture batteries for electric cars, I’m like, well, we should make contractors.”
Last fall, Hunsinger said she reached out to the Rhode Island Builders Association about organizing training sessions to bring more contractors into the fold. Five companies have gone through the training programs thus far, and Hunsinger said five more are scheduled for the second quarter of this year. So far, she said the agency has spent about $140,000 building out the curriculum and paying for those sessions.
“We’ve got these dollars that we have to spend,” Hunsinger said. “Once it gets up and running, then I don’t see any reason why we can’t be doing multiple units a week, and getting families back in their homes in a lead-safe environment.”
Still, Rhode Island Housing has to spend more than $6 million by the end of the year. The agency can apply for an extension through May 2025. After that, any funding not spent repairing lead hazards in Rhode Island will go back to the federal government.
Click here for more stories from our series Renters at Risk
Do you have a story to share? Contact Nina Sparling at nsparling@thepublicsradio.org or 401-626-0389
This story was produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2023 National Fellowship
