A recent report on the distribution of pollution and industry across Chicago could be a first step to addressing decades of discriminatory planning, zoning and land-use policies in Chicago.
But, some residents on the South and West sides say their communities have been overlooked yet again.
Coined a cumulative impact assessment and released by the Johnson administration in September, the report is intended to capture how exposure to toxins such as ozone and particulate matter, socioeconomic factors and health conditions vary throughout the city. It is part of a voluntary compliance agreement the city negotiated with the federal government in May following a two-year federal investigation that found the city culpable of steering heavy industry away from white communities to Black and Latino communities.
One of the report’s key deliverables — a map identifying census tracts most burdened by pollution and vulnerable to its effects — did not consider proximity to the city’s 24 industrial corridors. These sweeps of land are zoned for manufacturing and where the city’s heaviest industries are concentrated.
The most burdened census tracts, which are designated environmental justice neighborhoods, will be subject to special considerations in future zoning and permitting decisions. Specifics are expected to be outlined in a forthcoming ordinance, which many residents doubt will rectify the unequal burden of industry across the city if it relies on the current map.
“Residents can smell that something went wrong with the committee when they did these calculations,” said Theresa McNamara, a McKinley Park resident and chair of the Southwest Environmental Alliance, at a City Hall hearing in October.
Not considering industrial corridors has resulted in blatant inconsistencies, according to Michael Cailas, an associate professor at University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health.
“Because of the methodologies (the city) applied, some census tracts that should be environmental justice neighborhoods are not considered so,” he said.
In Pilsen, for example, Perez Elementary School and Benito Juarez High School are both next to the Kinzie Industrial Corridor and less than a quarter mile away from H. Kramer and Co. Brass and Bronze Foundry, which was fined by the EPA in 2013 and 2021 for polluting the air and soil with excessive amounts of lead.
The two schools are also less than half a mile apart and in neighboring census tracts, yet only Benito Juarez is in a designated environmental justice neighborhood. Ironically, Perez is in the same census tract as the foundry.
However, the pollution from facilities such as H. Kramer and Co. affects students at Perez and Benito Juarez the same, according to Cailas and McNamara.
“(The city is) not taking into consideration those smells, those odors that we smell everyday when we step outside of our door. Do I have to cross the street to get clean, fresh air or what?” McNamara said.
The census tract containing the entirety of the historic Stockyards Industrial Corridor is also not an environmental justice neighborhood.
“(It) doesn’t make sense. If you know Chicago, there’s a problem,” said Cailas.
He proposed that the city create buffer zones of a set radius around industrial corridors to zero in on areas within census tracts that are heavily burdened by nearby industry. This would ensure that Perez is not forgotten and account for frequent heavy diesel traffic in and out of manufacturing sites, which residents were also upset was excluded from calculations.
While the methodology recognized that industrial corridors affect surrounding communities, they were excluded from calculations because they “sometimes represent zoning and land use designations, rather than actual presence of pollutants and proximity to potentially polluting facilities,” according to a statement Thursday from the Chicago Department of Public Health, which is responsible for inspecting and citing polluters.
Other factors that were part of the calculations, like proximity to hazardous waste facilities and freight rail lines, are better measures of the presence and relative impact of industry, according to the health department.
Even so, residents said this list is still missing proximity to scrap metal facilities, asphalt plants and heavy diesel truck routes.
As residents expressed these concerns during the hearing, city officials stressed the assessment is a living document and health department policy director Kate McMahon said the city is exploring the possibility of allowing communities to self-designate as environmental justice neighborhoods. However, it is unclear what the revision or self-designation processes will entail.
McNamara anticipates that the ordinance being drafted by the health department and the Office of Climate and Environmental Equity using the existing report will be welcomed by industrial companies.
“What (the city is) doing, is what the polluters are going to love,” McNamara said.
She fears that companies will use the assessment to justify their operations in areas that the map fails to designate as environmental justice neighborhoods, especially those near industrial corridors.
“If we have this map, it’s gonna screw up everything because these polluters will say, ‘This map says it’s OK. I can use this map as my flag so that I can lay down stakes and put my polluting company in this community,'” she said. “It’s a welcome mat. That’s how they’re seeing it.”
Poor communication, tangled loyalties
As several residents criticized the cumulative impact assessment during the recent hearing, Charles Perry sat and listened.
Despite being a longtime West Pullman resident and community activist, he did not hear about the assessment until a few days before the meeting, weeks after community engagements had been conducted and analyzed.
Nevertheless, the issue is important to him. After spending 19 years in federal prison for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, he sees a similarity between industrial pollution and crime.
“As a drug dealer, I was polluting my community too. I infested it with these narcotics that were just very dangerous. There’s a correlation right there with my behavior, with big companies’ behavior, and with politicians’ behavior. It’s the same principles,” he said.
If the city sees certain communities as dumping grounds, those communities will see themselves in the same way, Perry said.
Keen to end the pollution, he brought 12 young people from his South Side community with him to the public meeting. None of them had heard about the report and were shocked to learn how nearby industrial sites affect their health.
Perry suspected that his community’s ignorance was intentional on the city’s part, pointing out that the government has shown it can effectively communicate messages if it wants to, such as with the urban revitalization project INVEST South/West.
“There were billboards and signs on the expressway talking about INVEST South/West, right? Well none of that about (the cumulative impact assessment). None of that about this because it is an issue, but we don’t want to alarm folks either. Right? We don’t want to alarm those who have no idea this is an issue,” said Perry.
The city only focused its outreach in the neighborhoods where it perceived voices to be loudest on environmental justice issues, namely those on the Southwest Side, according to Perry.
Alfredo Romo, a McKinley Park activist who co-chaired the communications and engagements working group, also recognized that ongoing work will be required to reach everyone, especially those whose livelihoods are entangled with polluting industries.
He began working in manufacturing and chemical plants at a young age to support his family. Only after a battle with cancer forced him to stop working industrial jobs did Romo become more attuned to how some industrial facilities fail to contain toxins on their premises and launch into activism.
“A lot of Black and brown folks, immigrants in particular, are working for these types of industries. It’s very hard for us to bring this level of information to them when these are the companies that are offering jobs to them. They’re putting food on their table and paying their bills,” said Romo, who is executive director of the Southwest Side-based group Neighbors for Environmental Justice.
Trouble trusting the city
Despite many residents feeling excluded, the city has boasted that the cumulative impact assessment is a model for community engagement. It prioritizes residents’ experiences more than previous citywide studies such as the 2020 Air Quality and Health Report, which already found South and West side neighborhoods bisected by industrial facilities and major highways face the poorest air quality and highest prevalence of related chronic diseases like asthma.
“With the cumulative impact assessment, we have taken a more fully comprehensive approach, and it started with building relationships with community partners who live these issues every day,” said Megan Cunningham, the health department’s former managing deputy commissioner, during a September news conference unveiling the report.
Front-line environmental justice activists were invited to join working groups coordinated by the health department and environment office.
McNamara said she was asked to participate several times but declined because she doubted the city was committed to holding polluting industries accountable.
Other community activists, including Romo, decided to partner with the city despite initial reservations.
“I actually was very pessimistic about it. … There was a lot of mistrust just because of the history of the city and the patterns that we continue to see through questionable policies. They continue to redirect more heavy industry into overburdened communities,” he said.
Right before Romo joined, his organization released a report documenting how the city has dropped charges, doled out light fines and negotiated tickets with large polluting companies so as not to disturb business-as-usual over the last decade.
Even though he thought the community outreach — which included public meetings, event tabling, focus groups and online public comment — was productive, he has reservations that the cumulative impact assessment will produce systemic change.
“There’s a part of me that continues to carry a lot of doubt as a community organizer,” Romo said, shortly after the report was published.
Department-specific commitments to protect pollution-burdened communities outlined in its “Environmental Justice Action Plan” were superficial, according to Romo. He would like to see an in-depth analysis of departments’ operations and a concrete accountability protocol.
Instead, Dave Graham, a longtime health department employee who the inspector general’s office singled out for playing a critical role in greenlighting a 2020 botched smokestack demolition that encased six blocks of Little Village in a toxic dust plume, was promoted to oversee environmental health and safety compliance in December 2022.
“I just don’t know how you reconcile this,” said Romo.
However, the health department stands behind Graham and his ability to hold polluters accountable.
“No one person was responsible for the Hilco implosion, and we have full confidence in the many devoted public servants who attempted to anticipate and prevent negative impacts on the Little Village community, who have worked since the demolition to implement needed reforms, and who continue to improve and protect public health of the community and the environment through new structural changes,” a department spokesperson said Thursday.
To the floor or back to the drawing board?
The health department and environmental equity office expect to introduce the ordinance establishing new protocols to protect environmental justice neighborhoods in early 2024.
If the ordinance passes, responsibilities may fall on the new Department of the Environment, which was reestablished under Johnson’s 2024 budget approved by the City Council last week. The department would absorb and expand the environmental equity office, which has been spearheading the report.
“It can only strengthen our work, so that’s exciting for us,” said Gabriela Wagener-Sobrero, the environmental justice manager for the office.
Local environmentalists have been pushing for an environment department since it was shuttered in 2011 by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Responsibilities of the former department were dispersed among other departments and the environmental equity office was created last year as a policy-focused body. The health department was put in charge of inspecting and citing polluters, and activists believe they have been too lenient.
Romo said the success of the assessment is contingent on strong enforcement, and he would like to see pollution inspections back in the hands of a robust Department of the Environment, rather than under Graham’s environmental health and safety compliance division of the health department. But, city officials said, for now, the health department will continue to be in charge of environmental permitting and enforcement.
As for the ordinance, it may face an uphill battle as residents like McNamara call for the map to be revised to include industrial corridors before it is used to write any policy.
“We want them to do a cumulative impact assessment, but we want them to do it correctly. We don’t want them to pick and choose what they think we’re breathing and what they think we’re not breathing,” said McNamara, who doubts the existing map will satisfy a city’s voluntary compliance agreement with the federal government.
Failure to comply could result in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal housing assistance.
“I hope the mayor doesn’t sign off on this. I hope the mayor says, ‘Get back to the table,'” McNamara said.
