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Chicago sometimes touts itself as \u201cthe most American of American cities.\u201d The nickname is intended to be a reference to the city\u2019s gritty, go-getter attitude, its so-called melting pot of cultures. But to many low-income residents and people of color, that superlative doesn\u2019t come off as a compliment so much as a constant reminder of the many decades of structural inequities now amplified by the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n
Little Village was largely shaped by Chicago\u2019s segregationist housing policies. In the 1950s and 1960s, Black and Latino families were pushed out of Northern neighborhoods and into the area, limited by where they were permitted to buy houses. When Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Chicago in 1965, he set up his temporary residence in nearby North Lawndale, in part to highlight the city\u2019s race-related disparities in housing. Today, Little Village\u2019s population is 88 percent non-white (58 percent Latino and 23 percent Black).<\/p>\n
The area\u2019s economic hardships also go back several decades. In 1979, the Little Village community was home to around 1 million industrial jobs, primarily in the meatpacking, steel, and manufacturing industries. But by the mid-1980s, 37 percent of those jobs had been eliminated. The loss of those comparatively stable union jobs was devastating, squeezing many residents into low-wage, temporary jobs.<\/p>\n
But even as the jobs disappeared, the industries left a lasting mark on the community\u2019s health. A 2001 study from the Harvard School of Public Health<\/a> attributed 41 premature deaths, 2,800 asthma attacks, and 550 emergency room visits annually to the neighborhood\u2019s old Crawford and Fisk coal plant. Community groups including the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization fought for years to have the plant shut down, a goal they eventually achieved in 2012. But the site, contaminated with waste including lead, selenium, and arsenic, sat untouched until 2017, when the city council rezoned the area for high-end commercial and tech development.<\/p>\n Community relief over the coal plant\u2019s removal was short-lived: The city soon announced that a warehouse development, expected to bring hundreds of diesel fuel trucks every day, would be constructed on the same site. People who lived nearby were worried about the trucks\u2019 impact on air quality. A 2018 study by local high school students<\/a> in Little Village found that on average 90 diesel trucks per hour drove through the community\u2019s main road, with more expected once the development was completed in 2021.<\/p>\n The neighborhood’s environmental woes weren\u2019t limited to the air: When the last remnants of the former coal plant were demolished last April, during the initial throes of the coronavirus pandemic, the implosion sent large dust clouds<\/a> floating through the streets for hours. Local activists say the blast rocked the lead service lines that run through the community, potentially allowing harmful materials to seep into residents\u2019 water. (Chicago has approximately 400,000 lead service lines<\/a>, more than any city in the country.)<\/p>\n In 2018, the National Resources Defense Council created a map of Chicago<\/a> outlining these kinds of environmental burdens and pollution. The map illustrates the cumulative vulnerabilities in Little Village and other nearby southwest communities, as well as on the Southeast Side<\/a>. Little Village falls into the range of highest burden. The nearby downtown communities, which are more than 70 percent white, fall into the least burdened range.<\/p>\n \u201cThe question is always: why aren’t resources going towards the communities that need it?\u201d said Jos\u00e9 Acosta-C\u00f3rdova, an environmental planning and research organizer at LVEJO. \u201cAnd in Chicago, environmental justice is where all of the struggles \u2014 economic justice, racial justice, immigration, labor issues \u2014 meet.\u201d<\/p>\n When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it became clear that the neighborhood\u2019s environmental woes were exacerbating the local health risks associated with the disease. An LVEJO study<\/a> of the years leading up to the pandemic found Little Village residents were already about 1.2 times more likely than average to have their water shut off compared to the rest of the city — and 52 times higher than the Near North Side.<\/p>\n In March 2020, the Illinois Commerce Commission announced an emergency moratorium on all utility shutoffs during the pandemic, but an investigation by the Intercept<\/a> found at least 16,165 Illinois households had utility shutoffs in September alone. (A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study<\/a> estimates that a national moratorium on these kinds of shutoffs since the onset of the pandemic could have reduced all infections by 9 percent and deaths by 15 percent.)<\/p>\n And the neighborhood\u2019s COVID-19 rates kept climbing. In November, hundreds of cars were lining up every day at the largest local drive-through testing site, according to one local news report.<\/a> One in nine residents<\/a> had a confirmed case of COVID-19.<\/p>\n The city\u2019s vaccine rollout plan did not seem to take these high infection rates into account, prioritizing those with specific jobs over those with place-based risk. But in Chicago, poverty and race strongly correlate with one’s proximity<\/a> and access<\/a> to health care and employment. While the city\u2019s decision about which groups to vaccinate first followed guidelines set at the federal level<\/a>, it put many residents of Little Village at a disadvantage because of the high local unemployment rate — as much as three times<\/a> that of the city\u2019s wealthier neighborhoods.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the way the city has been set up for decades, especially since deindustrialization, these communities have been neglected,\u201d said LVEJO\u2019s Acosta-C\u00f3rdova, whose family\u2019s roots on the West Side of Chicago go back 70 years. \u201cAnd now during a respiratory pandemic, our communities on the frontlines of dealing with respiratory issues and air quality issues aren\u2019t being given access.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/div><\/div> While the pandemic has exacerbated old racial and income-related disparities, some activists hope it has also ushered in an opportunity for the city to try to address these inequalities now that they have once again come to light.<\/p>\n During a January 2021 press conference, the Chicago Mayor\u2019s office announced they were in the planning stages of launching a \u201ccommunity engagement effort\u201d around COVID-19 vaccination on the South and West Sides. The city has also begun prioritizing residents by age — starting with those over 65 years old — along with certain essential workers like police, teachers, and bus drivers.<\/p>\n But the numbers are still damning. The New York Times\u2019 vaccine distribution tracker<\/a> ranks Illinois 47th out of 50 states for percentage of the population that has received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 43rd in the U.S. for the percentage of doses used. According to a press conference given by Dr. Allison Arwady, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, Chicago’s public vaccination sites are fully booked — but only with health care workers who have been eligible for seven weeks, not individuals based on age. And a recent report<\/a> found that employers of essential workers in Chicago say they have received little to no information from the city about how to go about vaccinating employees or when more vaccines will be available.<\/p>\n Grist reached out to the mayor\u2019s office for comment, which directed the request to the Chicago Department of Public Health for comment. CDPH did not respond by time of publication.<\/p>\n Acosta-C\u00f3rdova said access to resources like clean air, water, and now vaccines are why people need to keep these environmental injustices in mind when making future policy decisions. \u201cThese issues have been in Chicago for much longer than the idea of \u2018environmental justice\u2019 but framing these issues around environmental justice helps groups — Black, Latino, and Indigenous in particular — rally and bring all of our struggles together,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Acosta-C\u00f3rdova and LVEJO have continued to hold regular community dialogues about environmental justice, encouraging residents to get tested and advocating for currently eligible workers and residents to schedule vaccination appointments, but there is only so much the organization can do, he told Grist. It\u2019s up to the city, he said, to redefine its values and reframe its ideas about which communities are \u201cessential.\u201d<\/p>\n This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline Chicago\u2019s COVID-19 vaccine rollout put polluted communities last<\/a> on Feb 1, 2021.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/grist.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/chicago-fisk-coal-plant-little-village.jpg\")
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