Last year American families sold a record 4.1 million homes, and the number looks to move even higher in 1997. We hope these folks know where to get their all-important lead-paint forms and radon kits. Lead paint, found in most pre-1978 houses, is the latest obsession of the regulatory industry. Forget to hand over the right set of lead forms in the right order to your buyer, and you could find yourself spending the summer with your lawyer.
Decades of heavy regulation have left many homeowners with a list of things to worry about. How long that list has grown is the subject of d recent study by Cassandra Chrones Moore, adjunct scholar with the Washington based Competitive Enterprise and Cato Institutes. Dr. Moore's "Haunted Housing: How Toxic Scare Studies Are Spooking the Public out of House and Home" shows how government attempts to protect families from government-defined health hazards often hurt them instead.
Start with radon, which makes most people light up with images of Los Alamos. In reality, few in the science community think indoor exposure to this natural gas poses any kind of significant risk. But that didn't keep the federal government from inventing the Indoor Radon Abatement Act and State Indoor Radon Grants Program, dedicated to radon education and radon hazard reduction. Elementary kids thrilled to "Jeff Meets the Intruders," a National Theater for the Environment play about the evils of dust, passive smoke and radon that toured Pennsylvania thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Some of their parents meanwhile got to experience the EPA more directly. Lucky towns like Montclair, N.J., chosen as EPA clean-up models, took a hit in property values. Home buyers today may pay what amounts to a "radon tax" in extra construction precautions taken almost purely to insure against possible litigation or property value loss.
Is this not beginning to remind some people of the last great danger to global health and the human species? Back in the 1960s and 1970s, scientists and government officials predicted up to 50,000 asbestos-related deaths a year. The number seems to be more like 600, with a good share of those resulting from occupational exposure. As far as Dr. Moore can document, precious few school janitors-let alone a child-have ever come down with asbestos disease as a direct result of sitting in an asbestos-insulated basement. Dr. Moore estimates that school children have done without $200 billion in funds for textbooks and teaching over the years so that school adminis trators could rip out asbestos.
So now it's lead's turn. Lead levels that used to be the American norm are now blamed for hyperactivity and reduced intelligence in children. Certainly, the Lead Poisoning Prevention Act pass ' ed during the Bush Administration has driven down home prices and cut supply of low- income housing. Following rules on lead removal mandated by federal and state law can cost families between hundreds and tens of thousands. This "lead tax" also hits landlords. In Maryland, for example, landlords must have rental units cleared for lead hazard before they hand keys to tenants. Realtors can also be fined up to $10,000 a day if they fail to warn of lead obligations.
The lead police of course have their own beneficiaries: the sinecured employees of federal and municipal health departments, consultants, hazard remediation firms, tort lawyers. From lead- lined Chicago, the firm of Much Shelist reports it is investigating some 900 potential lead cases. Then there are the lobbies, working hard to keep the anxiety levels high. When the Centers for Disease Control recently released data showing a national decline in lead poisoning, the executive director of the nonprofit Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning sent out a worried fax: "Ironically, this impressive progress may undermine our resolve to finish the job of eliminating lead poisoning ... I hope you will editorialize in support of a significant national initiative...."
Judge Louis B. York of New York's Supreme Court must be an answer to their dreams: He recently imposed fines of $5,000 a week on the city and threatened to imprison the Housing Commissioner for failing to speed lead removal from apartments housing children under seven years of age.
Any modern environment has the potential to pose dangers, some more serious than others. These home-based threats, however, should serve as case histories of liberalism's apparent incapacity to modulate the too large financial and bureaucratic claims that its good intentions impose on people. Lead, radon, asbestos-it all sounds so reasonable on Day One. Years later, it's mostly an exercise in expensive unreason.
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