Amy Marx
Amy Marx
New Haven Legal Assistance Association
As a staff attorney in the housing unit at New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA), I work with my colleagues to fight health disparities that arise due to housing conditions that exist in the rental housing stock in which low-income New Haven residents live, including mold and lead-based paint. These health hazards in the built environment cause serious harms to health, often with life-long impacts. NHLAA represents individuals seeking judicial relief from these health hazards and works on systemic issues such as reforming governmental structures to provide preventative protections and remedial actions.
Type of work: Abstract
Approximately 300 children suffer from lead poisoning in New Haven from chipping and flaking lead-based paint in their homes. New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA), a non-profit legal aid organization that provides free legal services to low-income individuals and families, has worked for the last two years to provide access to justice for families with children poisoned by lead paint in their rental units to get the protections to which they are entitled under the city and state law.
NHLAA represented a number of families individually in lawsuits to order the City to conduct lead hazards inspections and ensure abatement of any such hazards found. Four different judges have ruled in favor of the families, ordering protections for the children.
In response, the City has refused to share data publicly on the nature and scope of the lead poisoning crisis, backtracked on the meaning of the current law, and proposed new laws that provide weaker protections.
NHLAA has now filed a class action lawsuit and lobbied against the proposed new law, fighting back against the argument that it is too expensive to protect our most vulnerable children and rather insisting that New Haven should remain a national leader in protecting children from life-long harm and minimizing the societal costs of this health epidemic.
Even With the Law on Their Side: What Happened When Low-Income New Haven Parents Got Equal Access to Justice and Tried to Protect Their Children from Lead Poisoning