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Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation

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102 points Brajeshwar | 1 comments | 31 Aug 25 01:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.198s | source
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SilverElfin ◴[31 Aug 25 02:08 UTC] No.45079701[source]▶
I wonder what the accuracy of the data is like. And what do you do about damaged pipes? I read that cities lose a lot of water to leaks. Doesn’t that also mean pollutants can get in? And it won’t matter if your pipe is lead or whatever else.

An aside: lead exposure is thought to lead to increase violence. I wonder if Chicago having the most lead pipes is also a contributing cause of their (reputed) crime problem.

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1. nkrisc ◴[03 Sep 25 15:43 UTC] No.45117112[source]▶
> An aside: lead exposure is thought to lead to increase violence. I wonder if Chicago having the most lead pipes is also a contributing cause of their (reputed) crime problem.

It would be a drop in the bucket, if it's even a measurable contributing factor at all.

The primary cause is relatively boring: a century of racist housing policy, policing, under-investment, which results in a self-sustaining vicious cycle of poverty and crime. Couple that with broader national issues like the gutting of local manufacturing industry, the crack epidemic, the "war on drugs" and more and crime is what you get.

Chicago was (and still is) a segregated city, achieved indirectly through redlining and other thinly-veiled policies. Like many things, it's probably going to take much longer to fix the problem than it took to create it.