Environmental Racism is Real. Ask Chicago.

• Author: Goozner, Merrill
• Position: Chicago, Illinois

LIKE MANY CITIES, IT'S COPING WITH BROWNFIELDS, POLLUTION, AND MINORITY NEIGHBORHOODS WITH ILL-HEALTH CONDITIONS. HERE'S HOW LEGAL ACTION AND PHYSICAL RELOCATION CAN PROVIDE SOME RELIEF.

Environmental health scientists have long known that people who live in lower-income city neighborhoods suffer a disproportionate share of the ill-health effects of air, water, and soil pollution.

Over the past 60 years, their neighborhoods--built to serve industrial workers when city factories were booming--have become reservoirs for displaced workers and low-wage service-sector employees as corporations moved jobs to the suburbs, the non-union South, and overseas. After being torn down, the abandoned factories became brownfields, their land poisoned by a century of unregulated toxic dumping.

Transit planners added insult to injuries by targeting the same neighborhoods for the interstate highways that bisected cities. Aided by discriminatory Federal Housing Authority mortgage policies and bank redlining, white residents used the new interstates to flee to America's burgeoning suburbs along with many of the good jobs.

The remaining businesses were often the worst polluters--scrap metal processors, for instance. And new businesses willing to use the vacant land--warehouses and intermodal transfer facilities, for the most part--often polluted as much or more than the prior occupants due to their daily flow of 18-wheel diesel trucks.

In recent years, community activists in cities across the country have launched campaigns to combat the ill-health effects of this legacy, often under the banner of fighting environmental racism. Most of the worst-off neighborhoods are majority Black and Hispanic.

In Chicago this spring, several local groups on the city's predominantly Hispanic Southeast side scored a major victory when outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot signed a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) promising to consider the health impact of industrial and commercial projects before issuing permit approvals.

The conflict began three years ago when the city issued a permit allowing Reserve Management Group/Southside Recycling to build a scrap metal processing plant in the neighborhood. The Southeast Environmental Task Force, the South East Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke, and People for Community Recovery filed suit, claiming that the company's proposal to build the facility constituted discrimination based on race since the...