It's not just Flint — every major American city has hazardous amounts of lead hurting kids

[Proserpina]

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/19/10790534/lead-soil

...Urban soil lead contamination is woefully understudied

The main thing we know about non-catastrophic lead in the United States is that the biggest problem is inner-city soil contaminated by decades-old gasoline. Gas went unleaded in the mid-1970s, but all the old lead burned in the past was dumped into the air and then fell back to earth. The tiny lead particles don't biodegrade. They mix in with the soil, get tracked into houses, and, most of all, end up on the hands and toys of little kids, who have a marked tendency to stick anything and everything into their mouths, leading to the ingestion of lead.

This lead is everywhere, but it's most heavily concentrated in places that were close to a lot of vehicle traffic during the leaded gasoline days — in other words, the centers of big cities.

But there's very little systematic research on the lead situation in most cities. An exception is New Orleans, which happens to benefit from proximity to one of America's leading lead researchers, Tulane's Howard Mielke. Here's what he found:

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[MisterP]

1. even Beverly Hills is full of trenches with petroleum and arsenic waste

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=125066&page=1
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/12/beverly_hills_toxic_soil.php

now of course BH has money to blow on cleanup and council members, unlike most of the people left to die a decade early or cut 20 IQ points--BHHS even embezzled a cool $10 mil on keeping the subway out, and poured further millions into rent-a-radical outfits to halt any transit

BUT the suburbanites were in fact among the first mass movement to point out that farmland and wild flora and fauna were disappearing under the ranchettes and cul-de-sacs, and that indeed many of them were built atop toxic waste: so even if it's only a few state-shielded rich people joining this strain of environmentalism we still get their resources!
http://www.amazon.com/Crabgrass-Crucible-Suburban-Environmentalism-Twentieth-Century/dp/0807835439/

[Igel]

2. It is a problem.

However, blood lead levels have pretty consistently been falling in urban kids since the '80s.

Falling faster for some groups than for others but that is probably due to extraneous factors.

[Proserpina]

3. Makes urban agriculture a little more challenging

[bemildred]

4. Well we've always wanted to emulate the Romans. nt