Archive for ‘environmental justice’

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01/31/2010

Looking for answers and justice in Kettleman City

Kettleman City, California, is one of the place names that most experts in environmental justice recognize right away, along with Chester, PA, Cancer Alley in Louisiana, and the Niger Delta. Kettleman City has been been a conflict location between the local, deeply impoverished Latino community, the county, the state and the EPA for over a decade now. Kettleman City is the location of the largest toxic waste dump in the state of California–and it’s not just a relative measure. By any measure of volume and toxicity, this is one of the largest facilities in the US.

There are 1,500 residents in Kettleman City, and the conflict has moved back to the public eye after going quiet largely because the community has identified a clustering of birth defects and they are getting traction for their claims under Obama’s EPA. It’s about time. The LA Times has run many stories on the conflict, which I have collected here:

Infant deaths, cleft palates raise concern about toxic landfill in San Joaquin Valley | L.A. NOW | Los Angeles Times

Kettleman City asks: Why so many birth defects? – latimes.com

EPA to review oversight of toxic waste | Greenspace | Los Angeles Times

Schwarzenegger orders state to investigate birth defects in Kettleman City – latimes.com

Kettleman City birth defects: Schwarzenegger steps in | Greenspace | Los Angeles Times

On another sad note, when I was collecting these articles, I saw that rights attorney Luke Cole had been killed far too young in a car crash. Cole was one of the attorneys that helped put the Kettleman City case on the national environmental justice agenda. His obituary is here:

Luke Cole dies at 46; leading practitioner of environmental law – latimes.com

I was pretty pointed in my review in JPAM of the book that Cole co-authored about the original environmental justice conflict in Kettleman City, largely because the authors allowed their personal dislike of EPA staffers to color their writing. They missed an opportunity to write about the institutional issues that really prevented justice from being served here and instead allowed readers to go forward with the impression–all to comforting to American readers–that government employees are lazy and inept and politicians are sleazy and that’s why the residents of Kettleman City were gaining no traction. They failed to describe how the law really is stacked against communities here–property rights are established, environmental rights are not, and the knowledge burdens are prohibitively high to overcome.

Here, I suspect it will be difficult for the community to win on this, but they do have some tenacious activities. Nobody knows what causes cleft palates; we do know it’s one of the more common birth defects, and it does have a higher incidence in Asian and Latino families. This means that the environmental causes get harder to locate because it is not established that Asian communities are disproportionately located near chemical stressors, though it has been established in California for Latino families.

So this is a group of people that has a higher incidence of the problem to begin with, and if this is a small town, the clusters may be related to clusters of families who have a genetic link to the defect.

That said, the case demands investigation; cleft palates are not the only birth defect reported in Kettleman CIty, and the reports have been coming in over a decade. This is an important learning opportunity for environmental policy and public health in addition to being a crucial community issue for the residents.

References:
Cole, L., & Foster, S. (2001). From the ground up: Environmental racism and the rise of the environmental justice movement. New York: New York University Press.


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01/26/2010

Unsustainable losses of human capital

The L.A. Times today has a story on bike lanes in Long Beach (yay) and homicide deaths in LA County.

While I generally do not like statistics that try to equate risks in a numbers game–like somehow death, injury, and suffering are linear metrics when they are not–about 250 children die in the entire United States each year from bike crashes. Don’t get me wrong: that is unacceptable. Our goal should be zero.

Nonetheless, that is about the same number of people who died of gunshot wounds within a 4-mile buffer of one part of Los Angeles in just two years. The whole country on the one hand; a 4-mile buffer on the other.

It’s not that we shouldn’t care about bike lanes; we absolutely should. It’s that we have to expand our notion of what the sustainable city is and what does not happen in it. While the addition of bike lanes is a victory and I am glad, there is no victory in the sustainable city until that 4-mile buffer in South Central (or whatever the city is trying to get us to call it now) is as safe as the many 4-mile buffers in Santa Monica that haven’t seen a single homicide death in years. As we focus on important issues like climate change, we must also think about the social devastation of poverty, desperation, and social exclusion played out on the scale we see it in Los Angeles. These deaths–predominately male, predominantly among people of color–are an environmental justice issue.

My colleague David Sloane, works with the city to study and try to intervene in gangs. One of his many gifts is seeing the real issues–the ones that really matter–in the life of poor neighborhoods. Check out some of his work:

Sloane, D.C., with C. Maxson, K. Hennigan, et. al., “It’s Getting Crazy Out There: Can a Civil Gang Injunction Change a Community?”; Criminology and Public Policy 4(3): 577-606; 2005

Sloane, D.C., with L.B. Lewis, L.M. Nascimento, et. al., “Assessing Healthy Food Options in South Los Angeles Restaurants” ;American Journal of Public Health, 95/4: 668-673; 2005

Sloane, D.C., “Bad Meat and Brown Bananas: Building a Legacy of Health by Confronting Health Disparaties around Food”;Planners Network (Winter 2004). Reprinted in T. Angotti and A. Forssyth (Eds.), Progressive Planning, pp. 49-50; 2004

Sloane, D.C., with A.K. Yancy, L.B. Lewis, et al., “Walking the Talk: Process Evaluation of a Local Health Department-Community Collaboration to Change Organizational Practice to Incorporate Physical Activity”; Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 10(2): 120-127; 2004

Sloane, D.C., with A.L. Diamant, et al., “Improving the Nutritional Resource Environment for Healthy Living through Community-Based Participatory Research”; Journal of General Medicine, 18(7): 568-575; 2003


Posted in community development, environmental justice, social inclusion | 1 Comment »

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01/21/2010

New manuscript on evacuation among nondrivers

Relocation of Children, Elderly, and Transit Dependents for a Daytime No-notice Evacuation in a Multimodal Transportation System

By Sirui Lui, Pamela Murray-Tuite, and Lisa Schweitzer

Under no-notice conditions with family members collecting dependents, the geographic location of these pickup points become a crucial factor to efficient evacuation. This paper presents a bi-level linear integer optimization model for facilities to relocate, optimally, dependents that need to be picked up. The program, solved using Lingo, is iterated with a traffic simulation model to obtain an optimal set of locations based on anticipated travel times with dependents relocated to those sites. Theentire methodology is applied to a sample application based on Chicago Heights, Illinois with three safety thresholds. The results found that the safe evacuation time threshold is quite important on implementing the strategy. When the safeevacuation threshold is tight, the relocation strategy is not effective;however, when it is adequate, relocating dependents of facilities increases the number of successful evacuation and decreases the total network evacuation time, and also significantly benefit those who rely on public transit to evacuate. Application of the proposed methodology to a certain area can assislocal decision-makers to take effective measures during no-notice evacuation and the relocation sites could be part of local evacuation management plans.


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01/18/2010

Jason Haremza and Rolf Pendall on sidewalks, snow, and social justice

Clearing the Way on Sidewalks: Why keeping walks snow-free is a matter of public health and social justice | Opinion Blog – syracuse.com

I’ve always followed Rolf Pendall’s research on housing, which has implications for social justice, of course. Here his co-author and he are right: cleared sidewalks are a crucial link in the mobility network.

I got to wondering, however, about how carefully they’ve thought through their proposed solution:

So, instead of raising taxes, how about starting with this proposal: Shift a penny per gallon of the 31.9-cent-per-gallon state gas tax to support municipal (city and village) clearance of snow from public sidewalks. Then campaign in every county that has at least one city or village with sidewalks to devote at least 10 percent of the county’s sales tax on gasoline to the plowing of sidewalks in those locations.

People often suggest a penny out of the gas tax because a penny sounds very small. But a penny out of the state’s gas tax is a sizable pot of money, and then to add 10 percent of local option sales taxes on top–just for snow removal on sidewalks?

Let’s put some parameters on this: in 2007, there were 5,641,925,000 gallons of gas sold in New York [1] (not including diesel, which gets us another million gallons), which is at least that many pennies. This is $56 million dollars per year at base. The sales taxes on gasoline in New York range from 3.1 percent to 4.75 percent [2]; assuming a sale price of $2.50 per gallon, 30 percent of the take on a 3.5 percent tax would be another $148 million.

Maybe I’m figuring this wrong, as I haven’t had enough coffee yet.

However, the state operating budget, out of which snow removal comes, is $2.6 billion [3] which means that the proposal would be about 8 percent of the state’s total operating budget (where money for snow removal on state-operated transit and highways come).

They aren’t clear about what they are really proposing until later:

The funds could also be used to capitalize a low-interest revolving loan fund for sidewalk renewal and replacement. It’s inefficient and costly for property owners to do this parcel-by-parcel.

This is what they really want, given the size of the pot of money they are asking for.

The problem with sidewalk maintenance is that it’s labor intensive; snow plows for roads work because they take advantage of economies of scale in machinery. It may be inefficient for individual property owners to provide maintenance, but it’s also not terribly efficient for the city to do so because the combination of sidewalks and single-family homes is spatially disaggregated and inefficient to begin with–too much infrastructure (both roads and sidewalks) serving too few people.

To wit: there is a lot of underused capacity in the snowblower world as well (just like there is underused capacity in the riding lawnmower world). When I lived in Chicago, the one guy on the block with a snowblower cleared everybody’s sidewalk and would take, after much urging, money for fuel or baked goods. He even used to clear a little potty area for my short-legged dog to do his business. But, of course, not every community has snowblowers or angels to run them.

It would be interesting to know how other states deal with their sidewalks.

Edited to add: Professor Pendall noted that their proposal was for 10 percent of sales tax receipts, not 30 percent, which would bring the total budget allocation to $100 million–about 50 state, 50 local.

[1]http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2007/mf2.cfm

[2] Gas price information http://www.newyorkgasprices.com/Tax_Info.aspx

[3] New York state enacted budget. http://publications.budget.state.ny.us/budgetFP/2009-10EnactedBudget-FINAL.pdf


Posted in environmental justice, public space, social inclusion | 1 Comment »

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12/31/2009

Language ability and evacuation destinations

From my research in Chicago, the data show a very clear relationship between English language proficiency and knowledge of potentially ‘safe’ locations to go to during an emergency. Those with little to no English skills were much more likely to be unable, even in interviews conducted in their native Spanish, to be able to identify a geographic location to go outside of the City of Chicago in case of a large-scale evacuation.

For those of you who are wondering, this is a mosaic plot, made in R.


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12/30/2009

Richard Green on Discrimination, Property, and Wealth

My colleague Richard Green has written what looks to be a wonderful manuscript with Thomas Mitchell and Stephen Malpezzi on the long-term prosperity outcomes associated with forced sales conditions, and how property sold under compulsory conditions yield lower prices than under fair market conditions. In addition, the race and ethnicity of the property owner also factors in, with minority-status property owners getting lower prices. There’s a “double discount”–minority property owners are more likely to experience forced sales, and then as people of color they receive even lower sale values than non-minority households.

I’m so excited by this research! It’s so essential to understanding sustainability, largely because of the looming issues associated eminent domain and with larger social justice questions involving reparations to African Americans. If I’ve said it to my students once, if forced sales results in fair sales, why do we never do it in Beverly Hills, Georgetown, Beacon Hill, or Malibu?


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12/29/2009

Incompatible land use, externality-shifting American neighbors, or unsustainable practice?

Today’s LA Times ran this story about the land use conflict surrounding an immigrant-owned poultry slaughterhouse in Rosemead: the Chinese American Live Poultry Company.

These types of land use conflicts are at the center of sustainability, and it’s a thorny set of issues. The owners, the Phus, have got a number of code violations on the books, including improper disposal of chicken waste. That you can’t have, not at industry levels. It’s not like we’re talking a few chickens in the backyard.

And yes, chickens do smell.

But the facility has been there since 1991. I suspect that many of the neighbors who hate this facility and want it shut down moved next to it in the first place. And I bet they eat chicken, regularly, though I suspect not from the bloodied floor of a local slaughterhouse, but purchased in packages at Ralph’s.

My students often want to discuss mixed land use in terms of retail, housing and office space. If I push them to think about industry, they say they envision “green industry” but have no real way to flesh out what green industry is and how it works. Isn’t this a green industry? It’s providing local-scale food. If they composted the waste material (a process that would probably send the neighbors into outer space with rage), it could be pretty green. I suggest to students “how about organic or sustainable meat production in downtown LA-would that be green industry?” and they look aghast, even though most are not vegetarians.

Two major things have entirely altered the landscape of my youth: corporate agriculture and, not unrelated, methamphetamine production. My hometown in Iowa is enveloped routinely by the smell of hog production. Is it acceptable for people in Bakersfield to have to tolerate meat production so that everybody else, including Rosemeadeans, can indulge in chicken pot pies and roast beef sandwiches without having their dainty noises offended by the reality of their food?

This has always struck me as a problem that better urban design, better industrial ecology, and better governance should be able to help reconcile. Put some money and creativity into solving the problem rather than trying to just get your own way in a public conflict. Why, really, does that building and its environs have to be so ugly? Why does this conflict have to be about putting somebody out of business instead of enhancing their business to fit in better?

Perhaps the first rule of sustainability should be that if the land use/public service/whatever can’t go in your neighborhood, it can’t go in anybody else’s neighborhood either. Which means either you get creative, or you can’t eat chicken. The responsibility resides on both the producer and the consumer to construct livable communities.


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10/20/2009

Distributive justice research in transport finance

Most of the research in transportation and social welfare concerns distributional outcomes, or more prosaically, the question of who gets what out of transport finance policy. The research on distributive social justice in transportation occurs primarily in three, largely separate fields: social inclusion, environmental justice, and the major topic of this manuscript, tax incidence. The research on social inclusion addresses the extent to which mobility limitations—either physical or financial—affect the distribution of individuals’ access to social and economic opportunity. Because taxes and user charges can raise the costs of gasoline or transit fares, they can create (or lower) financial barriers to mobility, and by extension, to social inclusion (1). The research on social inclusion in the US is perhaps best represented by the enormous amount of research on spatial mismatch.

Environmental justice research and activism has raised awareness about the distributive consequences, particularly for impoverished communities of color within metropolitan regions, of the external costs from transportation-related pollutants and environmental health costs associated with auto usage (3-9). Other types of external costs, like noise and pedestrian crashes, have also been shown to be higher in low-income communities than in more affluent neighborhoods (12). These costs can be measured by additional sick days or expenditures on things like air conditioner or air filters. Because of these types of costs, the social equity question arises from failing to expect motorists, low and high-income alike, to consider the external costs of their choices and enabling travel over and above a social optimum in a way that decreases the welfare of others.

The tax incidence research, by contrast, asks how much individuals and groups pay under different finance methods relative to other groups. This research examines the regressivity or progressivity of tax payments and revenue allocations (2). Regressive taxes or fees ask low-income individuals to sacrifice a comparatively larger percentage of their resources, usually measured in income, to pay for taxes than is required of those with higher incomes. Progressive taxes, like a graduated income tax, take an increasing percentage of income as income increases overall. These definitions are inverted in the case of tax allocations rather than costs. Incidence research tends to ask a very different question than social inclusion research: do socially marginalized groups, particularly class minorities, pay a disproportionate amount of their income for a tax? Most taxes, save for graduated income, are regressive in terms of out-of-pocket costs. It is possible for a tax to be regressive, while revenue distribution may be progressive, so that low-income individuals may pay in disproportionately and benefit disproportionately. It is important to maintain the distinction between social exclusion and tax incidence because regressivity and progressivity are general measures of tax fairness, not proxies for whether mobility is affordable. Gas taxes have been found to be regressive, in general, but with an out-of-pocket cost estimate of $25 to $28 a year per household per car, the Federal gas tax is hardly a prohibitive sum.

However, tax and finance structures affect relative prices among modes and thus can influence both the overall affordability of mobility—the social inclusion concern—and the amount/type of driving going on—the environmental justice concern. The policy goals surrounding all of these issues can and do conflict, depending on the context and the policy design. Among the most significant equity concerns over congestion pricing is that low-income motorists will have to forego trips. With tolls, mobility on congested roadways would become less affordable, creating a barrier to social inclusion for low-income motorists and their families. But by protecting low-income motorists from financial barriers to mobility by undercharging everybody, policy may burden communities with excess emissions and surface traffic. The results from the environmental justice research suggest that that these costs are born unequally as well, so that by not pricing trips off the road, policy burdens low-income communities and families within them.

Though most of the studies in tax incidence examine the distribution of the out-of-pocket costs associated with pricing, the very best studies acknowledge the role that prices play in altering both the distribution mobility overall and the external costs associated with that mobility. Unfortunately, there are very few studies that take such a comprehensive view.

1. Lucas K. Locating transport as a social policy problem. In: Transport, Social Exlusion, and Environmental Justice. 2004. p. 7-14.

2. Due JF, Mikesell JC. Sales Taxation. Washington, DC: Urban Institute; 1994.

3. Schweitzer L, Valenzuela Jr A. Environmental Justice and Transportation: The Claims and the Evidence. Journal of Planning Literature. 2004 ;18(4):383-398.

4. Schweitzer L, Stephenson M. Right Answers, Wrong Questions: Environmental Justice as Urban Research. Urban Studies. 2007 ;44(2):319-350.

5. Houston D, Wu J, Ong P, Winer A. Proximity of Licensed Childcare to Near-Roadway Vehicle Pollution. American Journal of Public Health. 2004 ;96(9):1611-1617.

6. Houston D, Wu J, Ong P, Winer A. Structural disparities of urban traffic in southern California: Implications for vehicle related-air pollution exposure in minority and high-poverty neighborhoods. Journal of Urban Affairs. 2004 ;26(5):565-592.

7. Jerrett M, Finkelstein M. Geographies of risk in studies linking chronic air pollution exposure to health outcomes. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A. 2005;68: 1207-1242.

8. Jerrett M, Burnett RT, Kanaroglou P, Eyles J, Finkelstein N, Giovis C, et al. A GIS-environmental justice analysis of particulate air pollution in Hamilton, Canada. Environment and Planning A. 2001 ;33955-973.

9. Loh P, Sugerman-Brozan J, Wiggins S, Noiles D, Archibald C. From asthma to AirBeat: Community-driven monitoring of fine particles and black carbon in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Environmental Health Perspectives. 2002 ;110297-301, Suppl. 2.

10. Marshall JD. Environmental inequality: Air pollution exposures in California’s South Coast Air Basin. Atmos.Environ. 2008 7;42(21):5499-5503.

11. Bachman W, Sarasua W, Hallmark S, Guensler R. Modeling regional mobile source emissions in a geographic information system framework. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. Feb ;8(1-6):205-229.

12. Chakraborty J, Schweitzer L, Forkenbrock DJ. Using GIS to assess the environmental justice impacts of transportation system changes. Transactions in GIS. 1999 ;3(3):329-258.

13. Crane R, Schweitzer L. Sustainability, transport, and the built environment. Built Environment. 2003 ;29(3):238-252.


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10/06/2009

Spotlight on fellow Bruin TH Culhane

aka the“National Geographic Energy Man”. What can I say? TH is one of the brightest, most fundamentally decent, and most enthusiastic men I have ever had the pleasure to know.

Here’s more about his work at his blog “Solarcities” and, of course, his work helping change energy sources in the Cairo slums.



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09/22/2009

Mohamed Atta, Urban Planner/Philosopher King

Slate has a set of pieces by Daniel Brook on Mohamed Atta’s urban planning thesis. Except for the self-conscious throat-clearing at the beginning where Brook spends way too much time blithering on about how he knew the thesis was important when others overlooked it, this is a nice, insightful look at the ideological ramifications of urban planning. It is an unavoidably normative profession. Think about “Smart Growth.” Nobody is in this because they want “Dumb Growth.” The same is true of policy. People don’t study because they want to help foster bad government. Those of us in the policy/planning/management and, perhaps to a lesser degree, development, are here because we think those things can be done better.

The window into Atta’s thesis that Brooks provides helps us understand the terrorist’s worldview. There is a fundamentalism present in his work on Aleppo, though few contemporary urban planners would see much to fault in his grand vision to tear down freeways and high-rises to restore the Islamic vernacular. This is the danger of grand plans that planners can not cover with any amount of New Urbanist gloss: major social change is hurtful. It takes time and healing, even when it is ultimately for the good. It was wrong to build highways on communities, as French planners did, and chances are just as good that Atta’s grand vision of demolishing high-rises would also hurt in ways other than just the bricks, mortar, and glass and Westernism he intended to. In urban planning, like everything else, two wrongs seldom make a right.

This is a cautionary tale. I’m about ready to go to ACSP where I will be regaled with would-be philosopher kings explaining to me how high-speed rail will save the planet and make fat people, like me, walk more so we will be thin. I doubt any one will tell me about the significance of bus benches. We do not think small, we philosopher-kings, and as a result we miss those kinds of details and, depending on the context, can cause enormous hurt.


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