Eh, I learned it primarily by word of mouth from gardening enthusiasts who are buying homes. But here’s one article about the phenomenon: https://www.hgtv.com/outdoors/gardens/planting-and-maintenance/when-to-test-garden-soil-for-lead-contamination-and-how-to-garde
I don’t have a lot of statistics to back it up except that it seems worse on the East Coast and Rust Belt
As far as lawns go, thanks to lead paint and leaded gasoline from the mid-20th century, that land isn’t even one you’d consider suitable for growing food unless your house was built after the 1980s. At least, as long as you’re trying to avoid getting lead in your produce.
Really feels like our grandparents’ generation did a lot to fuck over our current generation. So many of these issues trace back to when even the Boomers were children.
There didn’t even need to be a deliberate cartel for this to happen either.
Amazon realized it could make money and grow the company by offering cloud services and now AWS runs something like 30% of the internet.
Google turned their leading search algorithms into an extensive tracking and advertising platform that integrates with most of the internet.
Apple decided that people don’t need to be allowed to tinker with and repair their own devices so that hardware can be locked into a four-year cycle of planned obsolescence.
A whole bunch of profit-maximizing firms did the hard job of controlling everything for the governments.