Rationale: Placing Environmental Justice at the Center
Fundamentally, environmental justice can be defined as the right of all people—regardless of race or class—to live, work, play, and learn in healthy, safe environments wherein they have equal access to quality resources that support their basic needs: heath care, jobs, education, food, housing, recreation, clean air, water, and soil. Environmental justice is a goal, borne of a movement that grew in response to environmental injustice; statistically, people of color and poor people—in industrialized nations like the United States and developing countries alike—are far more likely to live in communities that bear disproportionate burdens of toxic emissions, toxic waste, and other environmental hazards. A 2007 study by the University of California at Santa Cruz determined that, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while whites are twice as likely to live more than 2.5 miles from a Toxics Release Inventory facility (TRI) than they are to live within one mile of a TRI, African Americans are three times more likely and Latinos 2.5 times more likely to live within one mile of a TRI than they are to live more than 2.5 miles from one. 2 Further, the percentage of residents living in poverty is half as much when more than 2.5 miles away from TRI sites as it is when within one mile. 3 Of 200 TRI sites counted on a map of the Bay Area, more than 70% are located in neighborhood where more than 61% of residents are people of color. 4 Fewer than 5% are found in neighborhoods where people of color number fewer than 34%. 5 This correlation between race, class and toxic environments has been consistently evident in numerous studies since the 1980's.
Despite the disproportionate toxic burden shouldered by communities of color, their right to protection is enforced in a similarly inequitable manner. Fines paid for violating hazardous waste laws are 500% higher when the offense is committed in predominantly white communities, compared to fines enacted in communities with high percentages of people of color. 6 Even to simply be listed on the Environmental Protection Agency's National Priorities List takes communities of color with serious hazardous waste issues 20% longer than it does for an abandoned site in a white community to be listed, then as much as 42% longer to clean up after listing. 7 This pervasive lack of corporate and government accountability for the disproportionate contamination of low-income neighborhoods of color cannot be divorced from the serious health issues faced by such communities. For example, African Americans are three times more likely to dies from asthma than whites, and African American children five times more likely to have lead poisoning than white children. 8 As the correlation between health and environment becomes increasingly evident, the injustice of disproportionate toxic burdens increases.
Bayview Hunters Point (BVHP), the neighborhood in southeast San Francisco where the largest percentage of my students live, is a case study in environmental injustice. The neighborhood is home to 34,800 residents, 90% of whom are people of color: approximately half African American, a quarter Asian and Pacific Islander, the rest mostly Latino. 9 In BVHP, 40% of the residents live below the poverty line, earning less than $ 15,000 per year in a city that consistently ranks among the top 10 most expensive cities to live in within the United States. 1 0 The unemployment rate is almost 15%, more than double the rest of San Francisco. 1 1 There are close to 1,000 units of public housing. 1 2 The leading cause of death for African American males is homicide; the second is AIDS. 1 2 There are no grocery stores or hospitals, and only one pediatrician in private practice for the community with the highest density of children in all of San Francisco. 1 3 BVHP is San Francisco's "roughest," most disenfranchised community.
At just three square miles, BVHP comprises less than 6% of the city's total area, inhabited by less than 4% of its population, yet more than half of the neighborhood is zoned for industrial use, housing over 50% of San Francisco's industry in the form of 500+ industrial, commercial, and retail establishments. 1 4 Industrialization leaves a toxic imprint on the impoverished BVHP community. BVHP houses at least one-third of San Francisco's hazardous waste sites, and the neighborhood's residents live surrounded by no fewer than 325 toxic sites. 1 5 There are 100 brownfield sites (abandoned or underused industrial or commercial facilities where contamination inhibits redevelopment) and 187 leaking underground fuel tanks, as well as at least 124 hazardous waste handlers. 1 6 Per capita, compared with the rest of San Francisco, there are ten times the number of contaminated water sites, five times as many acutely hazardous materials storage facilities, four times the polluted air dischargers, three times more underground storage tanks, and four times the number of contaminated industrial sites. 1 7 The BVHP sewage treatment plant processes 80% of the city's sewage and, from 1929-2006, the state's oldest and dirtiest power plant operated in BVHP, where two-thirds of the 1,100 homes within a one-mile radius were public housing units. 1 8 The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a Superfund site named by the Environmental Protection Agency as one of the ten most toxic federal sites in the United States, occupies nearly 500 acres of BVHP. 1 9 There are an estimated 1.5 million tons of toxic and radioactive waste still buried in the shipyard despite extensive clean-up operations for the purposes of developing the land. 2 0 The shipyard houses the former Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the military's largest applied nuclear research facility from 1947-1969, where scientists tested the effects of radiation on animals; 2 1 waste that was not dumped in the bay or ocean lies in a 146-acre landfill 800 feet away from a public housing project. 2 2 Other major polluters include a rendering plant, the Potrero Hill power plant less than one mile away, a non-stick pan coating factory, and two freeways that border the neighborhood. 2 3 All told, the toxic outputs in BVHP contribute more than 20 tons of particulate matter to the air per year, 2 4 and well over 200 toxic chemicals to the community 2 5, including 109 radioactive substances recently disclosed by the Navy as being present at the Shipyard. 2 6 The quantity of ambient air pollution in BVHP is four times greater than all other San Francisco neighborhoods, emissions of nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter are the highest on the city, and chromium is found at levels thirteen times higher than what is considered safe. 2 7 BVHP ranks in the 80 th percentile for high levels of particulates, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds and in the 90 th percentile for sulfur dioxide. 2 8 Soil and water in BVHP contain particulates, pesticides, petrochemicals, heavy metals, asbestos, and radioactive materials. 2 9
The health outlook of the BVHP community is correspondingly stark. At 12 deaths per 1,000 live births (15 per 1,000 for African American women), the rate of infant mortality in the BVHP zip code is 2.5 times higher than any other San Francisco neighborhood, and the highest in the state of California. 3 0 More than 50% of infant deaths in San Francisco occur in BVHP and the adjacent neighborhood of Potrero Hill, 3 1 where there are nearly 500 public housing units and the city's last remaining power plant still operates. There are 44.3 birth defects per 1,000 births, compared with 33.1 per 1,000 in the rest of San Francisco. 3 2 Asthma is another persistent health issue: Upwards of 10% of BVHP residents have asthma, compared to 5.6% nationwide. 3 3 For children, the incidence of asthma is close to 20%, 3 4 and as high as 25% at some schools. 3 5 In BVHP, hospitalizations for asthma run four time the state's rate. 3 6 In addition, cervical and breast cancer are twice as common as the rest of Bay Area, 3 7 which already has the highest breast cancer rates of any metropolitan area in the world. 3 8 Hospitalization rates for congestive heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, and emphysema are more than three times the statewide average. 3 9 Clearly, the health of the BVHP community is highly compromised. While some of these incidences can certainly be attributed to the dearth of health care services in the community, there are many correlations between health issues and toxic environments. Asthma, for example, can be caused or aggravated by air pollution and a major cause of breast cancer is known to be ionizing radiation. 4 0
While BVHP can be considered one of the most extreme examples of environmental injustice in the nation, it is not the only neighborhood in the southeast sector of San Francisco where nearly all of my students reside that faces such issues. Potrero Hill, the neighborhood where our school is located, is home to San Francisco's last fossil fuel burning power plant. Emissions from its smokestack rise up into the Potrero Hill housing projects on the hillside that overlooks the plant. South of Potrero Hill in Visitacion Valley, a low-income and working class neighborhood, another superfund site is located only a few blocks away from the Sunnydale public housing projects, San Francisco's largest public housing complex with nearly 800 units. At the Midway Village public housing projects that are just across the city and county line from Sunnydale, waste from a decommissioned PG&E gas plant was used as landfill that has contaminated the ground directly beneath the housing. 4 1 Despite several attempts at soil removal, residents there suffer from a multitude of health issues and have spent years fighting for relocation and compensation for chronic and severe illness. 4 2 Next to Visitacion Valley is the Excelsior neighborhood where I live alongside many of my students. A recent study reports that the Excelsior, with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the city and among the highest percentages of both children and elderly residents, has had the highest overall number of people hospitalized for asthma for six years in a row. 4 3 This health issue is attributed to the close proximity of a major freeway and the truck routes that pass through the neighborhood into other parts of San Francisco. 4 4
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