Which Council District Should You Move To If You Want Your Lead Pipe Replaced?

September 5, 2024

Green dots represent lead service lines replaced in 2024. Red dots represent all identified lead service lines in the city.

If you are thinking about renting or buying in Troy but you are concerned about the city’s lead pipe crisis, we very strongly recommend that you look at properties in City Council Districts 2, 5, and 6.

After downloading the city’s lead service line inventory this morning, we can see that 161 (85%) of the 190 properties to have their lead service lines replaced in 2024 were in those three districts. This is particularly notable because the lead pipes in those three districts combine to a total of just 55% of the city’s lead service line inventory. Looking at just this information, we can imagine how somebody might conclude that families in some neighborhoods are getting preferential treatment from city administrators for political reasons.

Obviously, it would be preposterous to think that the Mantello administration would disproportionately and overwhelmingly spend its unnecessarily limited lead pipe funding on households in swing districts held by Republicans, since that would be a very sick thing for them to do. We imagine that the administration would instead agree that it simply has not made enough progress replacing lead pipes this year for there to be a sample size big enough for anyone to meaningfully analyze.