{"id":7495,"date":"2021-01-13T11:00:17","date_gmt":"2021-01-13T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=149406"},"modified":"2021-01-13T11:00:17","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T11:00:17","slug":"thousands-of-u-s-public-housing-residents-live-in-the-countrys-most-polluted-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/13\/thousands-of-u-s-public-housing-residents-live-in-the-countrys-most-polluted-places\/","title":{"rendered":"Thousands of U.S. Public Housing Residents Live in the Country’s Most Polluted Places"},"content":{"rendered":"
In some ways,<\/u> they couldn\u2019t be more different. Gerica Cammack is a Black woman from Alabama; Floyd Kimball is a white man from rural Idaho. Yet they\u2019re facing a similar ordeal. They\u2019re both single parents, forced by difficult circumstances to live in government-subsidized housing surrounded by pollution that is, or could be, poisoning their children. Like tens of thousands of people across the country, they live near, or on, some of the most toxic places in the nation. And the government has failed to protect them.<\/p>\n
In 2019, Cammack moved into the Collegeville Center, a public housing complex in north Birmingham, Alabama. She knew that moving into the neighborhood came with risk. The complex sits near a bevy of industrial sites that produced steel and iron and spewed pollution over nearby residents for decades. She\u2019d lived up the road years earlier and remembered how the fumes could be so overwhelming that the taste of them would linger in her mouth. But she was pregnant, homeless, and grateful for the apartment, so it was a danger she had to face.<\/p>\n
Little did she know that the Environmental Protection Agency had classified the area as a Superfund site, signifying that it was one of the most polluted places in the country. Testing had found the soil in her housing complex contaminated with lead, arsenic, and other carcinogens.<\/p>\n
More than 2,000 miles away, Kimball and his 4-year-old son live on a Superfund site as well. The federally subsidized apartment complex in Wallace, Idaho, they moved into three years ago, after Kimball lost his job, sits on one of the largest Superfund sites in the country. Though pollution from heavy metal mining was documented decades ago, neither the local nor federal government has moved people from dangerous conditions or sufficiently clean up the contamination. Meanwhile, many residents, including Kimball\u2019s young son, have been exposed to dangerous amounts of lead. Kimball\u2019s 4-year-old son hasn\u2019t yet begun to speak.<\/p>\n
An EPA analysis obtained by APM Reports and The Intercept found that more than 9,000 federally subsidized properties \u2014 many with hundreds of apartments or townhouses \u2014 sit within a mile of Superfund sites. Those properties are in 480 cities in 49 states and territories. But even that is an undercount. The list of 9,000 properties doesn\u2019t include several subsidized-housing complexes within a mile of Superfund sites.<\/p>\n
In most cases, the federal government has chosen not to relocate housing complexes near Superfund sites and made only piecemeal attempts to address the health threats. Housing officials often don\u2019t inform people who move into these housing complexes that a Superfund site is nearby. Neither the EPA nor the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the two federal agencies primarily responsible for protecting residents, regularly monitor the potential health threats to residents from nearby environmental pollution. In fact, some housing complexes near Superfund sites haven\u2019t been tested for contamination in years, according to the APM Reports and Intercept investigation. Even when testing is conducted and dangerous contamination is found, the pollution isn\u2019t always cleaned up.<\/p>\n
As a result, thousands of residents continue to live in places that are potentially dangerous to their health.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The problem is rooted in a history of the federal government developing public housing on cheap land in industrial, polluted areas. The approach was summed up in 1966 by Benjamin Lesniak, then executive director of the East Chicago Housing Authority in Indiana, when he noted the city\u2019s lack of available land for new public housing and floated a possible solution. \u201cWe can build them in vacant areas that are surrounded by industries,\u201d he said. Lesniak went on to oversee the construction of a housing complex on the site of an old copper smelter and a lead refinery in the city. (The complex was emptied<\/a> in 2016 after residents were exposed to elevated levels of lead and arsenic for decades.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Experts say many of the communities identified by APM Reports and The Intercept likely couldn\u2019t be built today in their current locations under state environmental regulations enacted after the EPA was created in 1970. Nearly a third of the roughly 9,000 public housing properties flagged by the EPA for their proximity to Superfund sites were built before environmental assessments were required under federal regulation.<\/p>\n The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act \u2014 commonly known as the Superfund law \u2014 passed in 1980 established a program under the EPA to clean up some of the nation\u2019s most polluted sites and hold corporations accountable for their environmental messes. A tax on polluters funded the program in its early years, but it expired in 1995. Since then, the government has had to pay for these massive cleanups, many of which have stalled because of funding shortages.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The residents \u2014 many of whom can\u2019t afford to live anywhere else \u2014 are left in a bureaucratic gap between various governmental agencies that lack the authority or resources to directly address the problem. The EPA and state environmental agencies have struggled to clean up Superfund sites and, in many instances, can\u2019t confirm that they\u2019ve contained the threat to human health. Local housing authorities lack the money to address pollution or test for contaminants, and it\u2019s rare for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to analyze the health risks or relocate people from hazardous housing complexes despite its own regulations requiring the agency to provide tenants with a safe and healthy place to live.<\/p>\n The problem is well known to housing officials. The inspector general\u2019s office that monitors HUD requested money in its 2020 annual budget to investigate the threat to public housing residents from Superfund sites, writing in its request, \u201cThe dangers posed to HUD programs by inadequately responding to this looming risk of unsanitary and unsafe housing are incalculable.\u201d<\/p>\n Following the East Chicago crisis, EPA and HUD officials agreed to meet quarterly to share information and address housing sites where there was concern about residents\u2019 health, according to a document<\/a> from an early meeting between the two agencies in 2017. Among the goals of the collaboration was to \u201ccoordinate communications with public housing residents.\u201d The EPA contends that it communicates with residents who live near Superfund sites. \u201cNotification to the community would occur, at a minimum, when a site is proposed and listed [as a Superfund site], and community involvement activities would continue throughout the cleanup process and be tailored to meet community needs,\u201d an agency spokesperson wrote in an email.<\/p>\n Superfund cleanups can take decades, though, and residents who move into a complex are often not informed of the nearby pollution. \u201cSometimes people know anecdotally,\u201d said Michael Kane, executive director at National Alliance of HUD Tenants, \u201cbut most of the time people that live on toxic sites don\u2019t know their kids are going out and playing on contaminated land, with lead and other toxins.\u201d Those who do know about the contamination receive little guidance from the government aside from general tips from health and environmental officials, such as monitor children so they don\u2019t eat soil and don\u2019t chew gum while gardening.<\/p>\n Eugene Goldfarb, a retired HUD official who oversaw the implementation of environmental regulations dating back to the EPA\u2019s earliest days, cautions that \u201cjust because there\u2019s contamination on the property doesn\u2019t mean that there\u2019s a pathway to adversely affect health and safety. That\u2019s an important distinction.\u201d<\/p>\n But hundreds of documents \u2014 including environmental assessments and reports drawn up by private consultants and government officials across the country \u2014 gathered by APM Reports and The Intercept reveal for the first time what\u2019s known about environmental hazards at public housing properties, which are occupied disproportionately by children, the elderly, and disabled people. Combined, the records show a troubling pattern, much like the one in Birmingham and Wallace, where people have been left exposed to hazardous conditions even years after the EPA or state officials found nearby pollution.<\/p>\n The few checks created by HUD often fall short. While local and federal housing officials are supposed to provide a safe environment, they aren\u2019t required to test to determine if environmental hazards pose a threat to human health. In fact, federal and state regulations typically require housing officials to test for contaminants primarily in one circumstance: when they are seeking money to redevelop or improve a property. It\u2019s a system that critics say prioritizes shielding lenders and developers from liability over residents\u2019 health.<\/p>\n Robert Weinstock, an attorney with the University of Chicago\u2019s Abrams Environmental Law Clinic who recently co-authored a report<\/a> on subsidized housing near toxic sites, said the problem is that a number of government agencies on the local, state, and federal levels are involved and none of them have taken decisive action to protect residents\u2019 health. \u201cWho is responsible?\u201d Weinstock said. \u201cEveryone and no one at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Since its founding in the years following the Civil War, Birmingham has been a center of steel and iron production. And the Collegeville Center public housing complex on the city\u2019s north side, built in 1964 on the edge of a pipe foundry, is surrounded by facilities that have fueled those industries.<\/p>\n The neighborhood faces a toxic threat both past and present. Poisonous remnants of heavy metal production at facilities long since closed \u2014 carcinogens like lead and arsenic \u2014 lace the soil. But there is also pollution that is ongoing and severe.<\/p>\n Today, the census blocks where the Collegeville Center sits in North Birmingham are subject to more dangerous emissions from local factories than 95 percent of census tracts nationwide, an analysis of EPA data shows. The area\u2019s toxic concentration scores \u2014 a measure of chemical releases weighted by toxicity \u2014 are three times higher than the citywide average. The top polluters, according to EPA data, are two facilities that produce coke, a fuel derived from coal that\u2019s used in the smelting of iron ore, and a steel plant. They have long been under scrutiny for dangerous emissions.<\/p>\n In 2018, the year before Gerica Cammack moved in, Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin sounded the alarm about Collegeville Center when he warned<\/a> the EPA\u2019s top administrator that \u201cthousands remain at risk including the 1,070 people living in 394 public housing units and 751 children attending Hudson K-8 school.<\/span>\u201d <\/span>Cammack knew there was pollution nearby, but she had little way to know how bad it was. And toxic chemicals in the air weren\u2019t her top concern at a time when she was so broke that she slept on the floor.<\/p>\n Like many residents in North Birmingham, she had come to think of pollution as simply a fact of daily life. People have long adapted by closing windows or taking laundry off the lines when the air grew thick with ash or smog. They grew up in it, worked in it, ate in it, and played in it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span><\/p>\n After moving in, Cammack, 27, tried to make a home for herself and her daughter, who is now 15 months old. Cammack\u2019s grandmother taught her to garden when she was growing up, and it always lifted her spirits. But when she tried to grow flowers outside her apartment, nothing would take in her front or backyard. She blames the soil\u2019s infertility on the pollution that\u2019s hung in the air and sunk into the ground in North Birmingham for as long as she can remember.<\/p>\n In the 1970s, Cammack\u2019s mom, aunts, and grandparents lived in the nearby North Birmingham Homes, a public housing complex less than a half-mile from Collegeville Center. The developments are divided by an area zoned for heavy industry and includes a metals scrap yard, a foundry, and a coke plant.<\/p>\n As in North Birmingham, where most residents are Black, the environmental burden from Superfund sites across the country falls disproportionately on people of color, who are also overrepresented in public housing for families. In the 1930s, public housing was built for people of all races temporarily laid low by the Great Depression. But over the years, the proportion of residents who were Black and Latinx grew. \u201cBecause of housing segregation and housing discrimination, in many cases across the country, low-income whites were better able to escape this housing,\u201d said Robert Bullard, an advocate and scholar who is sometimes called the father of the environmental justice movement<\/a>. \u201cPeople of color were more likely to be stuck in these areas with high concentrations of pollution.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Unbeknownst to Cammack, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, had issued an alarming assessment of the community that includes Collegeville Center in 2017 that \u201cdaily exposure to soil at properties with elevated lead concentrations could have in the past and could currently be harming their health,\u201d particularly children.<\/p>\n That report was based, in part, on soil testing that the EPA conducted throughout the neighborhood between 2012 and 2014 that found dangerous amounts of lead and the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene in more than a dozen samples taken from the Collegeville Center alone.<\/p>\n Benzo(a)pyrene is a chemical byproduct of coal when it\u2019s cooked to produce coke for processing iron and steel. Long-term exposure to benzo(a)pyrene is linked to lung, stomach, and skin cancer. It\u2019s also proven to cause miscarriages and birth defects in lab animals. Lead exposure can cause permanent brain damage, and children and pregnant women are most susceptible.<\/p>\n Cammack had no idea that the soil around her home had a history of contamination and, like the parents of 90 percent of the other young children who live in Jefferson County, never got her daughter tested for lead exposure.<\/p>\n The EPA began investigating the area back in 2009. Eventually the agency drew the Collegeville Center, North Birmingham Homes, and several industrial facilities into an area deemed the 35th Avenue Superfund site. By 2014, the EPA proposed adding it to the National Priorities List, which gives areas preference for further investigation because of known or threatened releases of hazardous substances. But that effort was beset by controversy<\/a>, and even after years of study and remediation, people are still exposed to dangerous soil and air emissions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s been so much industrial churn in North Birmingham over the past century that the EPA can\u2019t pinpoint the exact source of the contamination. By the agency\u2019s calculation, the area has featured at one time or another: 20 foundries and kilns; seven coal, coke, or byproducts facilities; 26 scrap and metal processing plants; and four chemical plants. Many of the companies went out of business in the late 1970s and 1980s, according to a city planning document, when enforcement of environmental regulations started to cut into profit margins.<\/p>\n The EPA\u2019s investigation and testing found high levels of air pollution and, in 2014, the agency assigned the 35th Avenue site the maximum score for likely soil exposure by residents under the Hazard Ranking System, the scorecard for determining eligibility for the National Priorities List.<\/p>\n But an executive from Drummond, a coal producer that owns the nearby ABC Coke plant named as one of the potentially responsible polluters, hatched a secret scheme<\/a> to keep the site off the National Priorities List. He and a lawyer representing the company were eventually criminally charged with quietly leading an effort to get local, state, and federal elected officials, including Alabama\u2019s attorney general, to oppose the additional oversight. The scheme became public and ended in scandal. A state representative and a regional EPA administrator pleaded guilty to criminal charges as well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Though the scheme was exposed, the 35th Avenue Superfund site wasn\u2019t added to the priorities list. While the corruption and political drama initially drew more attention to the neighborhood\u2019s problems, Haley Colson Lewis, an attorney with GASP, a local environmental advocacy organization, said the momentum for getting the site on the National Priorities List has since stalled.<\/p>\n The EPA did conduct an initial cleanup of the Superfund site and the neighborhood, but records obtained by APM Reports and The Intercept show that environmental officials knew residents would likely continue to face health dangers from ongoing pollution. The EPA warned in 2011 that dangerous ash would only continue to migrate from the coke plant that sits less than 3,000 feet away from both public housing complexes. \u201cThe surrounding community will continue to experience deposition from the plant unless controls are put in place,\u201d the EPA\u2019s on-scene coordinator wrote in a memo to his peers as they prepared to expand testing and cleanup in the area.<\/p>\n The agency has since shifted its stance. EPA officials now say they believe, based on a few samples from the surrounding neighborhood, that contaminated dirt brought in from nearby industrial sites is to blame for much of the pollution; they still maintain that the public housing is clean.<\/p>\n EPA records show that during the 2014 cleanup of the public housing, the agency left in place lead, arsenic, and benzo(a)pyrene in some areas because the pollution didn\u2019t exceed the level that would trigger removal. The agency hasn\u2019t conducted significant soil testing at the housing complexes in six years.<\/p>\n The current hazards in the soil at the housing complexes are unknown; the agency hasn\u2019t conducted significant soil testing at the housing complexes in six years.<\/p>\n Rep. Terri Sewell, a Democrat who represents North Birmingham in Congress, said the only way residents can rest assured that they are safe is if federal and local officials\u2019 oversight is vigilant. \u201cThis problem didn\u2019t happen overnight,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be solved overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n Residents have come to distrust government pronouncements about the safety of the area. That\u2019s in part because whenever the EPA has conducted environmental testing in the past decade, the results show pollution levels worse than people were led to believe. For instance, following the first tests by the EPA back in 2009, when dangerous levels of the benzo(a)pyrene and arsenic were found at two elementary schools that sit next door to each of the public housing complexes, the area was cleaned up and given the all-clear. Based on those limited results, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded exposures to soil in the area \u201cdo not present a public health hazard.\u201d That conclusion would be proven false when the EPA soon found further contamination in the area that led to the 2014 cleanup.<\/p>\n The fact that the EPA can\u2019t confirm health risks have been eliminated at the 35th Avenue Superfund site or the surrounding area \u2014 which includes two coke plants, asphalt batch plants, pipe manufacturing facilities, steel producing facilities, quarries, and a coal gas holder and purification system facility \u2014 has led to distrust among residents and environmental activists.<\/p>\n Charlie Powell, an activist with the local environmental justice group People Against Neighborhood Industrial Contamination, or PANIC, wonders how officials consider the site cleaned up with so much pollution still spewing over the community. \u201cHow can you say it is not going to happen again, but the plants are still doing the same thing?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Activists like Powell believe that residents should be moved out, and the area should be rezoned for industrial use only.<\/p>\n The Housing Authority of the Birmingham District may have other ideas. In a 2018 planning document, the housing authority notes that it would like to redevelop the North Birmingham Homes, which, like the Collegeville Center, also have \u201cwidespread environmental issues.\u201d Using public money to redevelop the property would require thorough environmental reviews. And therein lies an irony, critics note.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Some of the same public housing properties that haven\u2019t undergone a thorough environmental assessment in years, despite their proximity to a Superfund site and large amounts of pollution, would be studied to pave the way for a redevelopment project.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a process to protect projects, not people,\u201d said Weinstock, the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic attorney.<\/p>\n Such environmental reviews of polluted properties sometimes turn up more toxic pollution than anyone was expecting. That\u2019s what happened in Anniston, Alabama, which lies 50 miles east of Birmingham. The local housing authority opened Pandora\u2019s box when it attempted to rebuild three of its largest public housing complexes near the Anniston PCB \u2014 polychlorinated biphenyl<\/a> \u2014 and Lead Superfund sites.<\/p>\n As in Birmingham, numerous officials had claimed over the years that the site had been cleaned up and the housing complexes were safe. But when consultants conducted the environmental review, they found traces of PCB, lead, and industrial fill on three separate sites where families lived for years.<\/p>\n APM Reports and The Intercept collected similar environmental reviews from 75 properties clustered around Superfund sites across the U.S. and found that consultants flagged chemicals and toxic waste \u2014 including lead, arsenic, chromium, and PCB \u2014 at half the properties. In other cases, the findings were inconclusive, the inspections were only visual, or consultants cleared the properties based on data provided by companies that would have to pay for remediation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span><\/p>\n In Anniston, the EPA gave the properties a clean bill of health years ago and, like most of the public housing that sits within a mile of a Superfund site, they passed HUD\u2019s health and safety inspections repeatedly. That\u2019s because HUD\u2019s inspections look for building-related hazards like lead paint and asbestos but not environmental threats. The consultants\u2019 conclusions only affirmed the suspicions of David Baker, a local environmental activist who sits on a local Superfund advisory committee, that more cleanup is needed.<\/p>\n Baker spent the past couple of years trying to get a fence put up around one of the last parts of the community to be cleaned up, a PCB-contaminated stretch of Snow Creek that runs along the north east corner of the Glen Addie apartments where kids play, trying to catch fish, turtles, and tadpoles. The housing authority had big plans to modernize the complex, but the problems revealed in the environmental testing, Baker said, only affirms what he\u2019s been saying all along: \u201cAnniston needs to be retested.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, only one of the public housing redevelopments is moving ahead. The other two are still on hold.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nA City of Iron and Steel<\/h3>\n
Opening Pandora\u2019s Box<\/h3>\n