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https://www.urbancny.com/attorney-general-james-reaches-175000-settlement-with-syracuse-landlord-for-failing-to-address-lead-based-paint-hazards/
“In July 2023, Attorney General James, County Executive McMahon, and Mayor Walsh filed a lawsuit against Hobbs and his companies, alleging that he repeatedly and persistently violated lead safety laws at more than a dozen rental properties around Syracuse. Over the last eight years, there were 413 violations of lead safety laws at 19 different properties owned by Hobbs. At least 11 children were poisoned by lead while living at these properties.
Lead-based paint in residential housing is a pervasive problem in Syracuse, where 81 percent of the housing stock was built before lead-based paint was banned in New York in 1970. Lead poisoning in Onondaga County is highest among children of color, the majority of whom live in Syracuse. In 2022, 510 children in Onondaga County had elevated levels of lead in their blood, and 90 percent of those children lived in Syracuse. Approximately 11 percent of the Black children tested in Onondaga County in 2022 had elevated blood lead levels, compared to under two percent of white children tested.
Lead is a highly toxic metal that can cause serious and irreversible adverse health effects. Children who have been exposed to even very low levels of lead are at risk for neurological and physical problems during critical stages of early development. Children under the age of six are more likely to be exposed to lead than any other age group, as their normal behaviors have resulted in chewing lead paint chips and breathing in or swallowing dust from old lead paint that gets on floors, windowsills, and hands.
Since 2014, Hobbs has owned and managed at least 62 rental properties with at least 91 individual residential units in the Syracuse area. According to city and county records, all of Hobbs’ rental properties were built prior to 1960, and therefore presumed to contain lead-based paint. Most of these properties are rented by low-income families of color.
As a result of this settlement, Hobbs will pay $175,000, $55,000 of which will go to current and former tenants harmed by lead paint exposure at the properties he owned over the past eight years, and $120,000 of which will go towards addressing lead hazards at the 19 properties that Hobbs owns with lead-related violations. Hobbs will be barred from selling any of these properties without OAG’s approval until all lead hazards are resolved.
“Safe housing for all families in Syracuse should be the rule, but too often that is not the case,” said Paul Ciavarri, Community Organizer for Legal Services of Central New York. “We applaud Attorney General Letitia James and her multi-agency team in their fight for relief and justice on behalf of Syracuse tenants. Lead poisoning causes untold harm to our community’s most vulnerable families, and negligent landlords should expect to be held accountable to find and fix hazards in their tenants’ homes.”
“People should feel safe in their homes and not worry if they are being poisoned by lead. Yet, Black and Brown children in Syracuse have some of the nation’s highest rates of lead poisoning, which puts their education, health, and safety at risk,” said Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, Director of NYCLU’s Racial Justice Center. “Childhood lead poisoning is an environmental justice problem, and holding landlords accountable for it is a racial justice imperative. We commend the AG’s office for taking these necessary steps.”
“We applaud this latest action for safe housing in Syracuse from Attorney General Letitia James. The fragile shell of safety that is the home is shattered with every case of landlord negligence,” said Darlene Medley and Oceanna Fair of Families for Lead Freedom Now. “This action against Todd Hobbs is further proof of every landlord’s clear responsibility to deliver safe housing conditions. The high costs to our community when they don’t are already only too obvious. Our hearts go out to the families harmed, and meanwhile we see a horizon of hope for Syracusans in the important work of Attorney General James to hold another landlord to a common-sense standard of safety and health.”
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“Sooki and I shined our flashlights against the smooth bark of the trees that lay across the streets. We shined them into the beds of purple iris that stood tall and straight, untouched. We climbed over branches, met an impasse, turned to walk another way. The water in the creek a block away skimmed the bottom of the footbridge. We talked and then we didn't. It was enough just to be together in all that darkness.”
“These Precious Days.” Ann Patchett
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“It's the same way she looks at me—me with the books and no children-like not having children was some spectacular idea that I alone came up with. That is, after all, Robin's superpower: to love the person in front of her as she is, to see all the glorious light inside them and reflect it back, everywhere.”
There Are No Children Here, Ann Patchett
“For as many times as the horrible thing happens, a thousand times in every day the horrible thing passes us by. A meteor could be skating past Earth's atmosphere this very min ute. We'll never know how close we came to annihilation, but today/ saw it- everything I had and stood to lose and did not lose. Thanks 10 this fleeting clarity, the glow from the fluorescent tubes on the celings of this small cardiac recovery room lights up the entire word.”
These Precious Days, Ann Patchett
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“Sam knew that after her mother died, the last worries and pains would fall away. Sam would see her mother as not merely her mother, but as a full, perfect human. Sam would apprehend the whole of her mother's life, her girlhood through her old age, the whole of her body, her mind, her heart. Her existence on earth would be clear and perfect. Sam was from her, a part of her, and Sam would feel, in a profound way, that she remained a version of her, a derivative. This soothed Sam, to feel her mother's traces in every molecule, her light in every aspect. Her mother would die, but Sam would still be here. She didn't quite believe it yet, but she knew it just the same.
…
Sam slept for nine hours without waking. In the morning, as her consciousness streamed in with the sun, a vision came to her, unbidden but not unwelcome: of the ends of things, the time between now and then, the world without her.”
“Wayward,” Dana Spiotta
(learning to read, this on a snow day)
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“Heat and sweat; she couldn't breathe and threw off her blanket.
The air was cold, but she burned inside.
Sam did not check the time or pick up her phone. She knew it was two or three. Four is an early morning; one is a late night. Two or three are only for violence and prayer. Desperate hours. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. She felt the floorboards under her bare feet. The house throbbed against her. She heard the wind in the trees outside. The city was out there. She was in the house and the house was in the city. The city was in the world.
This was why you came here. You came here to witness, to see the world and then to act and make it better. To re-form it. She was fake poor, Sullivan's Travels, slumming-it "poor." But now she understood her obligation. The obligation of history, of her wealth, of her position. Even recasting her losses as gifts emerged with new purpose: the night waking drove her out to the street; her invisibility made her seem as innocuous as the pavement. She was a secret creature, a cryptogon. Her loneliness, with its grotesque emo-tions, outsized in the suburbs, here made her feel the pain-the weight-of what she saw. What was the extra-life for? You woke because it was not the time for gentle sleep. You sought the world with clarity, and it turned out it had been here all along, waiting for you to see it.
She was in the house. The house was in the city. The city was in the world. The world was history. This was why she bought this house in this place.”
“Wayward,” Dana Spoiotta
(admittedly too close, set 1.5 miles from home)
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His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exagger-ated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.
hans vollman
All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be.
roger bevins ili
It was the nature of things.
hans vollman
Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true.
roger bevins ili
At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end.
hans vollman
We must try to see one another in this way.
roger bevins ili
As suftering, limited beings
hans vollman
Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endone with compensatory graces.
roger bevins ili
[Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders]
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Six months of being a School Dieitian in my community, and I count each day a massive privilege to work together and alongside food service workers, school nurses, school therapists, farmers, distributors, community organizations, and coalition members.
This work is a front row seat to federal policy and structural determinants of health. It is at the intersection of so many moving systems, including the impossible machines of emergency food access and procurement, experienced by students each day, in and around the complex lives they lead.
It should always come back to being about dignity and belonging. Right now, I feel most energized/stretched by the work of caring for students with feeding differences. What belonging may be for them requires we unpack our morality around food and health.
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started to wonder if this is a space to take note. for example, how trauma informed care is not just for a provider-client relationship. it’s also for the moment when you walk into a school cafeteria to provide an allergy in service and you remember half the staff don’t have cars to get to work, and that a 14-yr-old student living with a disability, a person that walks through that line everyday (for their buffalo nachos, hot dog, turkey gravy and whatnot) was shot last night in the park and didn’t make it out. don’t know what trauma informed collaboration looks like in that moment, but I know it is sorely needed, because everyone is swimming in grief.
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looking back at this: “recognition and respect of humans cannot be sustained in abstract claims.” (Kyrie eleison)
and “where life is precious, life is precious.” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore).
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