The Boston Globe
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Downtown highest in polluted sites

Low-income seen at most exposure

By Beth Daley

January 9, 2001

Stand in Boston's Chinatown and you are at the epicenter of Massachusetts' most environmentally-burdened city. It's here, in the midst of the Big Dig's dust and the fumes from idling diesel buses that residents endure the largest concentration of industry and environmentally hazardous sites in the state, according to a new report.

Confirming what common sense has told environmentalists and residents all along, cities with lower-incomes and minority populations have far more power plants, landfills, and other pollutants compared to their suburban and rural neighbors.

Downtown Boston wins the prize - by far - for the largest number of such sites, with nearly double the exposure to environmental risks per square mile than the closest polluted city, Chelsea.

Other Boston neighborhoods and cities that hit the top 10 are Charlestown, South Boston, East Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Roxbury, Allston/Brighton, and Watertown.

''I expected some of this, but I didn't expect to see the types of disparities that we found,'' said Dan Faber of the Philanthropy and Environmental Justice Research Project at Northeastern University, who spearheaded the report.

Among other findings, his report showed low-income communities average two to three times more state hazardous waste sites than higher-income communities. And, for people who live in a community that is at least 25 percent minority, Faber found there are five times as many pounds of chemical emissions from industrial facilities than communities with less than 5 percent minorities.

To do the report, Faber assigned points - 25 for a Superfund site and 5 for a tire pile, for example, - and simply added up points for each municipality. ''There needs to be greater involvement and great recognition in these places about how deeply they are impacted,'' he said. Everett, Dorchester, Lawrence, Malden, and Boston as an entire city also made the top 15.

It was long thought that low-income people - including a disproportionate number of minorities - have tended to move to cities with lots of industrial pollution because rents tended to be cheaper. While that may be partially true, a federal report in the early 1980s showed that some unwanted landfills in the Southeast appeared to be purposefully built in lower-income areas because resistance tends to be weaker, said Sheldon Krimsky, professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University.

The report helped spark an ''environmental justice'' movement to help those communities gain a political voice.

Faber says the solution is not necessarily to sprinkle all the potentially harmful sites evenly throughout the state. Instead, he wants the study to help set future policymaking, and serve as a foundation to prioritize the clean-up of those communities that have the most pollutants first. By contrast, Krimsky says the hazards should be placed far away from people in isolated areas.

A related bill pending in the State House would require stricter environmental scrutiny of industries moving into communities that already face high exposure to contaminants.

''We should have that for the people who have borne these pollutants for so long,'' said Jim Gomes, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts. In some ways, Gomes says, forcing wealthier communities to take their ''dose'' of pollutants could also help fuel a campaign to clean up dirty industrial sites.

''If we had a lottery for siting these facilities and every city and town in Massachusetts had a one in 351 chance of getting one, you can bet we would take better care of them than we've done,'' said Gomes.

In Downtown Boston's Chinatown, residents and activists said they were surprised to learn of their unwanted title. Downtown Boston also includes the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End, and the Fenway, but Chinatown is one of the most heavily affected areas in that geographical zone.

''It's sort of a new dimension to environmental health in for us,'' said Martha Tai, coordinator of the Campaign to Protect Chinatown. ''We've been focusing on construction dust, you see it everywhere, and traffic. His report talks about all these other hazards that we aren't really aware of. It really opens our eyes.''