Though it’s by no means as infamous as Flint, the lead-pipe problem in Chicago is so extensive as to appear practically insurmountable. The city required lead pipes in buildings until 1986, when federal law banned them. Last fall, the Biden Administration set a deadline to replace all lead pipes across the country within a decade; Chicago is currently on track to switch out some 412,000 service lines that are made of lead or contaminated by it, the most of any city in the nation, by 2076.
But while the amount and even the likely location of many lead pipes in the city have been well-known for some time, a new analysis by Grist, Inside Climate News, and the local public radio station, WBEZ, has for the first time put the location of all those lead pipes on an interactive map.
Not only can you look up individual addresses on the map to check their lead status — lead, suspected lead, galvanized (which can harbor bits of lead and still need to be replaced), or non-lead — the map allows you to look at how the lead status of different neighborhoods compares to the demographics of who lives there, too.
The Health Toll of Lead Exposure
There’s not a safe amount of lead to consume in drinking water, and exposure to the heavy metal can lead to a host of health problems, including cognitive issues, stunted growth, and both brain and nervous system damage in children, and high blood pressure, nerve disorders, and reproductive problems in adults.
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While lead exposure through drinking water is fundamentally an infrastructure problem, it’s one that disproportionately affects Black, Brown, and poorer Americans the most.
In Chicago, however, the problem is so pervasive that even majority-white neighborhoods have high levels of lead.
Most Service Lines Need Replacing
In 2024, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Stanford delivered a sobering assessment of Chicago’s water system: nearly seven in 10 children under the age of six live in households where tap water carries detectable levels of lead.
And according to the new map, 74% of service lines need to be replaced. Even in Lake View — home to high-rise apartments along Lake Shore Drive and to Wrigley Field, where about three-quarters of the population is white — over 50% of service lines need to be replaced. But even if lead is bad in whiter and wealthier Chicago, it is far, far worse in browner and poorer parts of the city.
Chicago’s South and West Sides Bear the Burden
“In majority-Latino census tracts, areas that in Chicago average around 1,500 households each, 92 percent of service lines require replacement,” according to Grist. “In majority-Black tracts, the figure is 89 percent.”
The map shows areas of lighter red, denoting comparatively lower levels of lead, in the neighborhoods closest to the Loop in the heart of the city. Chicago’s core, where buildings tend to be both newer and larger, and thereby would need bigger service lines that weren’t historically made out of less, has some of the lowest levels of lead.
Ringing around the city’s core and immediately outlying neighborhoods are swathes of much darker red — showing high levels of lead, particularly on the Southside and Westside, parts of Chicago with significant Black and Latinx populations — and deep, difficult histories of environmental racism. Calumet Heights, one of the darkest red areas on the map, needs over 96% of its lines replaced; the neighborhood is 92% Black.
In addition to Calumet Heights, eight more of the top 10 neighborhoods that have the highest percentage of pipes that need replacing are all on the South Side.