Oh yes, cover the thing up and let someone else deal with it. The same strategy employed for years with lead paint.
We can either spend billions covering it up over and over again, or we can deal with it once and be done.
Capping leaded soil isn't great, in that you can't look at dirt and guess that it's old enough to probably be bad the way you can with paint or tile, and many plants tend to have deep roots that'll suck the lead right back up to the surface.
That said, so long as it is disclosed properly to future occupants, it's better than doing a bad job (accidentally or otherwise) and telling everyone it's been taken care of.
If lead paint is sequestered, it poses no threat. When you start trying to scrape all of it off and replace it is the point at which you've now exposed yourself and everyone that might inhale some of that dust.
Same thing with asbestos. As long as it's somewhere that you won't inhale/ingest it, there isn't a problem. Asbestos brake pads, problem. Asbestos siding on a house, only a problem if you're doing construction that disrupts it.
Similarly, if you have a location with high levels of lead in the dirt or are concerned about it, perhaps you should import soil and do some raised bed planting.
What does this mean? Dismantling the community and replacing everything above the bedrock?
Is this a random guess or based on anything?
What rate does it remove at? You’ll need to depopulate a quarter of American housing during that period. Are we sure none of the lead will emerge in the volatiles from burning?
You would definitely need to look into the lead coming out the chimney; if it does, you just dry the material and accept less concentration. (Or use a more complex technology like a molten salt reactor to keep it from escaping the chimney, but if it's eg concentrating in the leaves, drying it out is probably almost as effective as burning it.)
You only need to kick people out of their homes if the soil is so dangerous they can't live there anyway. You're not disturbing the soil more than gardening would.
There would definitely be huge challenges, my main point is that it's a naive assumption that you necessarily have to relocate people to remediate the soil. It doesn't necessarily have to work quickly as much as steadily. If you can do it in 10 years by relocating people and 100 years without, it probably makes sense to go the slow route and the soil will get less and less dangerous all the time.
If you're curious, you might look up bioremediation and biomining.
The article is specifically about unsafe lead levels.
> If you can do it in 10 years by relocating people and 100 years without, it probably makes sense to go the slow route and the soil will get less and less dangerous all the time
Versus just covering it up? What kind of cost-benefit analysis does that pass?
All kinds of toxic substances exist below the top soil. I agree it would be nice if we could poof away the problem. But given its scale, that’s not a real option. (For context, if we can do this we can solve the housing crisis.)
Is that a good use of resources? I don't have the data to form that opinion, and I'm not going to gather it for a casual Internet conversation, so I just don't know.