A “Community Foundation” That Forgot About the Community

The South Bend Heritage Foundation, Inc. owns and manages residential properties across South Bend, Indiana. Its portfolio is not made up of new construction. These are old buildings. The oldest property named in the EPA’s enforcement action was built in 1862. Others date to 1880, 1884, 1892, 1895, and 1902. Several entire clusters were built in 1917 and 1925.

Lead paint was not banned in residential housing in the United States until 1978. Every single property in this enforcement action was built before that date. That is not a coincidence. That is the entire legal basis for why disclosure laws exist. Federal law is crystal clear: if you rent or sell a pre-1978 home, you must tell the person moving in what you know about lead paint.

The Foundation did not do that. Again and again and again, across 45 documented transactions between 2019 and 2023, it failed.

What the Law Actually Requires

The federal Disclosure Rule, in place since 1996, is not complicated. Every time a landlord rents a pre-1978 home for more than 100 days, they must include four things in the lease: a statement about any known lead paint hazards, a list of any lead-related records they have, a confirmation from the tenant that they received this information and a pamphlet about lead risks, and signatures certifying everyone agrees on the facts.

These requirements exist because lead poisoning does not announce itself. Children swallow paint chips. Tenants breathe dust during renovations. The hazard is invisible and the damage is permanent. The disclosure paperwork is the bare minimum the law asks of a landlord. The South Bend Heritage Foundation could not manage even that.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What a Paper Violation Actually Means in a Child’s Body

The EPA’s enforcement document describes this case in the bloodless language of compliance: violations, lessees, lessors, attachments, certifications. Forty-five violations. That framing makes it easy to picture a stack of paperwork with missing checkboxes. That is not the reality. The reality is that real people, with real children, signed leases on buildings that were standing before automobiles existed, and the organization responsible for those buildings never handed them the one piece of paper that could have changed everything.

Lead paint does not become dangerous the moment someone moves in. It becomes dangerous when it ages, chips, flakes, or turns to dust. In buildings from 1862, 1880, 1884, and 1892, that process has been happening for over a century. The Lead Hazard Information Pamphlet that tenants were supposed to receive explains exactly this: how to spot deteriorating paint, what to do before renovating, how to protect young children from dust and chips. The Foundation’s tenants did not get that pamphlet attached to their leases in the way the law requires. They moved in without the baseline knowledge that the law says every single tenant in a pre-1978 building deserves.

The cruelest part of lead poisoning as a public health crisis is that by the time parents notice something is wrong with their child’s development, the damage is already done. Lead accumulates in bones and brain tissue. At high enough concentrations it causes irreversible neurological damage: lower IQ, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, reduced impulse control. Children under six are the most vulnerable, and the Disclosure Rule specifically calls out the presence of children under six as a key trigger for its protections. These violations did not happen in a vacuum. They happened in a city where low-income families rent in old housing stock because that is what they can afford.

There is no section in this EPA document that tracks whether anyone in these 45 units had their blood lead levels tested. There is no count of children who lived in these apartments. The enforcement record deals only in paperwork. But the paperwork exists precisely because exposure to lead in old housing is a proven, documented, ongoing public health emergency. When the Foundation skipped the disclosure, it did not just break a rule. It removed the one early warning system the government had placed between families and a poison that has been in those walls since before anyone alive today was born.

Legal Receipts: The Exact Words From the Government’s Own File

“Respondent failed to include the required statement disclosing either the presence of any known lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards in the target housing or a lack of knowledge of such presence, either in or attached to, one lease agreement identified in Paragraph 22, Line No. 22 above.” EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraph 31 — Violation 1: Disclosure Failure

“Respondent failed to include a list of any records or reports available to the lessor regarding lead-based paint and/or lead-based paint hazards in the target housing that have been provided to the lessee or a statement that no such records are available, either in or attached to, each of the 40 lease agreements identified in Paragraph 22 Line No. 1 to 10 and 12 to 42, above.” EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraph 36 — Violations 2-41: Records Failure, 40 Leases

“Respondent failed to include a statement by the lessee affirming receipt of the information set out in 40 C.F.R. § 745.113(b)(2) and (3) and the Lead Hazard Information Pamphlet required under 15 U.S.C. § 2696, either in or attached to, the 2 lease agreements identified in Paragraph 22, Line No. 26 and 35 above.” EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraph 41 — Violations 42-43: Lessee Affirmation Failure

“Complainant considered the nature, circumstances, extent and gravity of the violations, and, with respect to Respondent, ability to pay, effect on ability to continue to do business, any history of such prior violations, the degree of culpability.” EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraph 53 — Civil Penalty Determination

“Based on Respondent’s documented inability to pay claim, and in accordance applicable laws, EPA conducted an analysis of Respondent’s financial information and determined that the Assessed Penalty is an appropriate amount to settle this action.” EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order, Paragraph 54 — Inability to Pay Reduction

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health: The Silent Epidemic Hiding in Old Paint

Lead poisoning has no cure. Once lead enters a child’s bloodstream and embeds in brain tissue, the neurological damage is permanent. The CDC states there is no safe level of lead in a child’s blood. The federal Disclosure Rule exists because the government recognizes that tenants in old housing face a real, documented risk of exposure, and informed tenants can at least make choices: ask for an inspection, request remediation, avoid renovating, keep children away from peeling paint. The South Bend Heritage Foundation’s 45 violations stripped that choice from tenant after tenant.

The properties in this enforcement action are concentrated in the 46601 zip code, a South Bend neighborhood with a significant renter population and a housing stock dominated by exactly the type of pre-1978 structures that carry the highest lead risk. Children under six who live in homes with deteriorating lead paint are the most medically vulnerable population on earth when it comes to this specific toxin. The Disclosure Rule explicitly references this risk. The Foundation managed buildings with exactly this risk profile, for years, without completing the required paperwork.

The enforcement order covers lease agreements signed between 2019 and 2023. That is four full years during which tenants moved into buildings some of which predate the Civil War era’s end, without receiving the baseline documentation the government has required since 1996. Every health consequence that flows from uninformed exposure during that period sits, in part, on the Foundation’s failure to check a box.

Economic Inequality: Who Lives in Pre-1978 Housing in South Bend

Lead paint is not equally distributed across America’s housing stock. It concentrates in old buildings. Old buildings are cheap. Cheap buildings are where low-income families live. This is not an accident of history; it is a structural feature of how American housing markets work. Wealthier families rent newer units with modern materials. Working-class and poor families rent the stock that has been around for a century or more. The South Bend Heritage Foundation’s portfolio, with properties built as far back as 1862, is a textbook example of the housing that low-income renters in a mid-sized Midwestern city occupy.

The Foundation describes itself as a community-serving nonprofit. Nonprofits operating in affordable housing have the same legal obligations as any for-profit landlord. The Disclosure Rule does not carve out an exception for organizations with charitable missions. The families renting from the Foundation were not receiving charity. They were paying rent, month after month, on buildings where the landlord was required by law to be transparent about poison in the walls. The Foundation accepted their rent. It did not deliver the transparency.

The penalty the Foundation will pay, $55,566.56 total (enough to pay rent for roughly 4 to 5 months for a South Bend family paying the city’s median rent), will be spread across four installments over a year. The Foundation successfully argued it could not afford more. The families who signed those 45 agreements and moved into those old buildings had no equivalent legal mechanism to argue they could not afford the risk.

The Price the EPA Put on Your Right to Know

What Now? Who’s Watching, and What You Can Do

The EPA’s link for this consent agreement and final order can be found here: https://yosemite.epa.gov/oa/rhc/epaadmin.nsf/Filings/7428660781A86B6A85258CC4006EE0E5/$File/TSCA-05-2025-0025_CAFO_SouthBendHeritageFoundationInc_SouthBendIndiana_22PGS.pdf

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