This year, on Memorial Day, Coretta Johnson and her fiancé, Mack Flowers, wanted to invite their great-nieces over to celebrate.
The two little girls like to run around the backyard and throughout the three-story house Johnson and Flowers own on a small street in Glenville. Johnson used to babysit them at the home while their mom was at school.
Johnson learned in 2022 that the oldest girl, then age two, had high levels of lead in her blood. When Johnson grew concerned that the paint on her house was a source of lead poisoning, the fun at her Glenville home disappeared. This year, Johnson had no children over to celebrate Memorial Day. When the kids do visit, she’s strict about limiting what they can touch or do.
“Because I’m scared, you know,” Johnson said. “They little, you know, and I don’t want them touching anything or looking out the windows and them to put their fingers in their mouth.”
Lead poisoning can damage a child’s developing brain, leading to irreversible delays and behavioral issues. Johnson said she stopped providing childcare for the two children because of the lead – hurting her income and her niece’s ability to go to school.
The same year she learned one of the girls was poisoned, Johnson learned about a City of Cleveland program she hoped could make her home lead-safe for her great-nieces. The city had $9.7 million in federal money to help clean up lead in homes in Glenville, which for decades has had among the highest percentage of children exposed to lead in the city. Cleveland officials had been promising to make headway in fixing the problem since at least the 1990s, when the health department found that 86% of children tested had high levels of lead. In 2023, that number was closer to 19%. (The level of lead in a child’s blood considered dangerous has changed over the years.)
Johnson filled out the 13-page application.
She sent the city six months’ worth of bank statements and proof of income, which had to be low enough to meet the federal government’s requirements. The city required birth certificates and blood screening tests for visiting children under the age of six. Cleveland asked Johnson for a notarized document about income and a form affirming they lacked homeowner’s insurance due to financial hardship. This paperwork, Johnson would soon find out, was just the beginning of the process.
Nearly three years later, Johnson is still waiting. The lead paint on the outside of her house is still peeling, still a lead poisoning risk. And she’s not the only Glenville neighbor who applied to the program years ago who has nothing to show for it. Despite sweeping commitments in the last six years from the city’s public and private institutions to tackle lead poisoning, the problem stubbornly persists – as do the city’s struggle to move money out the door.
In decades past, the City of Cleveland lost federal lead grants for failing to spend the money quickly enough. History nearly repeated at the end of May: The federal grant Johnson hoped to use almost expired with about $7.6 million left.
When the grant began in 2020, Cleveland projected that it would make 312 homes lead-safe by May 2025. By June 2025, it had fixed up 35.
At the last minute, the federal government gave Cleveland one more year to use the dollars. Cleveland says it’s made improvements, from increasing the number of contractors to hiring a third-party vendor to manage them. By next May, Cleveland is supposed to complete 150 homes.
The city says Johnson’s home will be assigned a contractor within a week. Johnson said, at this point, she’s utterly frustrated.
“Where’s the money?” Johnson said. “They worried about the Browns stadium. They worried about all the wrong things, and at the same time these little kids is getting infected with lead. It’s messing with their development and messing with them learning.”
“So where’s the rest of the money for the neighborhood?”
A merry-go-round of challenges to prevent lead poisoning
Cleveland has more money to address lead poisoning than ever before. The Lead Safe Cleveland Coalition has almost $92 million in commitments from private, philanthropic and public entities, while the city is overseeing $20.3 million in public grants. But in recent years, advocates, council members and landlords have expressed frustration that dollars aren’t disbursed quickly enough. The federal government joined that group when it red-flagged the Glenville grant in 2023 for being behind schedule.
The Glenville grant, the city says, has been caught up in a merry-go-round of challenges – a shortage of contractors and staff, federal limits on how much can be spent fixing up each home, and lists of eligibility requirements set by the federal government and added to by Cleveland.
Signal Cleveland reviewed application records for the Glenville grant. The city got more than 160 applications, though some are for multiple units at the same address. Four residents whose applications were initially approved in 2021 or 2022 shared in interviews the reasons their homes aren’t fixed today. One older woman couldn’t move items out of her basement, another had unpaid property taxes, and the third received construction estimates that were higher than the grant would cover. In Johnson’s case, delays were the result of staffing shortages and process challenges, a city spokesperson wrote in a statement.
“We’re not satisfied,” said Alyssa Hernandez, Cleveland’s director of Community Development. “We’re upset about this stuff every day. We’re working really hard to make it right for the residents. It is a wicked problem, though.”
The city got the grant to address lead in the Glenville area in 2019 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and initially struggled to bring in applicants due to the pandemic. Since then, in quarterly reports, Cleveland has detailed additional obstacles to spending the money. One recurring challenge: A shortage of contractors licensed to safely oversee renovations that involve lead paint. The city hires the contractors to do the work and pays them with the grant money.
In 2022, the city worked to find more contractors. It held a citywide recruiting event, which more than 150 people attended. It also started accepting contractor applications year-round.
Quarterly reports show contractor numbers did not change much right away but did increase by 2025. The grant started off with four contractors, and by the end of 2023 it had six. At the end of March this year, the city said in a quarterly report that it had 13 crews. And in May, the city told city council members it had 17.
“We’re upset about this stuff every day. We’re working really hard to make it right for the residents. It is a wicked problem, though.”
Cleveland Director of Community Development Alyssa Hernandez
The city also battled HUD rules that limited how much money could be spent on each property. Cleveland found many houses required more money than the federal limit at the time of around $25,000. In 2022, Hernandez asked the City Council to set aside $3 million in federal COVID relief funds to help pay for extra expenses at each home. Council did. But Hernandez said using the COVID relief funds in tandem with the HUD grant ended up being difficult in practice because the two pots of federal money had different requirements.
“From an administrative perspective, it was probably a wash,” Hernandez said.
The city used about $100,000 of the COVID relief funds to assist with Glenville lead projects, according to a spreadsheet the city shared with Signal Cleveland.
City Council Member Rebecca Maurer, who’s advocated to address lead poisoning for nearly a decade, said the city added rules on top of already complex federal requirements that include income restrictions and environmental reviews.
“God, we make it so difficult. And then from what I understand, Cleveland looked at that and said, ‘It’s gotta be even harder,’” Maurer said.
Maurer released a 15-page report last week that detailed some of the bureaucratic and customer service challenges to removing lead hazards from Cleveland homes. That included the slow spending of city and federal money as well as lead-safe grants and loans. She also suggested the city could focus the work either in certain neighborhoods or on fixing the riskiest parts of older houses — wooden doors, windows and porches — to speed up progress.
Hernandez said she has tried to remove some of the strict requirements residents have to meet to get their homes fixed. When she started in her position in 2022, she told staff to “strip anything that was above and beyond what HUD” required, but the directive wasn’t carried out. Now, the city has removed some of those rules, she said, such as requiring a child under six to live in a rental home in order for it to qualify.
The city has no plans to do away with another rule it sets: that property taxes must be current or on a payment plan for a home to qualify. That requirement protects the investment of city or federal money, and the residents’ assets, from potential foreclosure, wrote Jorge Ramos Pantoja, a city spokesperson. The city, he said, refers people to organizations that can help with overdue taxes.
Lead poisoning risks in Glenville homes
In March of 2023, more than six months after Johnson first submitted her application to Cleveland, a city employee asked her to send updated bank statements “since so much time has passed,” according to emails Johnson shared with Signal Cleveland. The city approved Johnson and Flowers’ application for the program in April 2023.
A city inspector visited Johnson’s home that June and confirmed lead hazards existed in the windows and exterior walls of the home due to its peeling paint and lead dust in the windowsills. He also noted holes and cracks in the roof, documents show. Johnson said the inspector told them that the home needed a new roof before the program could make it lead-safe. The couple found a way to get the new roof through the Veteran’s Administration later that year.
The inspector came back and looked at the home again, Johnson said.
“He said, ‘Contractor will be in touch with you shortly,’” Johnson said. “And that was it, basically. And then we heard from no one.”
Signal Cleveland spoke with two other residents who had similar experiences with the city. Both had applications approved years ago, but their homes still aren’t lead-safe.
One Glenville resident, Cheryl Benson, was approved for the program in 2022, documents show. She spoke highly of her experience working with the city. But in 2025, she said, the city removed her from the program because she was behind on her property taxes. She wasn’t eligible to set up a payment plan with the county. She initially signed up for the program after learning one of her grandkids had lead poisoning, she said, a repeat of what she went through with her son decades ago, in a different house.
“Lead poisoning is not nothing new to me because in 1988, my youngest child had lead,” Benson said. “And he had severe lead poisoning to where he was hospitalized twice.”
Another woman, Donna Felton, was approved for the program in 2021. But progress stalled after the program asked her to move large items stored in the basement before work could begin, she said. At age 63, she couldn’t move them herself and said the city didn’t know of any programs that could help. In February, records show the city denied her application after they reached out and didn’t receive a response. Felton said the city did call her in February to ask if she was still interested in continuing the program, to which she said she would call back with an answer. Felton said she wasn’t given a timeline within which she needed to respond.
“They wait four years to call you, and then a week or a month to deny you after calling you after four years?” Felton said.
City Council Member Kevin Conwell, who represents Glenville, was frustrated by Felton’s case and those of other residents he’s heard from who applied to the lead program without results. He said he understands that residents have responsibilities in the program – but the city has some, too.
“You can easily say, OK, ‘She’s not doing what she’s supposed to do,’” Conwell said. “But what about you doing what you’re supposed to do?”
The city should improve communication with residents by returning phone calls and providing more written instructions, he said.
Coretta Johnson and Mack Flowers’ three-story home in Glenville, left. Peeling lead paint is a hazard at the home, an inspector found. Photos by Kenyatta Crisp for Signal Cleveland
‘I’m not trying to be a burden, but it’s been almost three years’
Last year, Johnson grew frustrated at the lack of progress on her house. She started emailing and calling city staffers and the mayor’s office, asking for an update on her application.
“I’m trying to do the right thing,” Johnson said. “Every time you ask me to give you something, I give it to you. But then I don’t get no results.”
Hernandez said her department “certainly” hears from individuals with frustrations like Johnson’s around long wait times.
She said housing projects by nature take a long time, which is compounded when there are not enough crews to fix a house right away or staff to conduct environmental reviews.
“When the end product is a massive home repair at the level of thousands at a time, it’s not a quick process,” Hernandez said.
This May, Johnson exchanged emails with Tony Scott, the assistant director of community development. Scott told Johnson that the city was in the process of completing its next steps on her house – completing construction specifications and finishing an environmental review – before it assigned a contractor.
Johnson responded: “In all due (sic) respect this is what I have been told … almost a year ago … The others I understand are busy but they don’t return calls … I’m not trying to be a burden but it’s been almost three years.”
“I understand your frustration Ms Johnson,” Scott wrote back. “I truly do. All I can do is show the results and work with the team to get your results.”
Because Johnson’s application had been on the shelf so long, it had expired when the city revisited it this year, Scott said. According to federal rules, the city had to check Johnson’s eligibility for the program again, meaning sharing more documents and bank records.
After Johnson handed over more paperwork, the city flagged in May that she was now delinquent on property taxes – another hiccup.
After two and half years of delays, the city told Johnson it would have to postpone her application if she did not send over paperwork “immediately” showing she’d set up a payment plan for the taxes, according to emails Johnson shared with Signal Cleveland.
She set up a payment plan, and the city approved her to move forward.
Cleveland hopes a new contractor will speed the process
The city said it has completed the construction specifications for Johnson’s address – and in late June, officials told Signal Cleveland that a contractor would be assigned within a week.
The city said residents like Johnson will be the focus throughout the next year of the program – people who have already applied for the grant but haven’t yet seen investment. The city closed its intake program to new applicants unless the home has a child who currently has a high lead level.
“We have more applicants than we have the ability to provide service to at this point,” Hernandez said, adding the program would focus on getting work done to the homes of existing applicants instead of searching for more.
To do that, the city signed a $6 million contract with NextGen Construction. The hope is that the company can act sort of like a general contractor. NextGen will help move applicants from one of the first steps – a lead inspection – to assigning a construction crew to complete the work. The group will be required to have 40 contractors willing to take projects, Scott said.
“Instead of us trying to manage a few dozen contractors, I have one relationship,” Hernandez said.
NextGen can also pay contractors up front instead of having to reimburse them, which Hernandez said is important for small businesses.
With the new company in place, the city is aiming to make 150 more units lead safe in Glenville by May 2026 – about four times as many as it has completed since the grant started in 2020.
If Johnson’s home is included in that number, it would mean she could open it back up to her two great-nieces and the other infants and toddlers in her life. Her fiancé’s niece recently wanted to bring her young kids over. Johnson wants them to be able to crawl safely at her home.
Right now, though, she’s skeptical that she’ll see it happen.
“They told me they was going to help me uncontaminate my house, so I can enjoy my family and my family can enjoy me,” Johnson said. “But that’s not happening. That’s not happening at all.”
