Yahoo News How US redlining led to an air pollution crisis 100 years later
Study of 200 cities shows dangerous environmental inequality fueled by 20th-century practice dividing cities along racial lines
A new study has found that neighborhoods in which the federal government discouraged investment nearly 100 years ago – via a racist practice known as redlining – face higher levels of air pollution today.
Looking at more than 200 cities across the nation, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found that people who live in neighborhoods that were once categorized as “hazardous”, based on racist factors such as how many Black or “foreign-born” people lived there, now breathe 56% more of the freeway pollutant nitrogen dioxide than those in top-rated areas.
Those formerly redlined neighborhoods also suffer from higher levels of the sooty particle known as PM 2.5, the study found. And both pollutants are associated with health effects, including higher rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease and even Covid-19.
“The people who made the decision [to redline certain neighborhoods] aren’t even alive any more,” said Joshua Apte, a UC Berkeley environmental engineering professor, who co-authored the study, published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters on Wednesday. “But the decisions made a long time ago still matter quite a lot for the disparities experienced today.”
In the 1930s, the federal government created a series of maps that indicated where Black people, immigrants, and other groups of the people that they considered “too risky” to have as neighbors lived, and used those maps to discourage mortgage lending in those neighborhoods.
This process was known as redlining, because the makers of those maps shaded those areas in red. The Berkeley research illustrates how those discriminatory maps, created by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation between 1935 and 1940, shaped urban development and real estate practices for nearly a century afterwards. It concludes that the maps helped to shape present-day locations of roads, freeways, industrial facilities, ports, and other major sources of pollution, thus influencing which neighborhoods have clean air today.
“Our findings illustrate how redlining, a nearly 80-year-old racially discriminatory policy, continues to shape systemic environmental exposure disparities in the United States,” wrote the study’s lead author, Haley Lane, a researcher in civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley.
The authors acknowledged the federal mortgage maps were not the first or the only instance of racist policy that determined long-lasting patterns of settlement and development in the US, but they said the maps provided a lens for studying how the racism of earlier generations still dictates winners and losers today.
The study compared the estimated 2010 pollution levels for each census block to historical redlining maps digitized by the Mapping Inequalities Project of the University of Richmond. The racist logic for shading each area of the map can be seen by clicking on individual neighborhoods in the maps, which cite supporting documents compiled by the federal loan agency.
Neighborhoods that received the highest grade, “A”, were shaded green on the maps and deemed minimal risks for banks and other mortgage lenders. Blue-shaded neighborhoods were deemed “still desirable” and yellow were labeled “definitely declining”. Homes in red-shaded “D” neighborhoods were labelled “hazardous” and were typically ineligible for federally backed loans or favorable mortgage terms.
Yvonka Hall, an environmental disparities expert and the executive director of the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition, has seen the results of redlining play out in her own Cleveland neighborhood, which was colored red and yellow in the maps.
She said the discriminatory investment patterns highlighted in the mapping resulted in highways being constructed right through the center of the neighborhood and polluting industries being allowed to locate all around it, while positive investment was kept out. And she said the area now suffered from all types of pollution.
“The African American community faced decades of environmental neglect,” said Hall, who herself has chronic bronchitis and has seen her neighbors struggling with all kinds of long-term illnesses. “What you see is the disparities of redlining persist [over time]. These areas are now more likely to have health issues, lead poisoning, asthma, lung cancer, heart disease, and don’t forget Covid.”
Julian Marshall, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Washington and co-author of the study, said even though the Clean Air Act, passed in 1970, had reduced pollution for nearly all Americans, immediate action was needed to reduce the systemic racial inequalities tied to air pollution.
“Environmental inequalities are immediate and local, but they’re also systemic and long term,” he said. “So that means the solutions also need to last longer than one presidential administration. We inherited this problem, but we need to act now to prevent it from continuing in the future.”
