A neighborhood risk map tells you which areas to worry about. This map goes further and shows you the individual buildings, and which ones to visit first. Below is a real example, built from public data, for one square mile of the South Bronx. Each dot is a residential building, colored by the decade it was built. Older buildings are far more likely to contain lead paint, so the age of a building is a strong first guess at where the hazards are.
| Building | Built | Lead-paint likelihood | Homes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 430 East 138 Street | 1932 | 90% (pre-1940) | 148 |
| 490 Southern Boulevard | 1929 | 90% (pre-1940) | 137 |
| 759 East 138 Street | 1905 | 90% (pre-1940) | 114 |
| 610 Trinity Avenue | 1937 | 90% (pre-1940) | 106 |
| 620 Trinity Avenue | 1937 | 90% (pre-1940) | 103 |
| 431 East 136 Street | 1931 | 90% (pre-1940) | 94 |
| 587 East 139 Street | 1905 | 90% (pre-1940) | 90 |
| 354 Cypress Avenue | 1906 | 90% (pre-1940) | 87 |
| 454 East 148 Street | 1887 | 90% (pre-1940) | 79 |
| 235 Brook Avenue | 1925 | 90% (pre-1940) | 78 |
| 526 Tinton Avenue | 1925 | 90% (pre-1940) | 77 |
| 398 East 152 Street | 1920 | 90% (pre-1940) | 76 |
| 683 East 140 Street | 1920 | 90% (pre-1940) | 75 |
| 112 Lincoln Avenue | 1920 | 90% (pre-1940) | 75 |
The likelihood here is the HUD national lead-paint-by-era rate applied to each building's year built. It tells you where to look first, not which buildings definitely have lead. To confirm the hazard on the spot, you need a field test. FluoroSpec is a low-cost lead-detection kit that does that: you spray a small amount of a reagent (methylammonium bromide) on a painted surface, and under a UV flashlight it glows bright green wherever there is lead paint or lead dust.
We start from the approach we describe in our white paper, which combines housing age and poverty, and we sharpen it down to each individual parcel using the year it was built. The map above is exactly this, for one Bronx district.
You match the map against the families you already serve, whether that is your WIC, Medicaid, birth records, or screening registry. The match runs on your systems, and no family name ever reaches us.
You get back the oldest, highest-risk buildings where enrolled children actually live, listed in the order to visit. A field test confirms each one when you get there.
Send us your public parcel file, or let us pull it for you, and we will build this same map for one jurisdiction free, as a pilot. You can then match your own list against it and tell us whether the top buildings line up with where you already find lead.
Start a free pilot Detroit Philadelphia Find your county For lead programs