Allegheny County: where the lead-paint housing is

Every census tract, ZIP code, and 449,285 parcels in the county scored for childhood lead-exposure risk from public records, then checked against the county health department's own 2025 blood lead results. Built October 14, 2026 for the Life Without Lead Summit (October 29). Free to use, no credit needed.

87thnational percentile for predicted risk. Rank 421 of 3,222 U.S. counties, 16th of 67 in Pennsylvania, 9th of the 47 counties with a million or more people.
170,421housing units built before 1940, 28.3% of the county. The U.S. figure is 12.0%. 77.8% were built before 1980.
127 of 383census tracts in the top 10% of the country for predicted risk. About 16,711 children under 5 live in them.
0.80rank correlation between the map and the county's measured 2025 blood lead results across the 75 ZIPs with 50 or more children tested.
Download everything (zip, 2.3 MB)brief, spreadsheet, 3 maps, 3 CSVs The brief (PDF, 5 pages) The spreadsheet (Excel)

Predicted risk by census tract

Each tract gets a housing-age score (share of homes built before 1940, 1940 to 1959, and 1960 to 1979, weighted toward the oldest) and a poverty rate, both from the Census Bureau's 2018 to 2022 American Community Survey. The two are combined and ranked against all 83,388 populated tracts in the country, so a tract at 90 has higher predicted risk than 90 percent of U.S. tracts. The method and its check against measured childhood blood lead in eleven states are published in GeoHealth (open access); the national map and address lookup are on the research page.

Allegheny County census tracts shaded by predicted childhood lead-exposure risk, national percentile
Darker is higher predicted risk. The Mon Valley, the river corridors, and the East End carry most of the county's top-decile tracts. Gray tracts have no residents.

Highest-risk tracts, ranked by how many young children live there

Tracts at or above the 90th national percentile, sorted by children under 5. This is the outreach list. Two Central Oakland tracts score 100 on poverty alone (student housing) and have no young children, so they drop out here. Estimated lead-paint homes apply the HUD American Healthy Homes Survey prevalence by construction era (87% of pre-1940 homes, 69% of 1940 to 1959, 24% of 1960 to 1977).

Tract Neighborhood or municipality Percentile Children under 5 % built pre-1940 Poverty % Est. lead-paint homes
4626 Stowe Township 93 437 45.7 20.5 1,260
2613 Summer Hill 97 413 23.4 42.4 632
1918 Brookline 92 379 56.9 11.2 1,850
1306 East Hills 97 354 27.1 48.7 695
4838 Homestead Borough 94 335 40.1 26.8 973
5619 Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar 95 333 20.9 37.6 622
1102 Highland Park 90 310 67.7 3.5 1,730
5625 Sheraden 97 281 62.7 24.4 893
501 Middle Hill 95 278 34.4 39.1 471
5524 McKeesport 97 267 51.3 31.9 1,024
5220 Pitcairn Borough 90 259 42.2 19.1 943
5140 Rankin Borough 96 254 33.2 35.5 550
2620 Spring Hill-City View 98 234 55.8 29.6 899
2703 Brighton Heights 91 234 53.8 13.2 690

All 383 tracts, with GEOIDs, are in the spreadsheet.

Does the map match what the county actually measured?

Allegheny County has required two blood lead tests before age 2 since 2018 and publishes the results by ZIP code every year. The 2025 numbers (children under 6 tested; elevated means 3.5 µg/dL or more) were pulled from the health department's public map on October 14, 2026 and joined to the predicted score for the same ZIP. Among the 75 ZIPs with at least 50 children tested, the Spearman rank correlation between predicted and measured is 0.803. Housing age alone gives 0.678. Sorting those ZIPs into quarters by predicted score:

Predicted-risk quarter Score range ZIPs Children tested 2025 Elevated % elevated
Quarter 1 (lowest predicted risk) 13-41 18 7,910 60 0.76%
Quarter 2 41-54 18 4,735 100 2.11%
Quarter 3 54-69 18 5,847 186 3.18%
Quarter 4 (highest predicted risk) 71-100 21 5,461 355 6.5%
Scatter plot of predicted ZIP risk score against measured percent of children with elevated blood lead in 2025
Each dot is a ZIP; dot size is the number of children tested. Pennsylvania was not one of the eleven states in the published validation, so this is the same check run on the county's own numbers.

The county's ten worst ZIPs in 2025, with the map's score for each

ZIP Area (county label) Children tested Elevated % elevated 2025 Predicted score % built pre-1940
15208 Pittsburgh (Homewood North, North Point Breeze) 228 29 12.72% 79 61.8
15132 McKeesport 523 56 10.71% 100 40.3
15104 Braddock, Rankin 161 17 10.56% 100 47.8
15210 Pittsburgh (Mt. Oliver, St. Clair) 621 60 9.66% 96 51.1
15207 Pittsburgh (Hazelwood, Hays, Lincoln Place, New Homestead) 264 22 8.33% 96 52.9
15214 Reserve Township, Ross Township 342 28 8.19% 86 39.9
15110 Duquesne 152 12 7.89% 90 43.5
15148 Wilmerding 52 4 7.69% 89 52.3
15045 Glassport, Lincoln 108 8 7.41% 68 35.7
15206 Pittsburgh (East Liberty, Highland Park, Shadyside) 613 40 6.53% 68 49.7

7 of these 10 are also in the map's 10 highest-scoring ZIPs with at least 1,000 homes. The misses are informative: 15208 is the county's worst ZIP but scores in the 80s because it averages Homewood with Point Breeze. The tract table above resolves that. Countywide in 2025, 708 of 24,472 children tested came back elevated (2.89%).

Every parcel, by the year it was built

County parcel records carry a year built for 449,285 parcels. 162,407 of them were built before 1940 and the median parcel dates to 1950. The pattern is the same one the tract map shows, down to the block.

Map of every Allegheny County parcel colored by construction era
Red is pre-1940, orange 1940 to 1959, yellow 1960 to 1979, gray 1980 or later. Parcel counts by mailing city are in the spreadsheet and CSVs.

ZIP codes with the most lead-paint-era homes

ZIPs at least half inside the county, sorted by the estimated number of homes with lead-based paint. The risk score here is the simpler 0 to 100 score used on the ZIP and address lookup, so anyone can type their own ZIP and see the same number.

ZIP Place Risk score Housing units % pre-1940 % pre-1980 Median year Poverty % Est. lead-paint homes
15212 Pittsburgh 77 15,937 56.5 89.3 1938 18.9 10,238
15221 Pittsburgh 66 17,621 37.8 86.8 1950 19.4 9,752
15206 Pittsburgh 68 17,004 49.7 78.7 1940 14.0 9,680
15210 Pittsburgh 96 12,828 51.1 93.4 1938 23.3 8,170
15235 Pittsburgh 56 16,942 10.7 92.6 1958 13.2 7,860
15217 Pittsburgh 73 12,582 51.2 85.5 1938 13.2 7,604
15216 Pittsburgh 64 11,194 51.7 94.4 1938 7.0 7,205
15227 Pittsburgh 60 13,952 20.9 91.2 1955 11.8 6,989
15237 Pittsburgh 35 19,332 6.7 68.3 1971 4.3 6,670
15202 Pittsburgh 73 10,555 47.4 89.7 1943 10.3 6,393
15108 Coraopolis 34 18,179 14.0 60.9 1973 5.7 6,270
15132 McKeesport 100 10,511 40.3 89.6 1947 32.0 6,052
15205 Pittsburgh 58 12,241 33.4 75.5 1957 12.1 5,966
15236 Pittsburgh 41 14,066 7.4 83.8 1959 7.7 5,810
15102 Bethel Park 39 14,160 9.6 76.8 1964 4.3 5,564
15120 Homestead 69 9,514 37.4 92.2 1950 14.7 5,462
15213 Pittsburgh 85 11,349 33.7 72.2 1959 48.2 5,385
15136 McKees Rocks 53 11,551 25.3 71.8 1962 18.0 5,057

All 119 ZIPs that touch the county are in the spreadsheet, with the share of each ZIP's land that falls inside Allegheny.

What the state's surveillance data says (2023)

Area Ages Children tested % of population tested Confirmed ≥ 3.5 µg/dL % of tested Confirmed ≥ 5 µg/dL % of tested
Allegheny County 0 to 23 months 10,248 43.52 278 2.71 163 1.59
Allegheny County 0 to 71 months 19,887 27.47 693 3.48 426 2.14
City of Pittsburgh 0 to 23 months 2,387 45.90 108 4.52 n/p n/p
City of Pittsburgh 0 to 71 months 4,428 27.50 286 6.46 n/p n/p

Pennsylvania Department of Health, 2023 Childhood Lead Surveillance Annual Report, Tables 9 to 12. Confirmed per the CDC 2016 case definition. The city tables publish only the confirmed total at or above 3.5 µg/dL (n/p = not published).

How to read this, and what it is not

  • The percentile is a prediction of where lead hazards concentrate, built from housing age and poverty. It is not a measurement of any child or any house. The 2025 check above is why it can be trusted here.
  • Tract estimates come with sampling error. Differences of a few points between neighbors are noise; the top and bottom quarters of the county are solid.
  • Student-heavy tracts (Central and North Oakland, the Bluff) score high on poverty without many young children. The children-under-5 column is the corrective.
  • Estimated lead-paint homes are expected counts from national prevalence by construction era, not inspection results. A home-by-home answer needs a test.
  • Nothing here uses medical records, any child's result, or owner names. Every input is a public dataset, listed below.

Sources

Download everything (zip) The brief (PDF) The spreadsheet (Excel) Get one of these for your area

Questions or corrections: Eric Ritter, Fluoro-Spec Inc., eric@detectlead.com, 631-461-1838.