High‐Resolution Housing Data for Primary Prevention: What Address‐Level Records Add to National Lead‐Based‐Paint Screening

Abstract

Deteriorating lead‐based paint in housing built before the 1978 residential ban remains a primary source of childhood lead exposure, reaching children through house dust and soil. Most U.S. hazard investigations follow a child's elevated blood lead test; for programs that look for hazards first, national and state maps, ours included, score housing age by census tract or county. We report a database of per‐address year‐built values for 48,634,671 homes in 41 states and D.C. (34.5 percent of U.S. housing units), assembled from 119 public assessor and parcel services and released with harvest code and record‐level provenance tooling. Harvested age distributions reproduce the independent Census estimate (Spearman 0.958 across 657 counties; tract‐level 0.74 to 0.95). We then compute, from national survey rates by construction era and at equal testing effort, what each resolution step adds to expected screening yield, the share of tested homes containing lead‐based paint. Blind canvassing yields 29.3 percent, county targeting 60.5, and ordering addresses by construction age 87.0. The tract rung reached 66.2 percent in Miami‐Dade County, Florida, where 4.6 percent of parcels predate 1940, and 84.7 in Erie County, New York, where 32.8 percent do; address ordering added 11 and 2 points. In 34,138 inspected New Jersey rentals, mostly in visual‐assessment municipalities, older homes more often had a recorded lead‐based paint hazard, also within census tracts; the yields were not tested. For proactive programs, the database ranks homes for testing. It records no occupants, and only an inspection shows whether a home holds lead paint.