Maribel Rivas with three of her ve children: Itzae, 2; Aries, 8; and Jose, 13. Their Townhouse Terrace apartment in Southeast Portland had radon nearly six
times the level federal authorities say calls for a specialized ventilation system.
Housing agencies can neglect radon because HUD doesn’t require them to do
testing on the nation’s 1 million public housing units. The most the federal
housing department did was to “strongly encourage” local authorities to test in
2013.
HUD never bothered to see if anyone listened. So The Oregonian/OregonLive
checked.
The newsroom contacted housing agencies from Portland, Oregon, to Portland,
Maine, spanning 26 states and nearly 125,000 units of public housing. Reporters
distributed test kits to residents and led dozens of public records requests with
housing authorities, reviewing thousands of pages of congressional records, HUD
documents, federal radon studies and local agencies’ testing results.
LEARN: Read about where we got the data for this story and how we analyzed it.
The effort took more than a year, producing the only national picture of radon
efforts by public housing authorities and HUD.