With an above-average concentration of older housing stock and one of the most urbanized populations in the country, young children in Rhode Island are at particularly high risk for lead poisoning, which is caused primarily by exposure to deteriorating lead-based paint and dust and soil contaminated by such paint. Recognizing lead poisoning as "the most significant environmental health threat in R.I.," the state General Assembly passed the Lead Poisoning Prevention Act in 1991 with the goal of "reducing exposure to environmental lead and thereby preventing childhood lead poisoning." The Act proposed meeting this goal by requiring all housing with young children to be "lead-safe" in an attempt to ensure safe living conditions without imposing excessive abatement costs on property owners.

A comprehensive program was established and administered by the state Department of Health (DOH), with four major steps in the process of creating lead-safe housing: screening, inspection, abatement, and enforcement. I analyzed data on the four steps for a two-year period to identify the major impediments to this process. The analysis revealed that the most significant obstacle to creating lead-safe housing is failure of owners to comply with the lead law in three ways: pro-actively, i.e., compliance before lead hazards are identified through an inspection by the DOH and before a child becomes poisoned; voluntarily, i.e., compliance with a notice to abate after inspection by the DOH but before any enforcement action; and generally, i.e., compliance with a notice to abate following both inspection and enforcement action by the DOH.

I examined possible factors inducing each type of compliance to determine ways to increase the amount of lead-safe housing for young children in Rhode Island. First, I assessed various owner characteristics to determine their relationship to voluntary compliance, revealing that the only owners in voluntary compliance are those who seek and obtain financing and have less remediation work to perform. Second, I isolated other factors contributing to general and voluntary compliance by studying the Massachusetts lead program for the same two-year period, identifying more available funding and an enforcement process that better deters non- compliance as reasons for higher compliance rates in Massachusetts. Third, I used experiences in Massachusetts and Maryland to demonstrate that a credible liability threat and insurance incentives structured around that threat have the potential to facilitate pro-active abatement of lead hazards by property owners in Rhode Island.

Ultimately, the compliance process must be structured to "filter" cases effectively through the system. First, owners who have the means to abate lead hazards must have incentives to do so in a pro-active manner. Second, owners whose properties are cited for lead hazards and who truly face financial hardship must be identified and given access to loan programs or granted variances so that they can comply voluntarily by performing remediation work themselves. Third, owners who refuse to make "good faith" efforts to comply or delay the process must face vigorous prosecution, either in housing court or by the attorney general's office in the most egregious cases. Such a system would lead to the most efficient use of public and private resources to create more lead-safe housing in Rhode Island.