This is a pretty typical growth pattern. Industrial zone establishes and city is set far away in a safe area. City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work. People then see this and say they built industrial next to the poor people when the opposite occurred. Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong?
> City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work.
In cities like Mobile, Alabama, the opposite is usually true[1]: people already lived in those areas, but companies (and local governments) don't consider their health sufficiently important. I'll leave it up to you to infer why that is.
As someone who grew up in the Clear Lake area of Houston in the 90s and 00s, I can tell you that the La Porte and Deer Park areas were bad, but weren't this bad. People lived in the surrounding areas before some of those plants ramped up.
It isn't always one way or the other.
As someone who is seeing more and more how irreversible so much of our environmental damage is these days, I am leaning on the plant owners being responsible, not the schoolchildren who are getting rolled a 1:20,000 chance of cancer.
Perhaps, knowing how much pollution affects surrounding areas, we should force such chemical plants to purchase all the land around them that will be affected to a certain extent. Internalize the costs of their damage to the community, and prevent others from being exposed to it.
It's the same when people move next to the airport and then complain about noise.
In general this can be solved with an extension of property rights, the industrial zone/airport/music venue etc can own the rights to "pollute" the neighboring areas, much like buying air rights in a city. Then it's clear when you purchase / rent / what level of noise / pollution you can expect.
This allows market forces to work, if after a certain time the city is bigger and that land is more valuable for quality housing then they can buy the rights from the polluter and shut it down.
The right to pollute should never be granted in perpetuity. If anything, it should be a recurring cost that increases or decreases based on the how much polluting is occurring. That way the markets work in incentivizing less polluting.
aren't you assuming we spend the money to adequately track the problem and hold the correct people responsible? that's certainly not the case now in the US. maybe you can fix that by creating a market somehow?
Gonna have to side with city zoning being the wrong party here. It’s really the people who represent the tax base that should be protecting said tax base.
Who do you think is setting up these neighbourhoods? A lot of times it's the industrial companies as well looking to diversify their investments.
But not always, let's not paint them with the same brush. Zoom out on the problem broader.
Why are industrial companies polluting land that they don't own? Well, because this was all established in an age when we considered pollution out of sight and out of mind. If it's not an oil barrel lying in a ditch, but some happy vapor going out into the atmosphere, who cares?
So the lack of government regulation of pollution on land not owned by the companies is the problem.
In 21st century sensibilities about externalities, an industrial plant should not be able to pollute land it doesn't own. And if there is no way to avoid that, the government should set it up as an isolation zone not zoned for residential, and force the company to price that into their economics.
By the way this is what the rest of the developed world does. The US, with it's obsession with profits, and deregulation, and "letting the free market" decide doesn't, and now has the worst correlation between health outcomes and socioeconomic class of any developed country.
I would still blame the industrial zone in this case. If it is unsafe to live within 5 miles of the plant they should own all land within 5 miles of the plant.
I think they way you described was a bit harsh. That said this is a serious challenge for industry that have large footprints and health risks to the community. In the electric markets there are lots of power plants that were originally far from communities but then housing spread and fell into the catchment areas.
Going forward wouldn't it make sense to zone an entire area to not be allowed to build for residential purposes (essentially a buffer around the industrial zones)?
It feels like its a grey area of responsibility etc. For industrial processes that are known to be highly toxic it would fall on the industrials but as we find out more information around toxicity and impacts (which it feels like more is coming to light all the time) it will require some deft navigating.
You're underestimating the ruthless disregard most large industrial producers have for the communities where they locate. These companies are led by sociopaths and fools.
The largest new industrial facility in West Virginia, Rockwool in Ranson, is permitted as a top ten polluter for formaldehyde in the entire United States and was built 1,300 feet from an existing elementary school just last year.
Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong?
This argument confuses policy and morality and somehow implies we should ignore both.
Morally, if you spew chemicals you know are going to cause significant excess deaths, you will have to live with yourself and myself and many people will think little of you.
Legality, if you spew an otherwise unknown chemical that you happen to know is quite toxic, you'll be liable. If you stay with EPA guidelines but happen to know this is going to kill or injure significant number, you only have public perceptions and your own conscious to answer for.
Policy wise, the EPA should impose regulations that make all neighborhoods reasonably safe. Moreover, I suggest structuring the regulation process to incentivize creating compliant processes rather than in terms of after-the-fact punishments. (I've heard a variety of contrasts between the US and Europe, where despite the US very "pro-capitalist", the regulatory paradigm is entirely adversarial).
I'm surprised by the levels in Houston. I wouldn't expect so much pollution in such a populated area. Louisiana gets a bonus mention-- there are quite a few polluters along the Mississippi just north of New Orleans. I can only imagine the impact this has on their water quality
Some anecdotes as someone who lived near one of these locations growing up (fortunately about 30 mi away)
1) Every now and then, our entire town would smell terrible, presumably from the winds carrying the emissions to us
2) A friend who moved here during my high school had to move away since his whole family suffered from asthma and it was made much noticeably worse here
3) Heard a couple huge explosions during my lifetime from these refineries sadly.
I did an internship at a pulp mill that was on the Canada-U.S. border (Canadian side). There was an elementary school literally besides the plant (~50m away).
If there was a release of sulphur dioxide that was going to stay on the Canadian side, the plant management notified the relevant authorities. Sometimes the kids were told not to go outside for recess.
If the SO2 was potentially going to drift over the border, the entire plant was shut down because the U.S. EPA would hit them with millions of dollars in fines.
Not particularly but for what it's worth things like bad smells and explosions haven't happen in a really long time here. I am not sure if there's an increased cancer rate where I am located but will likely be researching that soon.
As I've said for years, any time you see a glittering urban core full of glass towers, steel bridges, and classic old stone architecture, somewhere there's a Mordor nearby that made all that happen.
I think this is a fantastic way to think about pollution.
But to make sure that it doesn’t veer into city bashing (as HN is sometimes wont to do): the only difference between the glistening urban core and 300 square miles of suburban sprawl is the number of trucks needed to distribute the raw materials involved. All things being equal, the pollution involved in building the former is both lesser and more sustainable.
Boston area has no big chemical/hard industrial industry, and nothing on that map. Neither does seattle (but the map shows some small process in areaa). Id wager a lot of modern "intellectual" cities (where knowledge worker industries dominate) can be devoid of such processes. Tourism cities too - eg, Vegas and Miami don't have such a history and their maps are clean.
Obviously SFBay is a notable exception to the knowledge-worker idea, but SV was founded on horribly toxic silicon refining which, while mostly gone, has a terrible history of poisoning the ground.
Jesus, this story is going to have all the bad takes. People's main takeaway from the article is, "it's just the way cities grow," "it's the zoning board's fault," "people moved near a cancer cluster, it's their fault," "you should be able to pollute an area you pay for."
Seriously? The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations. I don't care if someone moved next door to an industrial plant or a pig farm, if they are spewing toxins into the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ground someone else will eventually purchase, they are responsible for damaging the environment as well as harming, and in the long run, killing people and that should absolutely be illegal and stopped. We're not talking about a bad smell or loud noise, we're talking about people getting leukemia or Parkinson's and so on. Are you sociopaths?
Absolutely! I have started a project to encourage municipalities to use land use to protect their water and other sensitive spots from service stations.
The EPA has all sorts of silly guidelines like saying setback a gas station 500 feet from school or wetlands if they pump over 3.6MM gallons a year. Under that? 25 feet.
A crazy thing I learned recently is the cost of cleanups for underground storage tanks is not really tracked or published publicly. I started requesting information a few weeks ago. https://postpump.org/oregon
Exactly. This isn’t some sort of weird environmental topic. This is a human rights violation. The foundation of a huge swath of our law is “no one has a right to encroach on a person or their property.” (Examples being murder and theft.) Pollution is a violation of that principle on a massive scale and it should be treated that way.
yes, internalize externalities first, starting with the most dangerous and egregious. most other ‘solutions’ are apologist distractions from this primary mitigation.
> The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations.
I disagree with the notion that regulations are inherently harmful to corporate profits. Foreign competitors do generally exist in other countries with different regulations, which complicates the matter in the real world; but in a healthy, homogeneously regulated market, a new regulation should increase the operating costs of all suppliers more or less equally. Assuming that there's a sufficient amount of competition to keep profit margins reasonably thin, the increased cost of regulatory compliance should be passed onto customers in the form of higher prices.
Readit News
In cities like Mobile, Alabama, the opposite is usually true[1]: people already lived in those areas, but companies (and local governments) don't consider their health sufficiently important. I'll leave it up to you to infer why that is.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/26/africatown-s...
Yeah, if your industrial process causes cancer you need to re-engineer the process to be safer and polluting less, even if you were there first.
I’m not saying this is good, but by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house.
It isn't always one way or the other.
As someone who is seeing more and more how irreversible so much of our environmental damage is these days, I am leaning on the plant owners being responsible, not the schoolchildren who are getting rolled a 1:20,000 chance of cancer.
Perhaps, knowing how much pollution affects surrounding areas, we should force such chemical plants to purchase all the land around them that will be affected to a certain extent. Internalize the costs of their damage to the community, and prevent others from being exposed to it.
In general this can be solved with an extension of property rights, the industrial zone/airport/music venue etc can own the rights to "pollute" the neighboring areas, much like buying air rights in a city. Then it's clear when you purchase / rent / what level of noise / pollution you can expect.
This allows market forces to work, if after a certain time the city is bigger and that land is more valuable for quality housing then they can buy the rights from the polluter and shut it down.
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Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
But not always, let's not paint them with the same brush. Zoom out on the problem broader.
Why are industrial companies polluting land that they don't own? Well, because this was all established in an age when we considered pollution out of sight and out of mind. If it's not an oil barrel lying in a ditch, but some happy vapor going out into the atmosphere, who cares?
So the lack of government regulation of pollution on land not owned by the companies is the problem.
In 21st century sensibilities about externalities, an industrial plant should not be able to pollute land it doesn't own. And if there is no way to avoid that, the government should set it up as an isolation zone not zoned for residential, and force the company to price that into their economics.
By the way this is what the rest of the developed world does. The US, with it's obsession with profits, and deregulation, and "letting the free market" decide doesn't, and now has the worst correlation between health outcomes and socioeconomic class of any developed country.
Are you suggesting that this question is somehow hard to answer? I don't think it is.
Going forward wouldn't it make sense to zone an entire area to not be allowed to build for residential purposes (essentially a buffer around the industrial zones)?
It feels like its a grey area of responsibility etc. For industrial processes that are known to be highly toxic it would fall on the industrials but as we find out more information around toxicity and impacts (which it feels like more is coming to light all the time) it will require some deft navigating.
This argument confuses policy and morality and somehow implies we should ignore both.
Morally, if you spew chemicals you know are going to cause significant excess deaths, you will have to live with yourself and myself and many people will think little of you.
Legality, if you spew an otherwise unknown chemical that you happen to know is quite toxic, you'll be liable. If you stay with EPA guidelines but happen to know this is going to kill or injure significant number, you only have public perceptions and your own conscious to answer for.
Policy wise, the EPA should impose regulations that make all neighborhoods reasonably safe. Moreover, I suggest structuring the regulation process to incentivize creating compliant processes rather than in terms of after-the-fact punishments. (I've heard a variety of contrasts between the US and Europe, where despite the US very "pro-capitalist", the regulatory paradigm is entirely adversarial).
Deleted Comment
Why not make that our political discourse? We stop the world at work to solve problems in revenue generation.
Somehow this has to be mired in political speak.
Letting figurative power thrive while squashing people is good business.
Dead Comment
https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
What I'm wondering is why the shaded areas around the hot spots on the Gulf Coast are so much bigger than the shaded areas around hotspots elsewhere.
1) Every now and then, our entire town would smell terrible, presumably from the winds carrying the emissions to us
2) A friend who moved here during my high school had to move away since his whole family suffered from asthma and it was made much noticeably worse here
3) Heard a couple huge explosions during my lifetime from these refineries sadly.
If there was a release of sulphur dioxide that was going to stay on the Canadian side, the plant management notified the relevant authorities. Sometimes the kids were told not to go outside for recess.
If the SO2 was potentially going to drift over the border, the entire plant was shut down because the U.S. EPA would hit them with millions of dollars in fines.
Was someone talking about ethics and morality?
But to make sure that it doesn’t veer into city bashing (as HN is sometimes wont to do): the only difference between the glistening urban core and 300 square miles of suburban sprawl is the number of trucks needed to distribute the raw materials involved. All things being equal, the pollution involved in building the former is both lesser and more sustainable.
Boston area has no big chemical/hard industrial industry, and nothing on that map. Neither does seattle (but the map shows some small process in areaa). Id wager a lot of modern "intellectual" cities (where knowledge worker industries dominate) can be devoid of such processes. Tourism cities too - eg, Vegas and Miami don't have such a history and their maps are clean.
Obviously SFBay is a notable exception to the knowledge-worker idea, but SV was founded on horribly toxic silicon refining which, while mostly gone, has a terrible history of poisoning the ground.
Seriously? The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations. I don't care if someone moved next door to an industrial plant or a pig farm, if they are spewing toxins into the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ground someone else will eventually purchase, they are responsible for damaging the environment as well as harming, and in the long run, killing people and that should absolutely be illegal and stopped. We're not talking about a bad smell or loud noise, we're talking about people getting leukemia or Parkinson's and so on. Are you sociopaths?
The EPA has all sorts of silly guidelines like saying setback a gas station 500 feet from school or wetlands if they pump over 3.6MM gallons a year. Under that? 25 feet.
https://postpump.org is the project so far.
A crazy thing I learned recently is the cost of cleanups for underground storage tanks is not really tracked or published publicly. I started requesting information a few weeks ago. https://postpump.org/oregon
Thank you, a voice of reason! This really needed to be said on this thread.
I disagree with the notion that regulations are inherently harmful to corporate profits. Foreign competitors do generally exist in other countries with different regulations, which complicates the matter in the real world; but in a healthy, homogeneously regulated market, a new regulation should increase the operating costs of all suppliers more or less equally. Assuming that there's a sufficient amount of competition to keep profit margins reasonably thin, the increased cost of regulatory compliance should be passed onto customers in the form of higher prices.
ProPublica knows how to present data.
Let's hope shining light on this brings pressure for change.
- Company buries toxic waste in 1920’s in drums that corrode
- Another company buys property, is aware of buried drums
- City seeks to buy property after company shuts down
- Company tells city there is toxic waste. City acknowledges.
- City talks about building on the dump site. City reminds city of toxic waste.
- Company finally sells land, makes city sign acknowledgment of toxic waste dump
- City then expands building school and new housing toxic waste dump
- People get sick, company gets sued