Minneapolis is expanding its effort to rid older homes of lead paint hazards, with the city's Health Department seeking licensed abatement contractors to work in occupied houses where young children are most at risk.
The stakes are high in a city where roughly two-thirds of housing was built before 1978, when the federal government banned lead-based paint in residential use. That aging stock is concentrated on the North Side, in neighborhoods like those in ZIP codes 55411 and 55412 that have some of the highest rates of childhood lead exposure in Minnesota. Those same neighborhoods overlap almost exactly with areas subject to decades of redlining, where housing investment has lagged and properties are least likely to have been renovated.
The city has run a Lead and Healthy Homes Program for years, funded largely through federal HUD Lead Hazard Reduction grants, including a $5.7 million HUD award in 2022. Abatement work typically involves replacing windows, stabilizing deteriorating paint, remediating contaminated soil and encapsulating lead surfaces in owner-occupied and rental homes serving low-income families. The latest contractor solicitation is posted on the city's supplier portal; the total contract value and number of units targeted have not been disclosed.
The work is gaining urgency from several directions at once. Minnesota lowered its childhood blood lead level of concern in 2021 to match the CDC's revised threshold of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter, a change that effectively doubled the number of Minneapolis children flagged as lead-exposed. Federal rules finalized in 2024 require water systems nationwide to replace lead service lines within a decade, a mandate that hits older Midwestern cities especially hard. And the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set aside $15 billion for lead pipe replacement, giving cities like Minneapolis new federal money to draw on.
Tenant advocates have raised concerns that the pace of enforcement in rental properties lags behind work in owner-occupied homes, a gap the city's Health Department has faced pressure to close. The Minneapolis Health Department is one of the few city-run, rather than county-run, health departments in Minnesota, giving it more direct control over abatement programs than most cities in the state.
The city's effort is part of a broader pattern of health-focused interventions by the Frey administration, which has also moved recently to expand doula care to close racial gaps in birth outcomes. How quickly contractors are selected and homes are cleared will determine how many families on the North Side get relief before another winter traps children indoors with aging paint.
