What $5,000 Cannot Buy Back

Imagine signing a lease on an apartment. You hand over your deposit. You get your keys. You move your kids in. Nobody tells you the building was constructed before 1978. Nobody tells you that paint in homes built before that year routinely contains lead. Nobody hands you a pamphlet explaining that if your toddler touches the windowsill and puts their fingers in their mouth, they could be ingesting a neurotoxin with no safe level of exposure. Nobody tells you because the landlord decided that paperwork was someone else’s problem.

This is what happened to the tenants of nine residential properties in Kalamazoo, Michigan, between August 2020 and September 2021. The properties were owned or co-owned by Josue Chipizinski and his limited liability corporation, Bro, LLC. The addresses are real, documented in federal records: 719 Stuart Avenue Apartment 1, 719 Stuart Avenue Apartment 2, 1020 Bonnett Street, 407 Myrtle Street, 710 Stuart Avenue, 720 Stuart Avenue, 1027 Bonnett Street, 1008 Bonnett Street, and 1010 Bonnett Street, all in Kalamazoo, Michigan 49007.

The tenant at 407 Myrtle Street signed their lease on October 10, 2020. Their lease term ran through September 30, 2021, an entire year. According to the EPA’s count in its final order, that single lease contains five distinct federal violations. Five separate legal obligations that were owed to that person, and five separate times the law was ignored. The person at that address spent a year in a pre-1978 home with no written acknowledgment of the lead paint risk sitting in the walls around them. They may have had children. They may have been pregnant. The law does not require Chipizinski to care about either possibility; it simply requires him to disclose the risk and hand over a pamphlet. He did not do it.

Federal regulations exist with blunt specificity on this point. The warning statement required by law includes the words: “Housing built before 1978 may contain lead-based paint. From paint, paint chips, and dust can pose health hazards if not managed properly. Exposure is especially harmful to young children and pregnant women.” That sentence exists because Congress, decades ago, decided that renters deserved to know this before they moved in. Not after. Not when a child started showing symptoms. Before.

Lead poisoning in children does not announce itself. It causes damage slowly, invisibly, accumulating in blood and bone. By the time elevated blood lead levels show up in a pediatrician’s test, the neurological harm has already started. There is no medication that reverses it. There is no catch-up. The children who lived in these nine homes during those lease terms will carry whatever exposure they received for the rest of their lives, and their parents never had the information they were legally owed to make an informed decision about whether to sign those leases at all.

Josue Chipizinski paid $5,000 to resolve 41 documented federal violations. That is $122 per violation. The families in those buildings paid nothing for their risk exposure. They just lived it.

The Exact Words in the Federal Record

These are direct quotations from the EPA’s Consent Agreement and Final Order, signed September 30, 2025. Nothing below is paraphrased.

Who Actually Gets Hurt When Landlords Skip Lead Disclosures

Public Health

Lead paint disclosure requirements exist because lead exposure in residential settings is a documented, preventable public health crisis. These failures in Kalamazoo are not administrative paperwork problems. They are health risks that were imposed on tenants without their knowledge or consent.

• Pre-1978 housing, the category covering all nine of Chipizinski’s properties, is the primary source of childhood lead poisoning in the United States. The CDC estimates approximately 500,000 U.S. children ages one to five have blood lead levels above the reference value of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter. There is no safe blood lead level in children.
• Lead poisoning causes irreversible neurological damage in children, including reduced IQ, impaired attention, behavioral problems, and developmental delays. These outcomes are permanent; there is no medical treatment that reverses the damage once it occurs.
• Pregnant women are a specifically named high-risk group in the federal warning statement Chipizinski was required to include in his leases. Lead exposure during pregnancy crosses the placental barrier and can cause miscarriage, premature birth, and developmental harm to the fetus.
• The tenant at 407 Myrtle Street occupied that pre-1978 property for a full year, from October 10, 2020 through September 30, 2021, with no written disclosure of lead hazards, no pamphlet on prevention, and no certifying documentation that any safety communication ever occurred. For any child under six or pregnant woman in that household, the withheld information was potentially life-altering.
• Michigan, where these properties are located, has documented elevated rates of childhood lead poisoning, a legacy compounded by the Flint water crisis and the widespread prevalence of pre-1978 housing stock in post-industrial cities like Kalamazoo. A landlord operating in this context who consistently skips lead disclosures is operating in a region where the baseline public health risk is already elevated.

Economic Inequality

Lead paint disclosure failures are not distributed equally across the housing market. They cluster in rental housing, in older building stock, and in communities where tenants have the least economic power to walk away from a bad lease or sue a non-compliant landlord.

• All nine properties are rental units in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a post-industrial city with a significant renter population. Renters, particularly those in lower-cost housing markets with older building stock, are the demographic most likely to occupy pre-1978 homes and the demographic least likely to have independent access to lead hazard inspection resources.
• The EPA’s required pamphlet, “Protect Your Family From Lead in Your Home,” exists precisely because tenants in affordable housing markets cannot be assumed to have background knowledge about lead hazards. Withholding that pamphlet removes the only free, federally funded resource those tenants were entitled to receive.
• The cost of treating lead poisoning in a child, including medical monitoring, developmental intervention, and educational support services, falls primarily on families and public health systems, not on the landlord who failed to make the disclosure. The $5,000 penalty Chipizinski paid does not touch those downstream costs.
• A tenant who is never told their home contains potential lead hazards cannot make an informed housing choice. They cannot negotiate for remediation. They cannot request an inspection. They cannot document exposure for a future legal claim. The withholding of required disclosures systematically strips lower-income renters of the informational tools they need to protect themselves and their families.
• The maximum civil penalty per violation under the Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act is $22,263. Across 41 documented violations, the theoretical maximum penalty was over $912,000. The assessed penalty was $5,000, with the remaining exposure waived due to Chipizinski’s stated limited ability to pay. The tenants who bore the actual risk received no compensation, no remediation, and no formal notification from the EPA’s enforcement action.

What the Penalty Actually Costs Per Family

Where the Fight Goes From Here

This consent agreement resolves civil penalties only. It does not remediate a single home. It does not compensate a single tenant. It does not require Chipizinski or Bro, LLC to conduct lead inspections or make disclosures they still owe to future renters. The EPA’s order certifies that Chipizinski is now “complying with the Act and the Disclosure Rule,” but that certification is self-reported, and the penalty that was supposed to deter this kind of conduct cost him $556 per property.

Who Is Accountable

• Josue Chipizinski, owner of Bro, LLC. The individual who owned, controlled, and executed leases on all nine properties. Named respondent in the EPA’s consent agreement and final order signed September 30, 2025.
• Bro, LLC, the corporate entity through which the leasing was conducted. Named co-respondent. Corporate title: limited liability corporation, state of Michigan. The corporate veil did not protect Chipizinski from individual liability here; both he and the LLC are co-signatories to the consent agreement.
• The consent agreement docket number is: CA-05-2026-0003. This is the public record number for tracking this matter.

Regulatory Watchlist

• EPA U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 5: The enforcing agency. Compliance with the Residential Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Act (TSCA Section 1018) is enforced through EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division. Contact: Region 5 headquarters, Chicago, Illinois. Public docket access available through EPA’s ECHO database.
• HUD U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: HUD shares enforcement jurisdiction under 42 U.S.C. § 4852d for lead paint disclosure requirements in federally assisted housing. If any of these nine Kalamazoo properties received federal housing assistance, HUD has independent enforcement authority.
• MDHHS Michigan Department of Health and Human Services: Michigan’s state health agency tracks childhood blood lead levels and manages lead poisoning prevention programs. If you or your child lived in any of these nine properties during the lease terms listed in Appendix A of the consent agreement, MDHHS can provide referrals for blood lead testing.
• CFPB Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: If any of these tenants faced unlawful eviction or security deposit retention tied to properties where mandated disclosures were never made, CFPB’s housing complaint process is an available channel.

What You Can Do

• If you rented from Bro, LLC or Josue Chipizinski in Kalamazoo between August 2020 and September 2021: Contact the Kalamazoo County Legal Aid or Michigan Legal Help (michiganlegalhelp.org) to understand whether you have a private right of action under 42 U.S.C. § 4852d(b)(5). The federal law provides for private civil suits against landlords who violate the disclosure rule, separate from the EPA enforcement action.
• Get your children tested: If you have a child under six who lived in any pre-1978 Kalamazoo rental between 2020 and 2022, request a blood lead level test from your pediatrician. Michigan Medicaid covers this test for children under six. The test is the only way to know if exposure occurred.
• Report non-compliant landlords: If your current or past landlord in a pre-1978 home did not provide a lead hazard warning statement or the EPA pamphlet when you signed your lease, file a complaint directly with EPA Region 5 at the enforcement email listed in the consent agreement: bartz.james@epa.gov or persoon.carolyn@epa.gov. Every report creates a paper trail.
• Organize with your neighbors: Kalamazoo has an active tenant rights community. Kalamazoo LACASA, local mutual aid networks, and the Michigan Statewide Housing Action Committee provide organizing support for renters facing landlords who violate safety and disclosure laws. The best protection against the next Chipizinski is a building full of tenants who know their rights before they sign.
• Push for stronger enforcement: Contact your EPA Region 5 representative and your congressional delegation (Michigan’s U.S. Senators and your House representative) to demand that EPA lead paint enforcement penalties be assessed at a level that actually deters violations. A $5,000 penalty for 41 federal violations is a business expense, not a deterrent.