City Housing Authority, HUD Begin To Kick In Ca$h To Give Rent, Security Deposit Assistance To Over 1,000 Poor East Chicago Residents Forced To Permanently Relocate From Public Housing Complex That Sits On Soil Loaded With Lead, Arsenic

In East Chicago, Indiana, The Times of Northwest Indiana reports:

• The East Chicago Housing Authority board approved two resolutions [] intending to help residents of a public housing complex where alarmingly high levels of lead and arsenic were found in the soil.
  
  The resolutions authorized the use of the authority’s capital funds to help relocating West Calumet Housing Complex residents with security deposits at new homes and waived criminal background check requirements as part of the voucher process.
  
  More than 1,000 residents, including nearly 700 children, have been given until Nov. 30 to move out after learning the full magnitude and extent of lead and arsenic contamination in the soil around their homes. The complex sits in the footprint of the long-ago-demolished Eagle Picher lead smelter and just north of USS Lead, a second factory.
  
  The public housing complex is in the west end of the city’s Calumet neighborhood, which is part of an EPA Superfund site established in 2009.
  
  It’s long been known the soil within the entire Calumet neighborhood is contaminated,(1) but public housing residents were not expecting to have to permanently leave their homes as the city applies to HUD for the site’s demolition.
  
  The EPA in 2012 selected a cleanup plan and reached an agreement in fall 2014 with Atlantic Richfield and DuPont for a $26 million cleanup in part of the USS Lead Superfund site. However, last month, the federal agency said cleanup of the property could be renegotiated depending on the city’s long-term plans for the area.
  
  The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last month released $1.9 million to ECHA to provide vouchers so West Calumet Complex residents can permanently relocate.
  
  A HUD spokesperson said [...] it was seeking approximately $1.2 million in additional federal, state and local funds in hope of reimbursing the East Chicago Housing Authority for the agency’s use of its capital dollars.

For more, see Resolutions aimed at helping West Calumet residents OK'd.

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(1) See Lead in East Chicago: Old lead smelter site went unaddressed for years:

• Nearly 20 years after an EPA project manager told state and federal health officials about a long-demolished lead smelter that once operated on the site of a public housing complex and elementary school in East Chicago, residents are just learning the full extent and magnitude of the contamination in the land some of them have lived on for generations. epa environmental protection agency