From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region 9780813574226

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From Workshop to Waste Magnet

NATURE, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE Scott Frickel, Series Editor

A sophisticated and wide-­ranging sociological literature analyzing nature-­ society-­culture interactions has blossomed in recent decades. This book series provides a platform for showcasing the best of that scholarship: carefully crafted empirical studies of socio-­environmental change and the effects such change has on ecosystems, social institutions, historical processes, and cultural practices. The series aims for topical and theoretical breadth. Anchored in sociological analyses of the environment, Nature, Society, and Culture is home to studies employing a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and investigating the pressing socio-­environmental questions of our time—­ from environmental inequality and risk, to the science and politics of climate change and serial disaster, to the environmental causes and consequences of urbanization and warmaking, and beyond. Available titles in the Nature, Society, and Culture series: Diane C. Bates, Superstorm Sandy: The Inevitable Destruction and Reconstruction of the Jersey Shore Cody Ferguson, This Is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Stephanie A. Malin, The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice Diane Sicotte, From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

From Workshop to Waste Magnet Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

DIANE SICOTTE

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Sicotte, Diane, 1960–­author. Title: From workshop to waste magnet : environmental inequality in the Philadelphia region / Diane Sicotte. Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2016. | Series: Nature, society, and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015047303| ISBN 9780813574202 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813574196 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813574219 (e-­book (epub)) | ISBN 9780813574226 (e-­book (web pdf )) Subjects: LCSH: Environmental justice—­Pennsylvania—­Philadelphia Region. | Environmental degradation—­Social aspects—­Pennsylvania—­Philadelphia Region. | Environmental health—­Pennsylvania—­Philadelphia Region. | Minorities—­Health and hygiene—­ Pennsylvania—­Philadelphia Region. | Hazardous waste sites—­Environmental aspects—­ Pennsylvania—­Philadelphia Region. | Philadelphia Region (Pa.)—­Environmental conditions. Classification: LCC GE235.P4 S53 2016 | DDC 363.7009748/11—­dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047303 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2016 by Diane Sicotte All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://​rutgerspress​.rutgers​.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents List of Figures vii List of Maps ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

1

Measuring Environmental Inequalities in the Philadelphia Area in 2010

15

2

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality

31

3

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia

56

4

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969

84

5

The Making of Waste Magnets: Environmental Burdening after 1970

109

6

Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

139

7

Toward a “Rust Belt” Theory of U.S. Environmental Inequality

157

Appendix: Nature of This Study 175 Notes 203 Index 243

v

Figures 1

Carole Burnett, Chester resident

3

2

Monument marking William Penn’s landing in Chester City, 1682

6

3

Mike and Jackie Saier, Port Richmond residents

8

4

Layering of industrial and social landscapes in the Philadelphia area

5

Theoretical representation of the processes through which predominantly minority and predominantly white Philadelphia area communities became extensively burdened

57

137

vii

Maps 1

Philadelphia area communities by percentage non-­Hispanic white, 2010

17

2

Philadelphia area communities by median household income, 2010

18

3

Philadelphia area extensively burdened communities, 2010

21

4

Philadelphia area communities by racial/ethnic composition, 2010

25

5

Philadelphia area communities by social class, 2010

27

6

Philadelphia industrial districts, c. 1830

64

7

Philadelphia area affluent communities, c. 1880

68

8

Philadelphia City dumps, c. 1929

81

9

Philadelphia factories, 1950

88

10

Philadelphia area pollution-­intensive factories, 1950

89

11

Getis-­Ord Hotspot Analysis for pollution-­intensive factories, 1950

90

12

Philadelphia Census tracts by percentage white, 1950

92

13

Number of factories per community, 1950

94

14

Number of factories by products, per community, 1950

95 ix

x  •  Maps

15

Census tracts in the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­ Richmond Planning Analysis Area, 2010

145

16

Getis-­Ord Hotspot Analysis showing number of environmental hazards per community, 2010

185

Tables 1

Environmental hazard point system

19

2

Descriptive statistics for communities by number of environmental hazards and hazard points, 2010

22

3

Definition of racial/ethnic composition categories

24

4

Social class cutpoints (points)

26

5

Black male representation in manufacturing industries, Philadelphia, 1880

71

6

Descriptive statistics for Philadelphia Census tracts, 1950

91

7

Number (%) of waste disposal facilities and factories in pollution-­intensive industries by Philadelphia Planning Analysis Area, 1950–­1959

99

8

Philadelphia area counties’ share of population, in number and (%), 1860–­2010

103

9

Philadelphia area incinerators and hazardous waste facilities as of 2010, by year opened for operation

116

10

Number (%) of total manufacturing jobs, by county, 1951–­2009

117

11

Percentage change in number of manufacturing jobs, by county, 1951–­2009

120

xi

xii  •  Tables

12

Number of employees by industry and racial composition of all employees, Philadelphia-­Camden-­ Wilmington Metropolitan Statistical Area, 2010

123

13

Annual average wage by industry, 2010

124

14

Population, racial/ethnic composition, and median household income/family income for Camden City, New Jersey, 1950–­2010

125

Population, racial/ethnic composition, and household income/family income for Chester City, Pennsylvania, 1950–­2010

126

16

Data sources for environmental hazards

182

17

Communities in the 90th percentile for environmental burdening, by hazard points, number of hazards, and community characteristics

186

18

Formula for measuring racial integration with comparative approach

191

19

Cutpoints for racial/ethnic composition categories

192

20

Cutpoints for social class category

194

21

Average racial/ethnic composition by racial/ethnic composition category, 2010

194

22

Average median household income and median home value by racial/ethnic composition category, 2010

195

23

Average economic, educational, and occupational characteristics by social class category, 2010

195

24

Average racial/ethnic composition by social class category, 2010

196

25

Risk ratios and 95% confidence intervals (in parentheses) measuring risk for extensive burdening (mean number of hazards shown in italics)

197

15

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the generous and knowledgeable people who helped me with this project, including Carole Burnett, Sarah Wilson (not her real name), Chris Mizes of the Philadelphia Clean Air Council, Michele Kondo, Mike and Jackie Saier, and the Reverend Horace Strand. The resources of the libraries of the University of Pennsylvania, the Temple Urban Archives, the Philadelphia City Archives, and the National Historical Geographic Information System at the University of Minnesota were invaluable to this project, as was the research expertise of Latanya Jenkins at Temple University. Others who provided feedback and help on the manuscript include David Pellow, Scott Frickel, Kelly Joyce, Tanya Nieri, Douglas Porpora, Mimi Sheller, and my anonymous reviewers. Thank you all so much.

xiii

From Workshop to Waste Magnet

Introduction Philadelphia is known for its cheesesteaks, pretzels, and the statue of Rocky near the steps of the Art Museum. But among those who care about environmental justice, Philadelphia and the towns surrounding it are also known for their stark and shocking environmental inequalities. Some area residents live in clean, leafy neighborhoods far from industrial pollution, while others are engaged in a daily neighborhood struggle with polluted air, multiple waste disposal facilities, relentless truck traffic, and the legacy of toxic manufacturers long gone. Camden City, New Jersey, and Chester City, Pennsylvania, are two such places in the Philadelphia area where important legal battles were fought more than ten years ago. For a moment, it seemed as though poor people of color engaged in continual struggles to fend off the latest proposal for the fifth, tenth, or thirtieth polluting facility for their neighborhood might be able to block the latest one using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After all, their lawyers reasoned, it should not matter whether intentional discrimination was occurring—­all that really mattered was the grossly unequal outcome, and the disparate impact it visited upon poor people of color. But the U.S. Supreme Court viewed it differently, and in its 2001 decision in Alexander v. Sandoval the court ruled that communities could no longer sue state or federal regulators for actions resulting in disparate impact.1 And so, in both communities, the struggle continues.2 As industrial suburbs of Philadelphia, Camden and Chester are two among many other such communities that form a sort of “inner ring” around Philadelphia, close to the Delaware River. In these inner-­ring towns, and in the city of Philadelphia, are many places where “heavy manufacturing” in the primary metals, machine manufacturing, chemical, petroleum refining, rubber, and shipbuilding industries took place from the early 1800s to the 1970s. In the history of people 1

2  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

and industry in the Philadelphia area, 1950 was an important year: it marked the first tiny trickle of what in the 1960s and 1970s would become a flood of people and businesses out of the city and into the surrounding suburbs, and the development of more suburbs farther away from the city. This is why we need to examine the area as a whole—­the suburbs as well as the city—­to understand the development of the environmental inequalities that will be revealed in chapter 1. For this reason my “study area” includes, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, Philadelphia (which is both the City and County of Philadelphia) and Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties; and on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties. The industrial communities within these counties began to lose manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, losses that changed the social fabric of some industrial towns and neighborhoods forever. Many of the factories are gone, but the legacy of industrial land use has drawn new waste disposal facilities that bring with them many of the drawbacks of industry, but without the plentiful jobs that existed in the past. As a result, many industrial neighborhoods still feel very “industrial,” but now the odds of meeting a neighborhood resident who is poor or unemployed are much higher than they used to be. Some industrial towns and neighborhoods are more racially diverse today than they were before the 1970s, with more African American and Hispanic residents and fewer non-­Hispanic white residents. Throughout their history they were always ethnically diverse, with many claiming German, Polish, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, and other ethnic heritages. But job loss led to population loss and the departure of a large proportion of white residents from some communities, leaving some of them predominantly minority, while others remain predominantly white. Some are extremely poor, while others rank somewhere between poor and middle-­class. Others are solidly middle-­class. But most share a legacy of manufacturing activities that were established early (in the Philadelphia area, by about 1820) near a body of water, a situation very common in “Rust Belt” cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Although this industrial history has left a great deal of toxic pollution in its wake, the present situation is a vast improvement over conditions in the past. For example, in the 1940s the stretch of the Delaware River bordering Philadelphia was called “one of the most grossly polluted areas in the United States.”3 The worst environmental abuses were curtailed in 1970 by the creation of a new set of laws and the federal, state, and local environmental protection agencies to administer and enforce those laws. But although there is less toxic pollution in the Philadelphia area today than there was before 1970, its distribution has changed: more facilities producing unhealthy effluents and poor environmental conditions now tend to be concentrated in fewer places. In chapter 1, I will show which thirty-­three communities bear more environmental burdens than 90 percent of all communities in the Philadelphia area. But

Introduction  •  3

for now, let’s take a look at life in two of these extensively burdened communities: Chester City in Delaware County, and the Port Richmond neighborhood in Philadelphia. Both of these communities border the Delaware River.

Chester City: Life in an Extensively Burdened Waterfront Community Let’s begin with Chester City, Pennsylvania, the home of Carole Burnett (pictured in figure 1) and Sarah Wilson (not her real name). Chester City is an industrial town on the waterfront of the Delaware River. Located in Delaware County surrounded by much wealthier communities, Chester City as of 2010 reported a median household income of $28,698, slightly more than one-­third of $74,515, the median household income of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area as a whole. As of 2010, a greater proportion of people were poor in Chester than in Philadelphia: 29.8 percent of Chester residents had incomes below the federal poverty threshold, and 35.14 percent received public assistance in the form of cash payments or food assistance;

FIGURE 1   Carole Burnett, resident of Chester, Pennsylvania, October 2013. Photograph and

map by author.

4  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

while 24.3  percent of Philadelphia residents reported an income below the federal poverty threshold and 30.42 percent received public assistance. Chester is located in affluent Delaware County, where only 9.4 percent reported an income below the poverty threshold and 11.93 percent received public assistance. Seventy-­two percent of Chester’s residents were African American, 16 percent were non-­Hispanic white, and 9 percent were Hispanic.4 Despite a sense of community and the presence of many caring people, Chester faces some daunting social and environmental conditions, and as a result is often viewed by outsiders as a deteriorating, dangerous, and polluted place. Chester suffers from a high violent crime rate, with a 2012 homicide rate of 64.25 per 100,000 inhabitants, many times the national average of 3.3 for cities its size. After being adjusted for population size, Chester’s homicide rate was three times higher than Philadelphia’s homicide rate of 21.51.5 In 2014, Chester suffered a record 30 homicides.6 From 2001 to 2013, Chester was a food desert without a single grocery store, which meant that residents had to go out of town to buy fresh, healthy food. This posed a severe hardship to Chester households because 33.76 percent lacked access to a car.7 These conditions and others have taken their toll on Chester residents’ health: the infant death rate in Chester in 2011 was 14.8 per 1,000 live births, twice the statewide average of 7.2; death rates from cancer, stroke, and lower respiratory disease all were higher in Chester than the Pennsylvania average.8 Until at least 1992, efforts to improve things in Chester were blocked by a Republican-­controlled city government characterized by residents as one that “delivered government functions as personal favors.”9 In addition to the everyday burdens of poverty, dysfunctional government, poor health, and crime, Chester also faces an extensive array of environmental burdens that add to residents’ problems. Packed into Chester’s six square miles are the Delaware County Regional Water Control Authority water treatment plant (Delcora), which treats 50 million gallons of sewage per day; the Covanta trash incinerator, which burns up to 3,510 tons of trash per day; six manufacturers that produce, use, or store ten thousand pounds or more of one or more hazardous chemicals per year and must report to EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI); one abandoned hazardous waste site listed on the Superfund; a cement recycling business with a large crusher; and other polluting facilities. These facilities cause concern among residents such as the woman I’ll call Sarah Wilson, who has lived in Chester since 1973. She says, “The Chester residents, the children, we have health issues here. A lot of childhood asthma, a lot of respiratory disease. I even spoke to a couple people—­not only did she have multiple sclerosis, but she had friends, at least one or two friends, who also had it. And she was interested in knowing if that was a possible by-­product, if you will, of breathing the chemicals here.”

Introduction  •  5

In addition to industrial chemicals, Sarah and other residents are concerned about breathing dust from a large cement crusher: “And then I know there was the cement crushing facility down there. . . . I’ve spoken with some of the residents in that area . . . they also had problems with the particulates that were blowing off the cement crushing facility . . . you’ve got all this sort of dust flying around. And that’s a particular problem for people with respiratory problems . . . even not being able to open your windows!” Residents must also deal with problems stemming from the constant flow of heavy tractor trailers into Chester, and the effect on their homes: “As far as truck traffic, when I’m on the highway, on my way to work, particularly on [Interstate Highway] 95, anytime I see one of those big tractor trailer semi trucks with municipal waste, I know either where it’s goin’ or where it’s comin’ from. You know? And you’re talking about tons of municipal waste, so these trucks are heavy. And I know there are residents down on Second and Booth Streets [near the incinerator], the trucks come down the same street every day. And there was a situation where the foundations of their houses were starting to crack.”10 Carole Burnett, a Chester resident since 1982, told me of how she developed pneumonia after participating in a walking tour of the incinerator and other facilities near the waterfront: “I had been informed by my allergist, when he said, ‘Keep your windows closed and keep your air conditioning on.’ Which I thought was strange at the time. But when I took a tour down there . . . the skin around my face, around my mouth started burning . . . within two weeks I had developed walking pneumonia in my left lung.” Carole is concerned about a new plan: last year, the City of New York signed a twenty-­year contract with Covanta to send about 30 percent of the city’s 14 million tons of trash to two incinerators, one of which is in Chester. The trash will be transported by barge and train to Wilmington, Delaware. From there it will be trucked into Chester, where Carole is certain its impact will be felt. “Well, it’s going to be more trash. It’ll be more funk, more odor. More air pollution going up into the air. More trucks. More truck traffic.”11 But like any place that people call home, there is much more to Chester than dirt and dysfunction. Chester residents take pride in Chester’s place in Pennsylvania’s history: William Penn’s first landing in Pennsylvania in 1682 occurred not at Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia as is usually believed, but there in what is today Chester. There is a stone monument in town commemorating this landing (see figure 2). Chester used to be a prosperous center of manufacturing. During the Civil War, its shipyard turned out ships for the Union; and each time war broke out, Chester experienced another industrial boom. During World War I, Chester workers found employment at many local manufacturers including the Sun Shipbuilding Company, the Atlantic Refining Company, and Keystone Paving and Construction. In all these industries, black workers worked alongside

6  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

FIGURE 2   Monument marking William Penn’s landing in what is now Chester City, Pennsyl-

vania in October 1682. Photograph by author.

white ethnic workers.12 An examination of the directory of Pennsylvania manufacturers in 1950 reveals that fifty-­seven factories—­31 percent of all the factories in Delaware County—­were located in Chester.13 Chester also boasted a thriving retail district: in fact, during the 1950s shopping in Chester was so good that it was not unheard of for people to travel there from towns along the affluent Main Line to do their Christmas shopping.14 The first indications of Chester’s decline came in 1962, when the Ford Motor Company closed its obsolete automobile plant in Chester, and Sun Shipyard laid off thousands.15 But throughout the 1960s, Chester’s school system was still a source of pride for Chester residents. As Sarah Wilson puts it, “If you talked to people who went to elementary school and then to junior high school, there was a sense of pride in the education system. I hear people talk about the teachers they had, how dedicated they were. And then . . . even when I graduated in 1975, there was still the same sense of pride, the sense that you could get a quality education here . . . but sometime after that, in the late ’70s going into the ’80s, things started to decline little by little.”16 Part of the decline was due to an increase in crime. While the crime rate was at an all-­time high all across the United States in the early 1980s, almost every newspaper story about Chester was about either its poverty or its high crime rate.17 People had already been conditioned to view crime and poverty as

Introduction  •  7

problems inextricably linked to urban neighborhoods and the African Americans who dwelled there.18 This racial stigmatization of Chester exacerbated its problems by making it appear to be the right place for dirty and polluting land uses unwanted elsewhere. It also exaggerated the amount of risk faced by white visitors to Chester. Residents are aware of this stigma and its unfairness, as Carole Burnett related in the story of a recent armed robbery in Chester that ended in the death of a white drugstore clerk: “Now we just had a . . . vigil at the Rite Aid [drugstore]. Because a worker in that store that happened to be Caucasian, that everybody liked, Jason, was killed. And immediately you think, oh, Chester, a crime place. All those people that were involved, that they finally arrested, were from Philadelphia.”19 Recent attempts at economic redevelopment along Chester’s waterfront have resulted in the construction of large-­scale entertainment complexes including a casino and racetrack and a soccer stadium. But these are in fact projects that can be characterized as exclusionary development as they are generally inaccessible to Chester residents, and bring them no benefit at all.20 Although the casino brings about 8,500 people to Chester each day and thousands come to the soccer stadium on big game days, all are whisked along Highway 291, which divides the waterfront from the poor areas of Chester. None of these visitors have to go through much of Chester, interact with its residents, or patronize its businesses. When asked if they have seen any benefits from these new facilities, which appear to be taking pains to distance themselves as much as possible from the city in which they are located, Sarah Wilson had this to say: “Not to my knowledge . . . not that I can see outwardly. The fact that they even changed the name of it . . . it was Harrah’s Chester. Now it’s Harrah’s Philadelphia. They did that over a year ago. That makes people feel that, what do you think of us? What do you think of the city?”21 But for the people who call Chester home, it is “a city made up of families” that has “a sense of family,” which I interpreted to mean that people feel closer to each other than is implied in the phrase “a sense of community.” Chester is where parents raised their children and saw their children and grandchildren come back to Chester to live. It’s a city where there are many organizations with dedicated people working to help and mentor youth, and where people fought to get City Hall back after decades of Republican machine control. Most of all, Chester is a city where people aren’t even close to having given up.

Port Richmond: Life in One of Philadelphia’s Oldest Industrial Neighborhoods Port Richmond, the home of Mike and Jackie Saier (pictured in figure 3) is sometimes called “Richmond” by residents.

8  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

FIGURE 3   Mike and Jackie Saier at their home in Philadelphia’s Port Richmond neighborhood, August 2013. Photograph and map by author.

It is where people in Philadelphia go for Polish food. Its Polish ethnic “flavor” is evident from the many Polish groceries and restaurants, the Polish flags on display, and the tall spires of its Catholic churches. Its streets are narrow, lined mostly with well-­kept rowhomes, and there is a constant flow of traffic that is choked off every few blocks by construction. Few homes have driveways or garages, and parking is tight. Many couples with children have recently purchased homes here, taking advantage of the relatively affordable prices in this neighborhood and causing the population to get younger.22 Mike and Jackie’s neighborhood is one of the oldest industrial neighborhoods in Philadelphia, located along the Delaware River. Neighborhood boundaries are always contested in Philadelphia, and there is often no general agreement among residents as to where the boundaries lie. But according to the boundaries used by the City of Philadelphia, there are eight census tracts in Port Richmond, and its racial/ethnic composition is 55 percent non-­ Hispanic white, 14  percent African American, and 27  percent Hispanic. Its median household income is $28,963—­77  percent of Philadelphia’s median household income and 41  percent of that of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area. But Port Richmond’s non-­Hispanic white population is concentrated into the four census tracts closest to the river (where Mike and Jackie live), which average 92 percent white, 1.4 percent black, and 4.36 percent Hispanic. Median household income is $35,702 in these tracts, just slightly less than that of Philadelphia as a whole.23

Introduction  •  9

Like Chester, Port Richmond is also extensively burdened with environmental hazards. As is true of every industrial neighborhood in Philadelphia, it has been subjected to many decades of intensive industrial use without strong environmental laws. Environmental irresponsibility and neglect is evident in abandoned and crumbling factories, and in fenced-­off brownfields and Superfund sites. But in the Bridesburg neighborhood, which borders Port Richmond, environmental hazards from the old Philadelphia Coke plant lie hidden under a verdant overgrowth of grass and trees. The Philadelphia Coke site covers sixty-­ eight acres, and hazardous waste is still stored onsite. Until the plant closed in 1982, Philadelphia Coke manufactured fuel for steel plants. All the buildings are gone, and the vacant land enclosed by a chain-­link fence appears to be a park. Only by excavating under the soil and sampling for chemicals can the true extent of toxic contamination be revealed.24 Bridesburg is one of two industrial neighborhoods adjoining Port Richmond. In the past, it specialized in manufacturing chemicals and coke to fuel steel plants. As of 2010, it was 95 percent white, 0.45 percent black, and 2.66 percent Hispanic, with a median household income of $44,058 (120 percent of Philadelphia’s median household income of $36,836). The other neighborhood is Kensington, now a low-­income neighborhood with the city’s largest concentration of Hispanic residents. As of 2010, Kensington was 40 percent white, 14 percent black, and 39 percent Hispanic, with a median household income of $26,184, or 71 percent of Philadelphia’s median household income.25 In decades past, Kensington specialized in textiles; it has a long history as one of Philadelphia’s oldest industrial districts. The three neighborhoods together make up the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­ Richmond Planning Analysis Area, one of twelve Planning Analysis Areas used by Philadelphia city planners from 1950 to 2010. (In chapter 1, I will outline the results of research including these areas.) Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond’s 7.39 square miles contain six Toxic Release Inventory facilities; fourteen Superfund sites; two electric power plants; one sewage treatment plant; and two trash transfer facilities (see the appendix for data sources). Mike Saier, who was born in Port Richmond, and his wife, Jackie, who has lived there since 1968, live in the part of Port Richmond close to the river. They love their neighborhood and have seen environmental conditions improve since the 1970s. Mike recalls what it was like there in the 1950s when the plants were still going: “First of all, we had a factory directly across the street, which was a metal galvanizing place. Which used to let off terrible smells day and night. And we had a diesel train go by the front of the house [he points out where the tracks were in the narrow street in front of his house] . . . they’re buried underneath the asphalt out here, they redid ’em about ten years ago. Used to deliver lumber from the yards and chemicals to all the chemical plants around here.”26 But their safety and their quality of life are still at risk due to the constant flow of truck traffic through the narrow streets of their neighborhood. They

10  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

also have serious concerns about what air pollutants are doing to their health, so much so that Jackie spoke at a hearing held by the Environmental Protection Agency: “Two summers ago my neighbor’s house on Almond Street was on fire. It started in the kitchen . . . because of a [large] tractor trailer going over [our street], the fire truck couldn’t get by . . . the fireman couldn’t open the fire truck doors [because] they were stuck between a parked car and the tractor trailer . . . the smell from the diesel was overwhelming . . . I had to close my windows it stunk so bad . . . my neighbor later passed away from her burns.” The building that once housed the metal galvanizing plant across the street is now a preschool, and many children play there during and after school every day. Jackie is concerned for the children’s health because they are breathing smoke and fumes from the diesel trucks that pass constantly on their street.27 The diesel exhaust from these trucks blackens her windowsills with soot that must be cleaned every three to four days. Mike and Jackie are also concerned about the uneasy mix of heavy truck traffic and many pedestrians, which, according to Mike, has already resulted in several accidents. I wondered how there could be so much truck traffic in the neighborhood now that almost all of its factories are gone. According to Mike, the departure of the factories left a lot of vacant land in close proximity to Interstate-­95, which is now being rented out as parking to long-­haul truck drivers from out of state. In addition to soot and fumes, the truck traffic from these lots also brings a lot of noise: “It’s horrible. I mean, the trucks normally start rolling by my house, I would say on the average, like three, three-­thirty, four o’clock in the morning. That early. And what they’re doing, they’re taking the rigs into the lot. And I imagine what they do is drop them off and wait for drivers to come in a little bit later and move ’em out . . . [b]ut they’re constantly back and forth and back and forth . . . it’s constant all day.”28 Mike would like to see the old, abandoned factories torn down and new development take their place, but although he doesn’t see that happening much in Port Richmond, he still has no plans to abandon it: “It’s been my neighborhood all my life. The people are friendly. They’re pretty well connected to each other in one way or another. A lot of people used to work together in different plants . . . it’s a close-­knit neighborhood, which is hard to find anymore. Especially in a major city like Philadelphia.”29

Philadelphia and the Questions of an Environmental Justice Researcher After visiting Chester, Port Richmond, and other environmental justice communities and studying the Philadelphia area for years, it still took some time for me to see and understand the complexities of the environmental inequalities that exist here in the Philadelphia area. I grew up in San Jose, California,

Introduction  •  11

during its transition from Orchard Town to Silicon Valley, and I was used to seeing industrialized urban neighborhoods that were predominantly Mexican American and black, while predominantly white neighborhoods tended to have a much more suburban feel. In graduate school I joined a group of professors and graduate students researching environmental inequalities in Phoenix, Arizona. We found that in South Phoenix, lower-­income and predominantly minority neighborhoods were burdened with a greater density of different types of environmental hazards.30 We saw the same clear, linear relationships between large minority populations and the higher number and severity of environmental hazards that were evident in research on Los Angeles, San Jose, Portland, and Seattle.31 After arriving in Philadelphia to begin my work as an assistant professor, I became intensely curious about the patterns of environmental inequality I would find here. As a sociologist, I found the city of Philadelphia fascinating: a walk down virtually any street in Center City revealed vast gulfs of social inequality. Wealthy whites could be seen walking home to their Center City apartments or heading for the nearest station to board regional rail trains to their suburban houses. Very poor African Americans could also be seen boarding buses to their homes in North and West Philadelphia. The history of Philadelphia revealed long-­standing racial segregation and job discrimination, with African Americans being shut out of the better jobs in the new manufacturing industries. Before about 1950, the more “foreign” looking and sounding groups of European immigrants were not considered really white, but they were still considered closer to white than African Americans. This was a form of white privilege: they had access to jobs that paid well enough to afford them social mobility.32 I started to conduct my own research on environmental justice in Philadelphia and discovered beleaguered, racially diverse communities in Southwest Philadelphia where neighborhood organizations were continually forced to fight off the latest waste disposal facility proposed for their neighborhood.33 When I examined the whole Philadelphia area, I discovered that there were disproportionately more African Americans, Hispanics, manufacturing workers, and economically disadvantaged people living near the worst of the hazardous facilities than there were near the less hazardous facilities.34 But the longer I studied the Philadelphia area, the more I uncovered complex relationships between racial/ethnic identities and social class status, and environmental burdening—­relationships that had seemed simpler and more straightforward in Phoenix. In Philadelphia I discovered that some of the communities most heavily burdened with environmental hazards were over 88 percent white with middle-­class incomes, which was unexpected.35 These findings made me intensely curious about the way in which it all came about. I wanted to trace the history of the Philadelphia area, and discover why environmental inequality developed as it did here.

12  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

Some of the places I identified as extensively burdened (such as the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond Planning Analysis Area) began as industrial suburbs surrounding Philadelphia but became part of the city with the Consolidation Acts of 1854. Others were Philadelphia’s industrial satellite cities (such as Chester City, Camden City, Bristol and Falls Townships, and the Borough of Marcus Hook), whose economies were almost entirely dependent upon manufacturing. Some of these industrial places were (and remain) predominantly white, settled many decades ago by white immigrants seeking industrial employment. The white, working-­class residents of these communities bear the environmental legacy of centuries-­long industrial land use. Philadelphia’s African Americans sought similar employment, but due to racial discrimination, far fewer were able to gain access to these relatively well-­paid, unionized jobs. Thus, the connection between industrial work and industrial hazards that explains the environmental burdening of Philadelphia’s predominantly white waterfront communities does not explain why so many communities in which African Americans and Hispanics make up more than 31 percent of the population are burdened with environmental hazards. (For a definition of racial/ethnic composition categories, see table 3 in chapter 1). Interestingly, there were also some very poor, predominantly black parts of Philadelphia (such as West Philadelphia) that were almost entirely free of hazards because of their history as unindustrialized suburbs. Many of the environmental problems faced by residents of places such as Chester City resulted from the accumulation of waste disposal land uses (such as incinerators, landfills, sewage treatment and compost facilities, and hazardous waste facilities) that were sited there long after the decline of industrial employment. These observations seemed at odds with existing ideas about the causes of environmental injustice and inequality. If racism was the reason for environmental burdening, why were some burdened places predominantly white? If African Americans were denied jobs in heavy industry and kept out of the predominantly white neighborhoods surrounding it, then why did African Americans predominate in a disproportionate number of environmentally burdened communities? Since social class was not emphasized in the literature on environmental racism, it could sometimes sound as though whites were a homogenous group of people, all of whom were middle-­class or affluent.36 But if it was poverty and not race that determined environmental burdening, why weren’t middle-­class communities in the Philadelphia area as free from environmental burdening as affluent communities?37 The literature on environmental injustice was vast, but it could not answer my questions. Researching this project has convinced me that the process David Pellow called “environmental inequality formation” is, in some places, much more complex than current theories indicate.38

Introduction  •  13

The research I’ve done for this book has convinced me that in the Philadelphia area, the root causes of environmental inequality are social class disadvantage and white privilege. These operated together to create industrially zoned places of heavy industry, where white immigrants from Europe and their descendants earned relatively high wages in unionized manufacturing jobs, and lived in racially segregated working-­class neighborhoods close to polluting plants. Three simultaneous developments in the 1970s and 1980s transformed these communities into impoverished, predominantly minority waste magnets: the disappearance of manufacturing employment, the flight of white workers from industrial communities, and the enactment of environmental laws that created a need for new places to dispose of wastes. And it is unlikely that this path to environmental injustice is unique to Philadelphia; many other northern industrial cities have traveled a similar journey through industrial development and decline to environmental inequality. The aim of this book is to explain the reasons for the present-­day environmental inequalities in the Philadelphia area by tracing their development through the industrial, social, and environmental history of the area, and ultimately to use what was learned about environmental inequality in Philadelphia to build a regionally sensitive theory of environmental inequality. In chapter 1, I’ll provide the results of my analysis, measuring which Philadelphia area communities were burdened with more environmental hazards in 2010 than 90 percent of all communities, and illustrating the numbers with maps. Chapter 2 focuses on definitions and theories of environmental justice and injustice. After discussing environmental justice research and research findings, I focus on some ways of thinking about environmental justice that, although neglected by researchers, can help us to explain how and why the Philadelphia area’s urban environmental inequalities came to be. These two introductory chapters set the stage for the next two historical chapters, which focus on the Philadelphia area’s three layers of industrial development and expansion (in which industrial landscapes were built on top of one another), within the context of current social and economic relations. Chapter 3 examines the first layer, the earliest stages of industrialization in Philadelphia, from 1820 to 1845. In this stage, heavy industry was established near the Delaware River. In the second layer, from 1845 to 1949, the advent of first steam and then electric power allowed Philadelphia’s factories to move farther out from the Delaware River as the city grew into the “Workshop of the World.” The social and environmental privilege of wealthy elites was consolidated through the creation of Fairmount Park and the shutdown of industry along the Schuylkill River. In chapter 4, I trace Philadelphia’s final stage of industrial expansion through its third layer (1950–2010), in which manufacturing industries remained economically robust but both people and manufacturing businesses began to flee Philadelphia for the surrounding suburbs.

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At the same time, Philadelphia’s pre-­EPA waste disposal practices were causing public anger. This sets the stage for chapter 5, which focuses on the changes wrought by deindustrialization and the new environmental laws and changing waste disposal practices from 1970 to 1990. Within a context in which manufacturing communities were devastated by the loss of tax revenues and jobs, some municipalities sought out polluting waste disposal facilities (such as incinerators), while others were able to use social and racial privilege to push the burden of their waste disposal onto others. It was at this time that both predominantly white deindustrialized communities and poor, stigmatized minority communities were transformed from workshops to waste magnets. Impoverished communities in which African Americans and Hispanics had become the majority of residents became racially stigmatized. Poverty-­related social problems such as crime, poor schools, and vacant houses caused them to be viewed by some as attractive build waste disposal facilities, while weakening their political strength to resist unwanted, polluting development. Nevertheless, the residents of these communities did (and do) fight against the addition of more polluting and waste disposal facilities. In chapter 6, I trace the ways in which social class and race/ethnicity intersected in the formation of urban environmental inequalities in the Philadelphia area. In a diverse metropolitan area such as Philadelphia, it has never been true that all or most predominantly white communities were wealthy or middle-­class, or that all or most minority communities were poor. Understanding the diversity among environmentally burdened communities requires an understanding of the ways in which some privilege (and not just disadvantage) can lead to environmental burdening. But white privilege alone has not been sufficient: the preservation of unpolluted space has required the combination of racial and economic privilege. These intersectionalities are evident in current efforts to redevelop the outmoded, dilapidated, and contaminated tracts of land along the Delaware River waterfront, which have resulted in either changing the fate of environmentally burdened waterfront communities, or sealing it. In chapter 7, I extract some of the factors found to be important in the formation of environmental inequality in Philadelphia, and consider their usefulness in creating a Rust Belt theory of environmental inequality that can be generalized to other northern industrial cities. This book is for residents of the Philadelphia area’s environmentally burdened communities, whose issues have too often been ignored by policy makers. It is also for students and researchers of environmental injustice and inequality, or anyone who is interested in urban racial, ethnic, and social class inequalities. It is also for those who study urban health and health disparities. Finally, I hope that it will interest people who study cities, including geographers, city planners, historians, and sociologists.

1

Measuring Environmental Inequalities in the Philadelphia Area in 2010 In the introduction, I’ve presented Chester City and Port Richmond, two Philadelphia area communities facing severe environmental inequality, in an effort to give the reader a bit of the flavor of what it is like to live there amid the environmental justice struggles each community faces. In this chapter, I’ll discuss my research and how I determined which communities in the Philadelphia area faced extreme environmental inequality, compared with others. I will also provide some numbers and maps to illustrate my findings. The focus in this chapter and the historical ones that follow is on the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area (also known as “Greater Philadelphia”), which includes the City of Philadelphia (which is also Philadelphia County) and the four Pennsylvania counties that border Philadelphia (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery). It also includes three New Jersey counties just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia (Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester). The Philadelphia area is especially suited for a study of the development of environmental inequality due to its industrial, environmental, and social histories. The city and its suburban manufacturing “satellite cities” have a long history of intense industrial activity, which gave rise to appalling levels of pollution and environmental damage. Philadelphia also played a long and fascinatingly contradictory role in the history of race and ethnic relations in the United States. It is the place where Quakers and others spirited slaves out of the South on the Underground Railroad; but it is also the place where African 15

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Americans were murdered and their homes burned in a series of antiblack riots during the same period in history. Throughout Philadelphia’s history, its African American job seekers faced a brick wall of racial discrimination when they sought a share of the prosperity of the booming manufacturing plants all around them. Yet Philadelphia is also one of the U.S. cities where there has always been a prosperous black middle class and black elite. It has also always been home to many impoverished and near-­poor white people, some of whom struggled to make a living without dying in their industrial workplaces. Thus, Philadelphia’s history illustrates the multidimensional nature of both race and social class as conditions shaping environmental inequality. At the beginning of Philadelphia’s industrial age, most of the largest industrial plants in “noxious” industries—­industries producing smoke, noise, and bad smells—­were located not in the center of Philadelphia, but rather in industrial suburbs on the outskirts of the city. Those who worked there tended to live close by, in small rowhomes near the plants. Farther away from the city were the homes of the privileged—­those who may have invested in factories but did not work in the factory. These wealthy communities are as much a part of the story of how environmental inequalities were produced as are poor and working-­class communities; yet, the privileged, and the way in which their racial and class privileges are mobilized to obtain environmental privilege, are usually ignored in environmental justice studies.1 Since the Philadelphia area is characterized by a high level of social class inequality, it also includes a number of these privileged communities, allowing for an examination of their role in the development of environmental inequality. For this reason, it was important to include the suburbs as well as the city in this study of environmental inequality. To trace communities through history, it is necessary to choose a definition of “community” that carries with it some type of social identity and sets it apart from other communities. Municipalities (boroughs, cities, and towns) have a social identity, including social class and racial/ethnic identities; and they specialize in certain types of employment. They also have legal boundaries, clear borders that set them apart from other places. Thus, communities outside Philadelphia are defined as the 339 boroughs, cities, and townships bordering Philadelphia but outside its boundaries. Within the city, it was a bit more difficult to define “communities.” Census tracts did not qualify, as they have no social identity; they were also much smaller than suburban towns. Neighborhoods were better than census tracts, since they have strong social identities; but like census tracts, they were too small in area to compare with suburban towns. Also, in Philadelphia neighborhood residents debate and disagree about the boundaries of their neighborhoods—­in fact, there is even disagreement over how many neighborhoods actually exist in the city. The best definition for communities was the twelve Planning Analysis Areas

Measuring Environmental Inequalities  •  17

used by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, each of which contained more than one neighborhood.2 (See the appendix for a more detailed description of methodology.) Census data were added to maps of the twelve Planning Analysis Areas and the suburban towns that surround Philadelphia, yielding a picture of the racial/ethnic composition of all Philadelphia area communities and the median household income of each community (see maps 1 and 2).3 Since this study examines the development of environmental inequality, perhaps it is time for some discussion about what “environmental inequality” means. Although all terms connected with environmental justice tend to have multiple meanings, it is fair to say that environmental inequality describes a wide range of conditions in which the environment in one place is less beautiful, healthy, or safe than the environment in another place.4 One type of environmental inequality is distributional inequality, which refers to difference, unevenness, or inequality in the distribution of environmental “bads” (such as polluting factories, power plants, or waste disposal facilities).5 Distributional inequality can also describe an unfair distribution of environmental “goods” (such as tree cover, access to parks and other places for safe recreation, and access to public transportation); in the Philadelphia area, as in most places,

MAP 1   Philadelphia area communities by percentage non-­Hispanic white, 2010. Source: U.S. Census.

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MAP 2   Philadelphia area communities by median household income, 2010. Source: U.S. Census.

environmental goods tend to be clustered in very different places than environmental bads. In the Philadelphia area, “environmental bads” include Superfund sites; electric power plants; polluting factories listed on the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI); commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs); incinerators; municipal, construction, and industrial landfills; large sewage treatment plants or sludge management facilities; and trash transfer stations (listed in table 1, along with a breakdown of the points assigned to symbolize the hazardousness of each type of facility). Using GIS, I mapped each facility onto 2010 census maps for the Philadelphia area (see the appendix for data sources and methods). The system through which points were assigned to symbolize the hazardousness of each type of facility compared to other types was created by Massachusetts researchers, who had access to a lot of information about the volume and toxicity of chemicals emitted by each type of facility, how long it took the chemicals to break down in the environment, etc.6 Unfortunately, most of the sites in New Jersey and Pennsylvania haven’t been given the same type of rigorous rating for hazardousness as the same type of facilities in Massachusetts. So in this study, the numbers used to symbolize hazardousness are highly abstract; their only validity lies in the extent to which incinerators, Superfund

Measuring Environmental Inequalities  •  19

Table 1

Environmental Hazard Point System Type of hazardous facility or site

U.S. EPA Superfund site (not on National Priority List) U.S. EPA Superfund site (National Priority List) Electric power plant Toxic Release Inventory industrial facility Commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facility Incinerators Demolition landfill Large sewage treatment plant or sludge management facility Industrial solid waste landfill (dry industrial waste) Municipal solid waste landfill Trash transfer station

General rating of severity of hazards to human health (in points)

5 25 10 5 5 20 3 5 5 5 5

SOURCE: Daniel Faber and Eric J. Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, Supplement 2 (2002): 277–­288.

sites, and power plants are fairly standard and likely to represent the same degree of hazard everywhere in the United States. This would be a bigger problem if this were a study of how much each hazardous facility was affecting the health of the people living close to it. But even though this study is focused on distributional inequality rather than health effects, the point system still presents a problem. If communities that are very small in area have just one or a few facilities or sites that are rated as more hazardous, they may get more points than larger communities with many facilities that are rated as less hazardous. This would be problematic because the clustering of hazardous facilities or sites in only a few communities is an almost perfect description of distributional inequality. One very simple way to capture the clustering of environmental hazards is to count up the number of each type of facility listed in table 1 that falls within the boundaries of each community, and add up the number of all facilities in the community. This allows for a true measure of the way that environmental hazards are clustered in space (or are not), and an easy way to compare their distribution across different types of communities. Most people, if fully informed and in possession of enough money to have a real choice, would choose not to live near accumulations of the facilities listed in table 1 because of the possibility that they or their children could be exposed to toxic substances through breathing fumes or dust, or through contact with contaminated soil.7 But the places in this study designated as “communities” are town-­sized—­areas much too large to enable us to tie hazards

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together with exposure pathways for individuals. This means that the data in this study can only point to communities where environmental hazards are clustered as places where exposure to these hazards might be more likely than communities where they are not clustered—­they do not constitute any proof that people in such places are actually exposed to hazards. But there are many reasons, besides possible health impacts, why people living near clusters of noxious facilities almost always suffer from a lowered quality of life. As we saw in the introduction, bad environmental conditions in extensively burdened communities include noisy trucks that load and unload day and night; the sickening smell of chemicals, sewage, or rotting garbage; and dust, smoke, and soot that constantly drift over homes and cars. These conditions become part of the identity of a place, and so may impact many more people in the community than just those living in the houses or apartments closest to the hazard. They may lower the values of people’s homes; and since most people’s wealth lies in their homes, this represents a significant financial impact on families in the community. Clusters of noxious facilities may also lead to an increase in poverty and unemployment in the neighborhood resulting from blocked opportunities for cleaner economic development. Just as people generally do not want to move to noisy, truck-­choked, dusty areas where the air smells bad, neither do offices, restaurants, retail outlets, or other sources of employment.8 Ironically, this is also a reason why these communities may attract only offers from waste disposal businesses: once the community becomes perceived as an appropriate place to put wastes, the number of waste disposers may increase over time, adding to the distributional inequality. One way to define the degree of distributional inequality is to compare the number of hazard points or hazard sites (the hazard burden) in one community with those of all communities. In this study, communities defined as extensively burdened with environmental hazards are those communities with more environmentally hazardous facilities or sites (and a higher number of environmental hazard points) than 90 percent of all other Philadelphia area communities in 2010 (or, to put it another way, extensively burdened communities are those in the top 10 percent for environmental hazards). The analysis shows that in the Philadelphia area, thirty-­three communities fit this definition, and are thus considered extensively burdened. These communities are shown in map 3 (see table 17 in the appendix for a list of extensively burdened communities). A statistical test indicated that the hazards are spatially clustered, and the clustering is statistically significant (see the appendix for map 16 showing test results). We know from the environmental justice literature that communities with a disproportionate share of environmental hazards tend to be

Measuring Environmental Inequalities  •  21

MAP 3   Philadelphia area communities extensively burdened by environmental hazards, 2010.

Source: U.S. Census (for sources for environmental hazard data, see table 16, Appendix).

predominantly minority and poor—­but in the United States researchers have found many exceptions to this generalization.9 A look at the social characteristics of people in the thirty-­three Philadelphia area communities that are extensively burdened shows that they are different from the average in the same way that the bulk of environmental justice studies would predict: the proportion of minorities is higher, while the socioeconomic status is lower (see table 2). But these results don’t explain much about how this group of communities came to be extensively burdened with environmental hazards, or why. One way to learn more about this pattern is to think about it in terms of “risk factors”—­did the social characteristics of the community such as poverty or high concentrations of African Americans and Hispanics place these communities at risk for extensive burdening? The long, ugly history of racial injustice in the United States, and the way in which it has built white wealth at the expense of all other groups, has left a residue of economic inequality for both African Americans and Hispanics.10 Since these two minority groups tend to have lower incomes than non-­Hispanic whites, it does not make sense to treat race/ethnicity and social class status as independent, competing risk factors. Instead, they can be said to intersect.

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Table 2

Descriptive Statistics for Communities by Number of Environmental Hazards and Hazard Points, 2010

5 environmental hazards or more (communities at 90th percentile), (N = 33) 4 environmental hazards (N = 13) 3 environmental hazards (N = 22) 2 environmental hazards (N = 47) 1 environmental hazard (N = 84) 0 environmental hazards (N = 152) All communities (N = 351)

Mean number of hazards

Mean hazard points

Median household income

Mean % non-­ Hispanic white

Mean % Hispanic

Mean % non-­ Hispanic black

9.76

73.58

$57,786 $225,448 66.43%

9.11%

17.59%

4.00

30.77

$53,727 $223,733 70.85%

4.95%

18.90%

3.00

21.64

$76,697 $307,884 80.41%

3.52%

10.40%

2.00

14.26

$68,571 $286,700 80.95%

4.79%

7.85%

1.00

6.67

$71,834 $287,075 79.72%

5.59%

10.06%

0.00

0.00

$74,023 $264,346 80.56%

5.69%

8.72%

1.78

12.63

$71,563 $264,500 78.47%

5.78%

10.38%

Median housing values

Intersectionality is the term for the ways in which multiple social statuses combine to intensify disadvantage (such as the way in which the combination of minority race/ethnicity, poverty, and female gender combine to disempower women of color).11 But intersectionality can also be used to study the way that whiteness and affluence can combine to consolidate social power.12 Although the concept of intersectionality has been used by sociologists mostly to study how disadvantage and privilege affect the lives of individuals, it can also apply to communities (or places) and their multiple social locations within relations of power.13 (I’ll have a lot more to say about theories of the formation of environmental injustice in chapter 2.) To explore how race/ethnicity and social class status might intersect in raising or lowering community risk for extensive burdening with environmental hazards, some categories are needed. Although creating categories to

Measuring Environmental Inequalities  •  23

characterize the racial/ethnic composition and social class status of communities is a very artificial way of analyzing them, it is the best way to rank them relative to other communities in the area. Another interesting thing categories allow is to examine how traits associated with social privilege (such as having high housing values) may combine with traits associated with social disempowerment (such as having a high proportion of African American residents) to boost or lower the risk of environmental burdening. Before beginning the task of creating categories, I already knew from many years of studying the environmental justice research that, in the northeast United States, African Americans and Hispanics are the two groups that suffer most from distributional inequality, and that patterns of environmental inequality often differ between the two groups.14 Only the three largest racial/ ethnic groups in the Philadelphia area (non-­Hispanic whites, non-­Hispanic African Americans, and Hispanics) were represented in the analysis. Six community types were defined: substantially white; predominantly white; substantially diverse (no one group is predominant); predominantly black (high proportion African American, lower proportions Hispanic and white); predominantly Hispanic (high proportion Hispanic, lower proportion African American); and high-­minority (high proportions of both African Americans and Hispanics; lower proportion white). For the proportions of each group in each community type, see table 3. The location of each type of community in the Philadelphia area is depicted in map 4. (See the appendix for the methods I used to create these categories, and for tables of descriptive statistics for communities in each category.) These categories were created from categories used in census data on population, occupation, and income as of 2010; but unfortunately, the racial/ethnic categories created by the Census Bureau don’t connect well with the historical meanings of race and ethnicity. Until the 1950s, very few Hispanics lived in the Philadelphia area; if they had, they would not have been visible in the census data anyway, since people weren’t asked whether they were of Hispanic ethnicity until the 1980 census.15 Today non-­Hispanic whites appear to be a homogenous ethnic group, but this was not the reality in the past. Before the twentieth century, many immigrants from Europe were not perceived as white; they were often despised as racially inferior people despite their white skin. But it was this white skin that allowed them to gain employment and advance economically in the United States, while African American advancement was blocked by racial discrimination.16 To understand how the meanings of whiteness changed in Philadelphia, we will have to go back further in its history than the 2010 census (see chapters 3, 4, and 5). To decide whether to categorize a community as disadvantaged, lower middle-­class, middle-­class, upper middle-­class, or affluent, I used six census variables: median household income; median home value; the proportion of

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Table 3

Definition of Racial/Ethnic Composition Categories Racial/ethnic composition category

Percentage white lower limit

Substantially 95.98% white (0–­4.02% minority) Predominantly white 87.94 (4.03–­12.06% minority) Substantially diverse 68.71 (12.18–­31.29% minority) Predominantly black 0.00 (24.01–­100% minority) 0.00 Predominantly Hispanic (24.01–­100% minority) 0.00 High minority (31% or more minority; high in Hispanic and black populations)

Percentage Percentage Percentage white upper black lower black upper limit limit limit

100.00%

Percentage Hispanic lower limit

Percentage Hispanic upper limit

0.00%

2.58%

0.00%

1.44%

95.97

2.59

7.74

1.45

4.32

87.93

7.75

24.00

4.33

7.29

75.99

24.01

100.00

0.00

4.32

75.99

0.00

7.74

24.01

100.00

68.69

24.01

100.00

7.30

100.00

residents over twenty-­five years old with less than a high school diploma; the proportion over twenty-­five years old with a bachelor’s degree or more; the proportion who worked in management occupations; and the proportion who worked in service occupations. For a recap of how each variable defined community social class status, see table 4. The spatial location of each type of community in the Philadelphia area is depicted in map 5. (See the appendix for methods for creating social class categories; see tables 21–­24 for descriptive statistics for communities in each category.) Besides racial/ethnic composition and social class status, a community’s location in the entire Philadelphia area is another characteristic that might raise or lower its risk for being extensively burdened with environmental hazards. A glance at map 3 shows that the extensively burdened communities are not scattered randomly across the Philadelphia area: instead, they tend to cluster along the Delaware River (see map 3). Thus, it was important to test how location bordering the Delaware River might boost or lower the risk for environmental burdening. Other locational factors that might be important include: urban/suburban locale (whether the community was located inside

Measuring Environmental Inequalities  •  25

MAP 4   Philadelphia area communities by racial/ethnic composition, 2010. Sources: U.S. Census; Richard A. Smith, “Discovering Stable Racial Integration,” Journal of Urban Affairs 20, no. 1 (1998): 1–­25 (see tables 18 and 19, Appendix).

Philadelphia or outside its borders); and inner ring/outer ring suburban location (whether a suburban community was an older township located close to Philadelphia or a newer municipality located further away from the city). (See the appendix for definitions of how locations were derived.) The last step was to calculate how each community characteristic affected its risk for being extensively burdened with environmental hazards, which meant it contained within its borders more hazards than 90  percent of all Philadelphia area communities. (See the appendix for details on how risk ratios were derived, and how to interpret them; risk ratios are listed in table 25 in the appendix.) First, let’s consider how each of the characteristics alone—­location, racial/ ethnic composition, and social class status—­affect the communities’ risk for being extensively burdened with environmental hazards. Location bordering the Delaware River is the strongest risk factor and increases the risk of extensive burdening to 9.60—­more than nine times the average. Bordering the Delaware River was a risk factor for communities in almost every social class category, although disadvantaged communities along the Delaware faced the highest risk (7.15 times average). (Only one affluent community was among the extensively burdened, and it did not border the Delaware River.) Almost

$191,474 or less $191,475–­$227,987 $227,988–­$319,250 $319,251–­$373,999 $374,000 or more

$54,071 or less

$54,072–­$62,318

$62,319–­$82,775

$82,776–­$94,984

$94,985 or more

Disadvantaged (1 point) Lower middle class (2 points) Middle class (3 points) Upper middle class (4 points) Affluent (5 points)

Median housing value

Median household income

Social class category

Social Class Cutpoints (Points)

Table 4

2.45% or less

2.46–­3.97%

3.96–­7.89%

7.90–­10.30%

10.31% or more

Percentage without high school diploma

9.66% or less

9.65–­13.09%

13.10–­15.53%

15.54–­17.97%

17.98% or more

Percentage in service occupation

55.64% or more

44.84–­55.63%

27.75–­44.83%

21.44–­27.74%

21.43% or less

Percentage with B.A. degree or more

53.11% or more

46.39–­53.10%

34.44–­46.38%

29.22–­34.43%

29.21% or less

Percentage in management occupation

Measuring Environmental Inequalities  •  27

MAP 5   Philadelphia area communities by social class, 2010. Source: U.S. Census (see table 20, Appendix).

half of the extensively burdened communities (fifteen out of thirty-­three, or 45 percent) border the Delaware River. High minority communities (communities with a high proportion of both African American and Hispanic residents) faced an elevated risk for extensive burdening 3.23 times average. (It is worth noting that no substantially white communities—­those at least 96  percent non-­Hispanic white—­were among the extensively burdened communities.) Risk was also significantly elevated for urban communities located within Philadelphia city limits (7.61 times average). Surprisingly, risk was not significantly elevated for inner-­ring suburban communities bordering Philadelphia, unless they bordered the Delaware River. But for outer-­ring suburban communities, risk was only 41 percent of average. Disadvantaged communities were 3.16 times more likely to be extensively burdened than the average community, but affluent communities faced only 13 percent of average risk for extensive burdening. Now let’s consider how risk factors combined to increase or decrease community risk for extensive environmental burdening. The risk for high-­ minority communities was 3.23, but it jumped to 4.34 when they were also disadvantaged, and it was 8.44 when they bordered the Delaware River. The risk for disadvantaged communities was 3.16, but if their racial/ethnic composition was characterized as substantially diverse (and no racial/ethnic group

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predominated), they faced a lower risk (2.55) compared with that of disadvantaged, high-­minority communities (4.34). But predominantly black communities did not face a significantly elevated risk unless they bordered the Delaware River, in which case it was more than five times average (5.45).

How Did This Happen? How did a concentration of all types of hazards (industrial, power generation, and waste disposal) come to be located near the Delaware River? The answer comes from the earliest period in Philadelphia’s industrial history (around 1820), when water was the most efficient shipping route and the only source of power for mills. The present-­day concentration of hazards near the river thus appears to be a continuation of a very old pattern, sustained until 2010 by a long precedent of industrial zoning near the river. But in the past, few minority communities were located in industrial neighborhoods near the river: instead, it was lower-­income white immigrants from Europe that tended to settle in such areas. Examining the spatial distribution of different types of communities in 2010 may reveal a little more about how environmental inequalities may have developed. With regard to race/ethnicity, each community type is clustered together, which indicates the area’s high levels of racial/ethnic segregation. High minority communities (with high proportions of both African Americans and Hispanics) appeared to be located in a sort of band going across the city of Philadelphia from north to south (and skipping over the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond area), and a disproportionate number of high-­minority communities outside Philadelphia were located in industrial suburbs along the Delaware River (see map 4). Although both high-­minority communities and predominantly Hispanic communities contained high proportions of Hispanic residents, their populations and their locations in the Philadelphia area turned out to be quite different. Predominantly Hispanic communities reflect the earliest settlements of the Puerto Ricans, who came to the area for agricultural work during World War II; thus, they were all located in areas far from the city that used to be centers of agriculture and now are fairly affluent suburbs (median household income was $81,561 for predominantly Hispanic communities compared with $53,921 for high-­minority communities) with larger proportions of non-­ Hispanic whites in predominantly Hispanic communities compared with either high-­minority or predominantly black communities (see map 4). And what does the location of predominantly black communities reveal? Most are located in a “band” encompassing the west side of Philadelphia; almost all are in or near the city (see map 4). This almost certainly reflects a long history of racial segregation, and white resistance to suburban integration.

Measuring Environmental Inequalities  •  29

Although there are many more predominantly white communities, and they are more widely and evenly distributed in space, nearly all are located outside the boundaries of Philadelphia (see map 4), which reflects the strong preference for suburban housing and school districts among middle-­class and affluent whites. Patterns of economic segregation were less strong; none of the community types save affluent appeared to be segregated in certain areas. Few of the affluent communities were located on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River; instead, they appeared to be distributed in a “band” outside the city stretching from north to south across the Pennsylvania suburbs (see map 5). Given these strong patterns of racial/ethnic segregation, we might expect a highly uneven distribution of environmental “bads” in poor, minority communities. But instead, extensively burdened communities turned out to be remarkably diverse in both racial/ethnic makeup and socioeconomic status. Thirteen of the extensively burdened communities (39  percent) were substantially diverse and eleven (33 percent) of the burdened communities were predominantly white (see table 19 in the appendix). Seven (21  percent) were high-­minority, while two (6 percent) were predominantly black. But it is telling that among extensively burdened communities there were no substantially white communities (the community type with less than 4 percent minority residents). As might be expected, fourteen (42 percent) of the extensively burdened communities were disadvantaged. But seven (21 percent) were lower middle-­ class, seven (21  percent) were middle-­class, four (12  percent) were upper middle-­class, and one (3 percent) was affluent. Interestingly, that means that 15 percent of the extensively burdened communities were in the highest two social class categories. The socioeconomic diversity of extensively burdened communities in the Philadelphia area points to their development during the time in history when industrial facilities were not feared for their hazardous pollutants, but desired as sources of good industrial jobs. While the extensive burdening of some communities is due to an accumulation of social disadvantages, for most communities in the Philadelphia area it is the legacy of a complex mixture of racial advantage and social class disadvantage that existed at the time they were thriving centers of manufacturing. Understanding more about the reasons for the development of environmental inequality in the Philadelphia area is important for reasons that go beyond an interest in Philadelphia itself: such an understanding will allow for a refinement and expansion of existing theories of urban environmental inequality, and move us toward a better understanding of the interrelated roles of social class inequality, deindustrialization, and racism in the making of environmental inequalities.

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So far, I have discussed these places and the environmental inequality they suffer as though we were looking at a “snapshot” of their situation as it existed in 2010. But those who research environmental injustice and inequality argue that instead of thinking about environmental inequality as a “thing” we can see in a snapshot, we should be thinking about environmental inequality as a process—­something that develops over time, in a certain place.17 We can’t make sense of this process without an awareness of the simultaneous social identities and locations occupied by communities (intersectionality); how communities relate with other communities within space and within the structures of social and economic power (the relational nature of space and power); and how these two factors play out at different turning points in history (the temporal nature of environmental inequality).18 I will discuss these concepts more in chapter 2, then go on to examine the history of the Philadelphia area in the chapters that follow.

2

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality

Environmental justice is a new, interdisciplinary area of research. Since the 1980s, researchers trained in economics, geography, history, law, political science, public health, sociology, urban planning, and other disciplines have examined the causes for and consequences of environmental injustice and inequality. In sociology alone, environmental justice work spans at least three subfields: environmental sociology, sociology of science and technology, and urban sociology. All of this work has yielded a large body of knowledge on environmental injustice and inequality in the United States and elsewhere. We already know that there is too much diversity in environmental injustice to allow for a “grand theory” of environmental injustice capable of explaining everything. However, even when we focus in on unequal distributions of environmental hazards within U.S. metropolitan areas (as I did in chapter 1), we still lack a coherent theory that could explain why some groups of people and some places (and not others) are unfairly burdened with environmental hazards. This lack of theory has real-­world consequences for communities burdened or potentially burdened with environmental hazards. Environmental justice research is used by the federal government and state regulatory agencies that seek to regulate environmental hazards.1 Without theories to explain or predict how environmental burdening occurs, it is much harder for them to craft effective policy that protects residents of industrial communities. For example, under Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) policy, an enhanced level of public participation is required when 31

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a facility operator applies for a permit to build a polluting facility in a community designated an “environmental justice community.” Lacking an understanding of how communities might become burdened with accumulations of environmental hazards, the agency uses simple demographic cutpoints, defining environmental justice communities as those census tracts where 30 percent or more of residents are racial/ethnic minority group members, and 20 percent or more have incomes below the poverty level.2 In the Philadelphia area, this definition of “environmental justice community” correctly includes poor minority communities such as the waterfront area of Chester, Pennsylvania, which is heavily burdened with noxious waste disposal operators such as incinerators and concrete crushers. But it incorrectly includes some parts of West Philadelphia that are predominantly African American and poor but where there are few or no environmental hazards; thus, it is too inclusive. It incorrectly excludes predominantly white communities such as the Bridesburg and Port Richmond neighborhoods of Philadelphia, and Bristol and Falls Townships, Pennsylvania, which also host a disproportionate share of environmental hazards.3 The exclusion of these communities means that the definition is not inclusive enough to trigger enhanced public participation in some communities where it is also needed. Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, an increasing number of rural communities (most of them predominantly white) face serious health risks from unconventional gas drilling; none of these communities is considered an “environmental justice community” by PADEP.4 But the agency can hardly be blamed for not understanding how environmental inequality develops when environmental justice researchers do not fully understand it.

The Diversity of Environmental Injustice A topic as broad as environmental justice cannot be easy to define, understand, or research—­and indeed, environmental justice is not. As Ryan Holifield has argued, the term “environmental injustice” cannot (and should not) have one agreed-­upon meaning because the meaning depends upon the context in which the injustice takes place.5 Within the context of the law, Kristin Shrader-­Frechette has identified several different aspects of environmental injustice, including distributive injustice (the unequal distributions of hazards); participative injustice (unequal opportunity to participate in decisions regarding possible or known hazards); procedural injustice; lack of compensation for health or economic damage resulting from environmental hazards; and inequities to future generations.6 In the context of governance, making less frequent inspections of hazardous facilities and taking a longer time to clean up Superfund sites in disadvantaged or minority communities have been identified as forms of environmental

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  33

injustice.7 Others have identified environmental injustice with unequal vulnerability to harm in the wake of disasters.8 Finally, issues including harm from global climate change, unequal access to healthy drinking water, workers’ exposure to toxic hazards on the job, the contamination of communities and drinking water from mining and gas and oil extraction, the export of hazardous waste and industries to poorer countries, and many others have come under the rubric of environmental justice.9 Given this dizzying array of issues, places, claims of injustice, affected populations, and possible causes, it is not surprising that researchers have defined environmental justice and injustice in many different ways.10 In the United States, a large proportion of research on environmental injustice has focused on the unequal and unjust distribution of environmental hazards (distributional injustice).11 Even this aspect of environmental injustice is far from simple, because it is closely related to participatory injustice. Participatory injustice refers to inequalities of power and knowledge that plague legal and political processes of deliberation about where noxious facilities should be located, the thoroughness and timeliness of hazardous site cleanups, and so on. In light of these inequalities, decisions resulting in unequal distributions can be said to result from the lack of recognition of social differences between groups.12 This lack of recognition then causes less valued groups to experience disrespect and exclusion from political participation, rendering them more vulnerable to unequal distributions of hazards and risks.13 Clearly, distributional inequality is linked with racial/ethnic and class-­based types of social inequality. But the findings from spatial statistical research are somewhat contradictory, and the role of race/ethnicity and social class inequality in the development of distributional inequality is unclear.

Findings from Spatial Statistical Research Documenting U.S. Environmental Inequality The lack of understanding of the process through which communities become environmentally burdened is not due to a lack of research. As of June 2015, a casual search with Google Scholar’s search engine using the phrase “urban environmental inequality” yielded 299,000 books, journal articles, and reports. In most of the research, spatial statistical methods were used to investigate the distribution of environmental hazards such as polluting factories and hazardous waste processors (TRI facilities), abandoned hazardous waste sites (Superfund sites), and other sources of environmental risk. As a new area of research, environmental justice has sparked methodological innovations that have continually redefined and sharpened the concept of environmental inequality, while expanding the number of situations that could fit the definition of distributional inequality.14

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Excellent reviews of the spatial, empirical (statistical) research on environmental inequality have already been done by others; therefore I won’t re-­ create them here.15 But in general, with regard to racial/ethnic environmental inequalities, it is fair to say that in most of the spatial statistical studies focused on U.S. metropolitan areas, researchers found that African Americans and Hispanics tended to live in disproportionate proximity to environmental hazards, and to be exposed to more air toxics than whites.16 But this finding was not consistent across places, times, or hazard types—­sometimes no disparities were found, or whites were found to be the burdened group.17 Other researchers found that environmental inequalities plagued minority racial/ethnic groups in some cities, but not others (or, patterns of environmental inequality found in the city differed from those found in the surrounding suburbs).18 In other studies, one racial/ethnic minority group (such as Hispanics) was found to be unduly burdened with environmental hazards, while other minority groups were not.19 Findings on social class status and environmental inequality were equally contradictory. Most researchers found that poverty (or lower income) predicted or went together with environmental burdening.20 But other researchers found income positively associated with waste sites or other hazards.21 In some cases, a nonlinear relationship between income and number of hazards was found—­meaning that few hazards were found in the poorest areas, a large number were found in areas with less than middle-­class incomes, and then the number of hazards tapered off to zero as income rose toward the wealthiest areas.22 Another group of people who might be found in disproportionate proximity to environmental hazards are manufacturing workers. Their homes might be in industrial areas due to a desire to live near their workplace or because such areas are affordable for people with less than middle-­class incomes.23 Affordable, industrialized areas are, of course, exactly those areas attractive to companies seeking to build a polluting factory or waste disposal facility. Thus, it is not surprising that in some studies the proportion of workers employed in manufacturing was positively associated with the presence, number, or severity of environmental hazards in several different studies.24 But deindustrialization and the closing of manufacturing plants may have weakened the link between environmental hazards and manufacturing workers; this may explain why some studies conducted since 2000 did not find such a link.25 Unfortunately, very little of this carefully crafted, peer-­reviewed research has been useful to environmental justice researchers seeking to use empirical findings to create a theory or theories of urban environmental inequality in the United States. The explanations for urban environmental inequality in the United States are fragmented and do not connect with one another,

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  35

illustrating our lack of understanding of the processes of environmental inequality formation.26

Explanations for Urban Environmental Inequalities Below are the general explanations identified by environmental justice researchers as being most relevant to explaining urban environmental inequalities in the United States.27 I have left out some equally important explanations more relevant to environmental inequality in rural communities.28 Some of these explanations seem to fit research findings for different regions, cities, groups, or times in history better than others. The major explanations are detailed below.

Race-­Based Explanations for Urban Environmental Inequalities From the existing race-­based explanations for urban environmental inequalities, we can identify similar—­but subtly different—­processes involving race and racism that may have led to the burdening of racial/ethnic minority communities with urban environmental hazards. The first is the racialization of urban labor and space, in which certain racial/ ethnic groups come to be viewed by industrial employers as the most appropriate workers for certain dirty and hazardous jobs. This can either increase access to industrial employment for racial/ethnic minorities or restrict it, at the same time placing the employed group in proximity to environmental hazards. For example, Mexican and Mexican American men were the preferred workers for Los Angeles’s brick-­making industry in the 1940s, while Asian women and Latinas were the preferred workers for the silicon-­chip factories of Santa Clara Valley from the 1960s to the 1980s.29 Although such hiring preferences are based on racist beliefs about a certain group of workers (for example, the notion of Asian women as having “small, nimble fingers”), they open up employment opportunities for the preferred group of workers.30 Housing for such workers is often built close to hazardous industry, creating segregated, environmentally burdened communities of color. However, racialization of labor can reserve both employment advantages and environmental contamination for whites. This occurred in the steel industry in plants near Baltimore, and also in Buffalo. In both cases, whites were the preferred workers for unionized industrial jobs in steel manufacturing; due to racial preference, whites enjoyed employment opportunities denied to African Americans. This version of racialization of labor produces environmentally burdened, segregated white communities.31 A second (and related) process is the process of containment, in which racially “othered” people are associated with filth, disease, or pollution. Based

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upon that association, the actions of city planning officials, health departments, mayors, zoning boards, etc. (either intentional or unintentional) have the effect of confining unhealthy conditions together with these “environmental lepers,” for the purpose of controlling them and limiting their negative influence on white populations.32 Containment can occur along with racialization of labor when dirty industries are primarily staffed by groups considered nonwhite. Various groups subjected to containment in environmentally poor areas have also included Jews, Italians, Slovaks, and the Irish, immigrant groups that today would be considered white. This illustrates the ways in which definitions of whiteness have changed throughout U.S. history, while the overall dynamics of containment stay the same.33 The building of both noxious waste-­handling facilities and prisons in and around established Latino and/or black neighborhoods in various U.S. cities illustrates how containment may be implicated in creating environmental inequalities.34 Of course, environmental hazards and minorities can only be “contained” if racially despised people are segregated together, away from whites. Thus, containment is hypothesized to operate through residential segregation. A third (and related) process is the use of communities of color as places of environmental servitude/slavery, wherein the “service” of waste storage and disposal for an entire (mostly white) area is imposed upon a few communities of color within that area.35 This idea evokes the long history of African Americans working in positions of involuntary servitude (as slaves) and paid servitude (as servants), in which they often were tasked with the cleanup of waste. But it is difficult to clearly hypothesize the link through which environmental servitude/slavery may operate, other than through racial discrimination for the purpose of continuing the exploitation of African Americans. Although many African Americans today work in service occupations, including waste disposal services, so do many others of other races. And although siting decisions about waste storage and disposal facilities may have resulted from racial/ ethnic discrimination, it is difficult to make the case that discrimination is due to notions that these communities exist to serve whites. A fourth process, rooted in white privilege, is white flight from polluted industrial urban areas for cleaner, segregated suburban areas, as occurred in greater Los Angeles, and many other urban areas. This reflects the greater access of whites to both segregated spaces and homes in the suburbs that qualified for federal mortgage underwriting programs that helped them to purchase homes.36 Although social class inequalities and other features of the urban context are also important aspects of these explanations, race-­based explanations for environmental inequalities are similar in their arguments that the principal force organizing the distribution of environmental hazards is racial inequality.

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  37

Economic Explanations for Urban Environmental Inequalities Another set of explanations for environmental inequality focus not on racism, but on the economic forces that factor into the decisions about where to place industrial and waste facilities. Economic explanations focus on the economic aspects of urban life and the urban business environment; but they should not be viewed as alternatives to racial explanations, as they often operate together with racial inequalities. In the earliest form of this explanation, economic factors were held to be “race-­neutral,” causing urban environmental inequalities through a process known as market dynamics. Market dynamics arguments hold that a search for cheap land and industrial zoning are the sole forces driving the development of environmentally burdened urban areas.37 Businesses seek to maximize profits by cutting costs, while people are “rational actors” free to choose a different home to buy, another neighborhood to move to, and so on. Many have countered this explanation by pointing out that residential segregation is still the norm in U.S. cities and suburbs, and that residential mobility is constrained by low income.38 Recent works have also pointed out the racialized nature of zoning, urban renewal, and real estate transactions, and the fact that housing discrimination against African Americans still occurs routinely.39 The authors of these works, critics of the market forces explanation, have revealed its shortcomings, particularly the way that it ignores how social inequalities limit people’s freedom to choose where they will live. Thus, few environmental justice researchers view market dynamics as an adequate explanation for the development of urban environmental inequalities. A more viable economic explanation for urban environmental inequalities is that they result in part from uneven development within the urban region.40 Uneven development is a characteristic of industrial and other urban landscapes that are continually in the process of being built, moved, dismantled, and otherwise altered in accordance with investment decisions by capital investors, in conjunction with local governments. Depending upon their potential to yield profits, some areas are deemed worthy of improvement, gentrification, and investment, while others are deemed waste repositories and are starved of investment.41 Many environmentally burdened areas are characterized by uneven development. The unevenness is particularly striking in waterfront areas such as Chester and Camden, in which large entertainment venues (like Chester’s soccer stadium and casino, and Camden’s aquarium) were built side by side with outmoded industrial infrastructure and urban decay. In both cities, tourist attractions are located near dilapidated industrial areas filled with polluting waste disposal facilities.42

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Only areas zoned for “industrial” land use can host waste disposal facilities such as incinerators or trash transfer stations. Thus, it is often easier to site such facilities in places in which intensive manufacturing land uses have predominated for decades. In the Philadelphia area, few of these places were predominantly black inner-­city “ghetto” areas. Instead, most were racially diverse or predominantly white working-­class neighborhoods near transportation routes. These industrial areas often saw their racial/ethnic and income mix change after factories shut down and waste facilities were sited. Such locally unwanted facilities tend to reduce the value of land, leading to a further influx of very poor people and sometimes the “downward spiral” of the neighbor­hood, exacerbating the uneven development.43 Apart from uneven development, social class inequalities play an important role in environmental inequalities. But few environmental justice researchers have treated social class in an in-­depth manner; in most of the spatial statistical research on environmental inequalities, the percentage of population below the poverty level is used as a proxy for social class. In this research design, there are only two social class categories: poor and not-­poor. These categories ignore two very important concepts relating to social class inequality: that social class is relational in nature (since one class exists only in relation to other classes); and that it involves exploitation (that the fruits of one party’s labor or sacrifice go to another party). The importance of these aspects of social class is illustrated in sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s definition of social classes: “As an abstract concept, the Marxian concept of class is built around four structural properties: classes are relational; those relations are antagonistic; those antagonisms are rooted in exploitation; and exploitation is based on the social relations of production.”44 Wright argues class relations are antagonistic in that what one side gains must be lost from the other side; what is gained or lost is exploitation (in that as one side gains freedom from exploitation, the other side loses freedom to exploit). The relations of production are the involuntary social relationships that people must enter into to obtain the necessities of life, which constitute the economic structure of society.45 Another useful definition of social class is David Harvey’s: Harvey conceptualizes social class as “situatedness or positionality in relation to processes of capital accumulation.”46 Both Wright’s and Harvey’s definitions emphasize differences in the economic and social power of different groups of people in society relative to that of other groups. These social class relations are not just abstract ideas; they are played out through actions within the spatialized political economy of the metropolitan area. The spatialized political economy produces places (and “sorts” different types of people into different places) through specific sets of social relations.47 This means that choices involving the placement of noxious industrial plants, waste disposal facilities, and lush public parks (and who will live near these)

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  39

were shaped by simultaneous, intersecting social relations within a spatialized political economy. Although referring to groups of people, social class concepts can also apply usefully to places. The residents of places hold place-­based interests, and seek to enhance the rank of their place within a spatially and socially stratified metropolitan region.48 Space is monopolistic (you either occupy it or someone else does so); thus, protecting one’s interests demands a monopolistic control over space.49 Both industrial and residential suburban landscapes are at once tangible and symbolic illustrations of the relations between these unequal groups.50 Spatial relationships express class or status differences between individuals and between communities; but they also shape people’s lives so that, to varying degrees, the lives of residents depend upon the fate of their community.51 Although wealthy municipalities and their role in creating and perpetuating landscapes of inequality have largely been ignored by researchers seeking to find the causes of environmental inequality, Gordon Walker’s concept of “geographies of responsibility” provides a way to make their roles visible.52 If, as is the case in the Philadelphia area, the waste burned in an incinerator that pollutes one community was generated in many other (more affluent) communities, then those who are responsible for creating the waste have pushed the consequences of waste disposal onto others. Social class inequality is hypothesized to result in environmentally unequal environments in many different ways: through the connection between industrial work and industrial land uses and zoning; through land-­use decisions that benefit the affluent at the expense of the less affluent; through “exclusive zoning” that divides land into parcels too large for low-­income people to afford; and through flows of investment capital that create and re-­create urban environments through processes such as deindustrialization and gentrification.53 The affluent can mobilize their economic power to secure environmental privilege for themselves, which can include tasking other communities with disposing of their waste; restricting the access of others to “natural” or beautiful spaces; buffering such spaces from development or industrialization; and enjoying the convenience of living in centrally located places from which the less affluent have been priced out. Neither uneven development nor environmental privilege is separate from racial/ethnic inequalities.54 But although processes such as deindustrialization and uneven development are important factors structuring environmental injustice, they have been examined in very few studies of environmental inequality.55

Sociopolitical Explanations for Urban Environmental Inequalities The final group of explanations focuses on processes that operate through the lack of sociopolitical power in certain communities rather than race/ethnicity or social class (although both, of course, are strongly related to sociopolitical

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power). The environmental injustice scenario that results from this lack of sociopolitical power has been characterized as the path of least resistance, in which certain types of communities are targeted for the siting of unwanted hazardous facilities because they lack the social capital, political power, and inside knowledge to effectively fight off the facilities.56 Business owners are aware that each time they seek to place an unwanted land use in a community, they will face political resistance from that community together with public controversy; both developments are likely to create expensive delays in siting the unwanted facility. Thus, they seek communities that cannot effectively mobilize against the facility. Communities in which there are few voters, few homeowners, and very little wealth, and in which most people’s educational attainments are relatively low, tend to be less able to resist an unwanted siting.57 Although there is nothing “racial” in the description above, these characteristics are often found in urban, poor, predominantly minority communities. These factors illustrate the interrelatedness of each explanation for urban environmental inequalities, which makes the task of theorizing urban environmental inequality even more complex. Currently, each of these explanations for urban environmental inequality exists in isolation from the others, and each provides only a partial understanding of the process by which environmental inequalities are created and re-­created. We don’t know why some explanations seem to fit cases of environmental inequality in some places much better than others—­or why some explanations make more sense at certain times in history than at others. These gaps in our knowledge stem from a disconnection between theory and findings from spatial statistical research, which keeps us from a better understanding of the process of environmental inequality formation. The disconnection between theory and findings has been largely due to five major research issues. Some of these issues are methodological, stemming from the goals of research on environmental inequality, and the types of data that are available to conduct the research. Others are conceptual, having to do with the way we think about distributional inequalities and their relationship to other processes and other types of inequality.

Research Issues Causing the Theory-­Findings Disconnection Some researchers have criticized the body of spatial statistical environmental justice research for its lack of usefulness to policy makers and environmental regulators, claiming that methodological weaknesses and political bias have rendered it virtually useless.58 I disagree with this assessment: although a few studies are methodologically weak, I believe the majority have used solid, well-­considered geographical and statistical methods, and have succeeded in documenting important patterns of environmental inequality.

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  41

My frustration with the body of work stems from a different cause: its limitations as material with which to build theory. While each of the points below has been discussed by other researchers, few have examined the limitations of both qualitative and quantitative environmental justice research for theory building. Most of the quantitative research is unsuitable for theory building because of the mismatch between research aims: spatial statistical studies seek to investigate disproportionate proximity, disproportionate exposure or risk of exposure, or some other disparate impact on those environmentally burdened. These researchers seek to document environmental inequality and to link it with actual or potential impacts on the health of burdened populations. But an understanding of the causes of environmental inequality requires that researchers instead examine the social process or processes through which environmental inequality is generated.59 The focus on the aim of documenting environmental inequality has resulted in the lack of connection between environmental justice studies and other relevant bodies of research on social inequalities, including research on disasters and urban inequalities.60 A final formidable barrier to understanding environmental inequality stems from the complexities of the topic itself, and the difficulties inherent in interdisciplinary work: inquiry into the causes of environmental inequality places sociologists in the realm of geographers and historians (and likewise places geographers and historians in the realm of sociologists). As a result, many of the findings from environmental justice research exhibit the failure to fully integrate the best insights and tools from geography and history into our research on environmental inequality. Combining these insights and tools with sociology’s deep understanding of the workings of social inequality will transform environmental justice research by enabling us to make visible the process of environmental inequality formation within its context in time and space. Below is a discussion of the research issues that get in the way of using research to build theories of environmental inequality.

Issue 1: Focus on Exposure to Environmental Hazards (Scale) In a large proportion of existing studies focusing on urban environmental inequalities, researchers have sought evidence of unequal proximity to environmental hazards that could lead to ill effects on health (or health disparities) among those who live near the hazard. In order to discover the populations most likely to be exposed (or those suffering the highest “exposure risk”), researchers must use the smallest possible areas as their unit of analysis. These include one-­mile buffer zones, one-­kilometer grid cells, census tracts or census block groups, or those areas that are inside plumes or paths of airborne toxics. Small units have also been used to avoid the inflation of statistical findings (such as coefficients) that occurs with the use of larger spatial units.61 But

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these small-­scale units are abstractions that are not socially meaningful, which means they are divorced from city-­wide patterns of industry, segregation, or social inequality.62 Thus, findings from research using small-­scale units are not particularly helpful in understanding the causes of environmental inequality.

Issue 2: Focus on One Point in Time (Cross-­Sectional Studies) Most studies of environmental inequality are cross-­sectional in nature—­ meaning they are a “snapshot” of environmental inequalities as they existed at one point in time. Thus, they are very much suited to documenting existing environmental inequalities—­and very unsuited to documenting local historical processes such as industrial development, segregation, evolving methods for waste disposal, and the transformation over time of racial/ethnic and social class relations.63 Each of the explanations for environmental inequality discussed above assumes that a certain social process has occurred prior to the time of the study, but cross-­sectional studies can provide no information about what occurred prior to that point in time. Historians know that racial identities, industrial technologies, class relations, and waste disposal methods are all radically different than they were only fifty years ago; but the ahistorical approach of cross-­sectional research does not investigate past events that have set the stage for present inequalities. Issue 3: Assumption of Generalizability (Scope) Although many sociologists use methods such as GIS, few sociologists are trained to think spatially; in addition, scholarly journals are more receptive to publishing studies with wide, national appeal (in contrast to those with narrow, regional appeal). These realities explain the large number of national-­ level studies of environmental inequality, which are problematic with regard to theorizing the process through which environmental inequality developed. National-­level studies obscure the context for the formation of environmental inequality because they embody the implicit and unexamined assumption that industrial development, racial/ethnic relations, gentrification, residential segregation, deindustrialization, land use controls and zoning, and many other things relevant to environmental inequality, are identical in all U.S. cities, and thus can be generalized to the nation.64 The assumption that the context can be generalized stems from an inability to recognize significant spatial variations in U.S. urban life.65 Historical studies of environmental inequality (summarized below) have shown that there are important differences between regions and cities; and that contemporary patterns of environmental inequality were almost certainly shaped by the process of development of a region or city. Although much has been made of methodological variations as the cause of inconsistent

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  43

findings, it is more likely that regional variations were the true cause of many of the inconsistencies.

Issue 4: Lack of Understanding of the Relational Nature of Places and of Power Very few spatial statistical studies of environmental inequality have had the capacity to focus on the relational nature of places and people, and between people occupying one social position with those occupying another. Despite Marx’s guiding principle that social classes are relational in nature, many studies investigating environmental inequality focus entirely upon the “victims” of environmental injustice while leaving out the environmentally privileged. This has obscured the causes of environmental inequality, because ignoring the privileged hides their role in creating and sustaining environmental inequalities.66 Worse, the failure to see the relational nature of these phenomena has resulted in an inadvertent deemphasis on the power relations embedded in every case of environmental inequality.67 Issue 5: The Unused Intersectional Paradigm In academic work, intersectionality is an analytic tool used to interrogate the interrelationships between a person’s multiple social locations, and how they affect the person’s experiences of privilege or oppression.68 Although highly relevant to environmental inequality, environmental justice researchers have not made much use of the concept of intersectionality. Nor have they sought to extend the concept theoretically from the individual level to the community level. This has resulted in spatial statistical studies that conceptualize race and social class as competing variables. Statistical tests designed to measure whether a high proportion of racial/ethnic minority residents or a high proportion of poor people is the “best predictor” of environmental burdening embodies the assumption that the two social positions are independent from one another, which does not reflect the reality of social life. History tells us that, less than 200 years ago, whites used racism to justify the enslavement and impoverishment of African Americans and the invasion and takeover of portions of Mexico (among other such travesties). Such racist events and practices occurred long ago but are still felt in American society today as continuing gaps in income and wealth between non-­Hispanic whites and others.69 These methodological choices have not only impeded an understanding of how poverty might result in more severe environmental inequalities in communities of color, but also kept us from considering how racial privilege might intersect with social class disadvantage, bringing environmental inequality to working-­ class white communities.70 They have also unintentionally reinforced the view of environmentally burdened communities as one-­dimensional victims

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of industrial pollution, in which the multiple interests of stakeholders in burdened communities are not acknowledged.71 These research issues are mostly a result of the constraints imposed by spatial statistical research, which is not well suited to exploring the processes by which environmental inequalities are created.72 More promising for theory building is the historical research that focuses on urban environmental inequalities in the United States.

Historical Research on Urban Environmental Inequalities in the United States The historical studies that focus on urban environmental inequalities in the United States are not hampered with the disadvantages for theory building that characterize the spatial statistical research on environmental inequality. Historical studies are useful for theorizing because they bring us an understanding of regional patterns, richer data about the relational nature of local inequalities, and an understanding of the historical and place-­specific nature of intersectionality. Historical studies tend to be case studies that examine a city, town, or place; thus, none of them has the drawback of Issue 1 (a small-­scale unit of analysis that does not connect to larger historical processes). They examine the place over a long period of time; thus, Issue 2 (cross-­sectional study conducted at one point in time) is not a problem. Nor is Issue 5 (the problematic generalization to the entire nation) a problem, as these case studies focus on just one place. However, in order to build theory we need to grapple with the issue of regional variations, and whether or not it is viable to generalize the processes of environmental inequality formation from one city or even one country to others—­and if it is viable, what are the limits to generalization (I’ll have more to say about the question of generalization in chapter 7). Below, I will discuss some historical case studies focusing on the process by which environmental inequalities developed in cities in the Southwest, Southeast, and Rust Belt regions. I examine very briefly the regional similarities in patterns of environmental inequality, and the possibility of generalizing each condition giving rise to environmental inequality. (I’ll give a bit more attention to the case studies focused on cities within the Rust Belt.)

The Southwest When it comes to environmental inequality, perhaps the most studied area in the United States is the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. Several excellent case studies have focused on this part of California, examining the development of industrial communities in East Los Angeles/Vernon, Torrance, and Commerce.73 All of these communities developed as segregated Hispanic industrial

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  45

communities with low-­cost homes built close to industry, with a reliance on the use of Mexican immigrants for cheap labor. White migration out of the industrialized central and southern areas and into racially restricted suburban towns in Los Angeles County between 1940 and 1960 illustrates how white privilege shaped environmental inequality.74 From the 1960s to the 1980s in Santa Clara County, California, electronics firms preferred Latinas and recent immigrants from Asia for work as electronics assemblers. This shaped the disproportionate proximity to environmental hazards of Hispanics in the industrial neighborhoods of Santa Clara and San Jose.75 Similar conditions were found in South Phoenix, where an east-­west rail corridor separated the poor, Hispanic southern part of the city from the rest. Along the rail line, noxious industry grew into an industrial corridor by the 1950s, and the railroad became a shipping route for hazardous wastes and the location of hazardous waste facilities by the 1970s.76 But in Portland, Oregon, it was African Americans who were affected by environmental inequality. The shipbuilding industry boom during World War  II attracted thousands of African Americans to the city; by the 1990s, black residents remained concentrated in one district in the northern part of the city containing heavy industry, landfills, and a sewage treatment plant.77 As housing costs soar, whites are gentrifying these industrial areas, diversifying the risks from proximity to hazards.78 Both the prevalence of Latinos in the population and patterns of preference for hiring them as laborers in dirty industry are due to California’s proximity to Mexico, a characteristic it shares with other cities in the Southwest. This suggests that there may be a “southwestern” regional pattern of U.S. environmental inequality driven by proximity to the Mexican border; if so, Portland may be too far north to exhibit this pattern. Industrialization occurred early in Los Angeles County, where Mexican labor helped to build the region’s industries. But this was not the case in Silicon Valley, Phoenix, or Portland; all of these places experienced an industrial boom that occurred either with World War II (in Portland) or after it with the rise of the aerospace industry in the 1950s (in Phoenix) or the electronics industry in the 1960s (in Santa Clara Valley). Although the urban growth boundary that increased the cost of housing was unique to Portland, and the growth of the electronics industry was unique to Silicon Valley, the pattern of Hispanic segregation from whites, late industrialization, gentrification, and white incursion into predominantly minority industrial neighborhoods in search of affordable housing, exists in many other cities with very expensive housing, such as Boston, San Francisco, and New York.

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The Southeast The U.S. Southeast has a unique regional history that includes an economic reliance on slavery and a largely agricultural economy. Until World War  I brought African Americans north in search of work, the vast majority of African Americans in the United States lived in this region. Thus, it should not be surprising that racism played a major role in shaping environmental inequalities in the Southeast.79 Historical case studies of the New Orleans area showed that better drainage (achieved through the installation of efficient water pumps in 1917) opened up more residential land in swampy districts with low land value, allowing African Americans to expand into those areas of the city. Segregation kept the areas of the city with higher elevation reserved for whites. The continuation of these patterns into the twenty-­first century virtually ensured that African Americans would face disproportionate risk for loss of life and property in the catastrophic flooding after Hurricane Katrina.80 Another New Orleans area study traces the history of the segregated fenceline community of Diamond in St. Charles Parish, originally where ex-­slaves remained to farm the land after emancipation. In 1953, the Shell Oil Corporation bought land in Belltown and erected a massive refinery and chemical manufacturing complex dangerously close to Diamond. A segregated white town (Norco) was built across a strip of woods and farther away from the plant; many Norco residents held jobs at the plant, but few in Diamond did (most of those who did were in janitorial positions). After years of struggle, local environmental justice leader Margie Richard succeeded in getting Shell to buy out the community, which was relocated.81 These New Orleans area case studies show the importance of racial inequality and racial segregation in shaping environmental inequalities that affected African Americans. The South is unique among U.S. regions for its uneven economic development and elite political control.82 Although racial segregation is also a feature of northern cities, the level of oppressive social control exerted over African Americans in the South was brutal and extreme, and continued well into the 1960s. This social context was undoubtedly a factor in shaping racially unequal environmental conditions elsewhere in the urban South.83 Uneven economic development, practices of outright racial discrimination, and local economies based on fossil fuel extraction and oil refining may have produced a southeastern pattern of environmental inequality. The Rust Belt The area colloquially known as the “Rust Belt” was once the most industrialized area of the United States. It includes cities in the Mid-­Atlantic, upper

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  47

South, and Midwest, including the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.84 One of the best historical works tracing the development of environmental inequality in a Rust Belt city focuses on the history of Gary, Indiana.85 Gary, a company town, was established by U.S. Steel in 1906. As was typical of industrial towns in that era, the steel plant was built along the entire waterfront of Lake Michigan, with no thought given to buffering nearby homes from smoke or noise. The company carefully planned and built high-­quality housing near the plant for executives and skilled workers. The land to the south was sold to speculators who built ramshackle housing without public services for the unskilled European immigrants who staffed the mill.86 African American migrants first settled in the southern part of the city among the immigrants, and then later moved to the Midtown area downtown. Air quality was worst in downtown Gary, where the wealthiest whites preferred to live through the 1950s. Although Gary was segregated along racial and class lines, both African Americans and working-­class whites lived in the smoky central part of Gary.87 But those who worked in the plants were exposed to the highest levels of toxic substances in conditions so dusty “you couldn’t tell blacks from whites—­ everyone was completely red.”88 Throughout the decades, racism in Gary was open and virulent. Even after World War  II, stores and restaurants in Gary displayed “whites only” signs. Schools and parks were segregated, police harassment and violence against African Americans were common, and both of Gary’s hospitals refused to admit African Americans.89 Before 1950, virtually all of Gary’s 40,000 black residents were squeezed into the dilapidated Midtown neighborhood just south of downtown.90 While steel industries employed more African Americans than any other manufacturing industry, black employment at the U.S. Steel mill was capped at 15 percent of the total labor force in accordance with a decision by the company’s executives. Even through the boom years of World War II, African American steelworkers were heavily concentrated in unskilled jobs, earning lower wages than white workers as a result. Mexican immigrants fared no better: during the Great Depression, most were repatriated back to Mexico. Those who refused to go faced job discrimination.91 U.S. Steel, which had a great deal of influence on all city planning matters in Gary, saw other industries as competition and lobbied in the 1920s and 1930s to exclude corporations that could have diversified Gary’s economy. These actions created a one-­industry town that would be devastated by the decline of steel in the 1970s, and resulted in the exodus of whites from better housing in the industrial neighborhoods surrounding Midtown.92 As U.S. Steel faced new constraints on its power to pollute and dump created by new environmental

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laws in the 1970s, dumpsites proliferated in poorer working-­class neighborhoods. By 1980, middle-­class whites had gentrified the old immigrant areas, while African Americans had moved into the most polluted areas.93 A much larger and more economically diverse Rust Belt city is Chicago, Illinois. Though it was little more than a fur trading village for over a century, the building of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1836 allowed Chicago to become a shipping port to the Mississippi River, positioning it as a major destination in the inland shipping route that connected New York City and the Great Lakes. By 1855, Chicago boasted seventeen railroad lines, connecting the city to farmers in the hinterlands and to markets for the regional goods it produced, including grain harvesters, brass, furniture, leather, carriages, and chemicals. Factory smoke was also produced in Chicago, and it began to be a public concern as early as 1854. The impetus to escape pollution spurred early suburbanization in Chicago, which began in 1860 when the town of Riverside was established to house the wealthy in a park-­like setting north and west of the city.94 German immigrants occupied skilled positions in manufacturing, whereas Irish immigrants were unskilled laborers. They were soon joined by Poles, Italians, Czechs, and others; by 1860 half of the city’s population was foreign-­born.95 Throughout the history of the city, both white ethnics and African Americans found employment in waste disposal, reuse, and recycling pursuits.96 The expansion of meatpacking and distribution in Chicago was so rapid and large that by 1866 a massive stockyard was created south of the city, followed by a collection of packing houses west of the stockyard in the industrial Town of Lake. By 1889, the industrial suburbs of Hyde Park and Town of Lake had been annexed into Chicago, and a 260-­acre steel production area was built on Lake Michigan in Hyde Park.97 The expansion of the packing houses caused severe water pollution: despite laws prohibiting the pollution of the Chicago River, putrid wastes and sludges were pumped directly into it. In the 1880s, meatpackers, glue factories, and fertilizer factories caused such a stench that it made the city attorney vomit. City officials responded to public pressure by empowering the new Department of Health to enforce city ordinances against the worst offenders; but in Hyde Park, enforcement took a back seat to the continued profits of the meatpacking industry.98 It was at this time that Hyde Park, Back of the Yards, and other South Side industrial communities began to be used by the city and private industry as a place to dump wastes. Tracing the history of environmental inequality in and near the meatpacking district, Back of the Yards, reveals the complexity of environmental inequalities in the industrial Midwest. Back of the Yards was first settled by Irish and German immigrants, and by 1904 most of its residents were Eastern European immigrants. They endured smoke, stench, filth, and

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  49

diseases caused by the proximity of huge processing plants dumping decomposing meatpacking waste, combined with four huge municipal dumps.99 All this resulted in such horrific pollution of the Chicago River that sanitary engineers reversed the river’s flow. While this improved environmental conditions elsewhere in Chicago, it only worsened them for Back of the Yards residents, who had to wait many years for the foul creek near them to be filled in.100 World War  I opened up manufacturing employment for African Americans, who migrated to northern cities in great numbers, swelling Chicago’s black population from less than 15,000 in 1890 to over 50,000 by 1920. That year, only 1.9 percent of Chicago’s manufacturing workers were African American men (although 23.6 percent of meatpacking laborers and 13 percent of iron and steel workers were African American). Turned away by racially restricted unions and suffering from desperate poverty, African Americans were often used as strikebreakers. When black men were organized by unions, employers refused to hire them at union scale.101 From the founding of Chicago, African Americans had lived in segregated housing in a narrow band of the city known as the “Black Belt,” which stretched from the downtown business district to as far south as 39th Street.102 Although Chicago was in the throes of a housing boom in the 1920s, African Americans were kept out of Chicago’s white working-­class neighborhoods by the threat of violence, and kept out of the middle-­class suburbs of the “Bungalow Belt” around the city by homeowners’ covenants pledging not to sell homes to black buyers.103 During World War II, Chicago was second only to Detroit in war production, and African Americans flowed into the city to work in manufacturing. In 1940, African Americans made up only 2.8 percent of workers in Cook and DuPage Counties, but by 1945 they were 14 percent of the workforce.104 In the 1950s, African American men found employment in the steel manufacturing and meatpacking industries.105 But they still found themselves concentrated in the hottest, dirtiest, lowest-­paying, and most dangerous jobs in these industries: in food manufacturing, they worked on the killing floor; in steel, they worked in the coke ovens. Worse, they were denied promotions into better jobs, regardless of seniority.106 By 1940, the South Side’s role as dumping ground had been solidified when the city built a 300-­acre municipal dump there.107 It was there, on top of a landfill and bordering an old dump containing industrial wastes and sewage, that Altgeld Gardens, a public housing development for African American soldiers returning from World War II, was built in 1945. Fifty years later, it would be an environmental justice community, a site of resistance to the pollution surrounding it.108 The congestion and dilapidation of housing in the Black Belt

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spurred African Americans to seek homes in other South Side neighborhoods such as Woodlawn. Each expansion was greeted with racial violence: between 1945 and 1950, Chicago saw 485 racial incidents, 74 percent directly related to housing.109 But not all South Side neighborhoods changed. Throughout this time, Back of the Yards remained a working-­class white ethnic neighborhood with a large Polish community.110 In Chicago, African Americans’ proximity to waste came about through their moving into industrial areas that white ethnics had left, or through having waste disposal land uses imposed upon their segregated communities.111 The decline of Chicago’s meatpacking industry began to be felt in the 1950s as packing houses began to close, laying off thousands of workers, many of them African American and Mexican. The furniture and apparel industries were also declining, and Chicago’s manufacturing base consisted of only two industries: metals production and machinery manufacturing, which accounted for more than 50 percent of the city’s manufacturing jobs. Chicago’s reliance on steel caused a precipitous drop in manufacturing employment when the steel industry began its decline in the 1970s. From 1967 to 1982, Chicago lost 46 percent of its industrial employment. The steepest decrease was in minority and racially mixed parts of the city, while the predominantly white suburbs saw an increase.112 The stories of Gary and Chicago illustrate the more complex social stratification and ethnic churning of Rust Belt cities with their northern patterns of economic development and social relations. Here, people of European descent tended to be segmented along ethnic lines, and ethnic groups such as Poles, Italians, and the Irish “achieved whiteness” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.113 While lacking the privilege of the white, native-­ born professional middle class, these ethnic whites were preferred over African Americans for relatively high-­paying industrial jobs. They also enjoyed more access to housing than did African Americans, who often moved into areas of the city the ethnics left behind. Industrial work drew people to the Rust Belt, and throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people viewed the presence of industrial factories and the smoke and noise associated with them as indicators of economic prosperity. Residential proximity to industry was viewed as an unalloyed good—­a shorter trip to one’s workplace as opposed to a health risk. Although there are few historical studies tracing the development of environmental inequality in the industrial cities of the Northeast, there is evidence that suggests the processes by which environmental inequalities are generated in New England and the Mid-­Atlantic region may be very similar to those in Midwestern industrial cities.114 If so, then a “Rust Belt” pattern of environmental inequality might exist. A Rust Belt pattern would be characterized by early industrialization; the monopolization of industrial areas by white ethnics; the

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  51

limited access of African Americans to industrial work; residential differentiation by social class just as acute as differentiation by race; and later in history, deindustrialization and the concentration of new waste disposal land uses in formerly industrial areas. It was between 1960 and 1990, when large-­scale deindustrialization was occurring, that some of the ethnic whites in these areas were replaced by poorer African Americans and Hispanics (see chapter 7 for more about a possible Rust Belt pattern of environmental inequality). The case studies discussed above are historically rich, and thus provide context and an overview of social and environmental conditions at different times in history that few quantitative studies can offer. This is the reason that they have made a greater contribution than quantitative studies to understanding how urban environmental inequalities came to be. But to get a full understanding of spatial and historical processes that created and shaped environmental inequalities, and to ultimately build theories of urban environmental inequality, researchers will need to use some new tools.

Using New Tools to Build Theories of Urban Environmental Inequality Useful insights can be gleaned from three lenses through which to view environmental inequalities that are currently not being utilized much by environmental sociologists: the concept of intersectionality in privilege and disadvantage; the conceptualization of place and space (and inequalities) as relational; and the careful incorporation of temporality (time) into research and theory.

Intersectionality As mentioned above, the concept of intersectionality has been underutilized in environmental justice research.115 As formulated by feminist theorists, intersectionality refers to the multiple identities that intersect to create social “axes” of disadvantage, rendering people vulnerable to harm.116 In public health, intersectionality has been used to promote an understanding of how poverty, racial inequality, and gender inequalities combine to render some groups of women more vulnerable to HIV infection.117 The concept of intersectionality can also apply to communities (or places) and their multiple spatial and social locations within relations of power. Although the concept of intersectionality has been taken up by sociologists and has not been used much by geographers, the differentiation of space that has resulted from intersecting social inequalities is within geographers’ area of expertise. Geographers have already provided important contributions to the research on the causes of environmental inequality, and by incorporating an understanding of intersectionality they can contribute even more to building theories of environmental inequality formation.118 There are at least three ways in which intersectionality can

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enhance our understanding of the processes by which environmental inequality comes to be. First, by “scaling up” the concept of intersectionality from the individual level to the place level, the intersectional nature of that place’s social status (and the environmental consequences that shape that status, and are associated with it) can become visible. Of course, scaling up also has pitfalls for building theory: generalizing conditions of environmental inequality to entire towns glosses over the smaller areas within the town, in which spatial sorting occurs and environmental inequalities are experienced by individuals. In densely populated areas (such as Rust Belt cities), inequalities between census tracts or even blocks may be as significant as those between towns. In short, the scale we choose to examine will shape our research results and the outcome of spatial studies. But it is also true that the processes through which industries begin and grow, cities are built, and people settle and create neighborhoods (and later, through which industries shrink and die out, cities are rebuilt and modified, and people move to new areas) are all driven by political and economic decisions. Decisions to seek out certain tracts of land, certain markets, or pools of laborers are often what drives these processes, and these are never made at the neighborhood or census tract level.119 Thus, it is crucial to examine the process at the spatial level of legal entities (towns, or parts of towns used by city planners). Decisions about land use are based not just on a calculus of profit and loss, but also on the reputation of places (and their inhabitants): regardless of their true state of dilapidation, it was the places where a significant number of inhabitants are racial/ethnic minority people or where poor people lived that have been viewed as “slums” or “blighted,” and slated for condemnation.120 Areas with few white residents have often become negatively racialized: viewed, because the race or ethnicity of the people living there, as places of low value that are appropriate locations for polluting industrial or waste disposal development. As discussed above, East Los Angeles is an example of the continuing concentration of environmental hazards that followed negative racialization.121 Thus, intersectionality is important for understanding the intensification of racial/ethnic inequality conferred by simultaneous economic disadvantage. Second, an awareness of intersectionality also sensitizes the researcher to see how environmental inequality can be generated by contradictory social statuses. The existence of predominantly white environmentally burdened places can be explained through the complex intertwining of advantage and disadvantage that characterized industrial neighborhoods in the past. The environmental “riskscapes” studied today were built at a time in history when college educations and professional jobs were out of reach for most people,

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  53

industrial jobs were relatively high-­paying, and the true health risk of chemical exposures largely unknown. For example, throughout the industrial history of Philadelphia, African Americans were largely excluded from manufacturing work.122 Many manufacturers were located in industrial areas of the city such as Kensington, a neighborhood characterized throughout most of the twentieth century by its racial segregation from blacks and its modest rowhomes.123 As in other places, working-­class white residents in Philadelphia’s industrial neighborhoods had access to industrial employment, but only at the cost of living with pollution. They enjoyed racial privilege, while suffering from social class inequality. The intersectional paradigm also allows the researcher to do something very important: to theoretically differentiate low-­income white populations from affluent white populations, which are rarely among the environmentally burdened. Third, intersectionality is particularly useful as a theory-­building tool because it cautions against reifying “race” or “class” as things rather than relations between groups.124 This necessitates considering how the intersection between whiteness and affluence conveys the power to escape environmental burdening, or to shift it onto others, in a way that whiteness alone does not.125 For example, the citizens of Aspen, Colorado, have been able to simultaneously mobilize racial and social class privilege to claim the most beautiful, clean, natural spaces for themselves.126

Space and Place as Relational Space and place are “relational,” linked through power relationships.127 The ability of the wealthy to control space is a manifestation of the greater social and economic power that they enjoy.128 Thus, relationships between neighborhoods or towns in a metropolitan region are social class relations, linked together not only by participation in the economic order, but by forms of exploitation. Social class relations between communities are often complicated by racial/ethnic differences because, in the United States, these power relations are always racialized.129 Both factors often intersect, producing environmental inequality: for example, poor communities of color are often chosen as host sites for waste-­disposal land uses and large-­scale transportation infrastructure (such as airports and highways).130 Relational insights, which keep us focused on inequalities in power, could be used to craft a better understanding of the role of more powerful places within a county or metropolitan area in the development of distributional inequalities in less privileged urban areas.

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Temporal Issues In order to understand racial/ethnic and social class inequalities in proximity to environmental hazards, it is essential to contextualize these inequalities in place and time. Environmental inequality can afflict different groups at different times in history—­even in exactly the same place.131 Thus, the location of stockyards, slaughterhouses, and garbage dumps in the immigrant wards on the South Side of early twentieth-­century Chicago created noxious conditions that were replicated a century later by recycling centers and landfills on what had become the predominantly black South Side.132 In other cases, environmental inequality may be a continuation into the present of simultaneous axes of racial and social class inequality that were established many decades in the past, such as the establishment of huge petrochemical plants in Diamond, Louisiana, on plantation land settled by freed slaves.133 Racial identities, prejudices, advantages, and disadvantages are always formed at a certain time in history, and in a certain place.134 Thus, the temporal/historical and spatial dimensions of environmental injustice are just as important as the present-­day characteristics of the community in question. Both are determinants of how racial/ethnic and social class identities either buffer a community from, or subject the community to, environmental injustice. History is also important in shaping the ways in which a community will resist environmental injustice. When engaged in resistance, people in burdened communities use the history of previous struggles for justice as a guide, a symbol, or an intimation of what is to come.135 The resistance of communities to polluting land uses always changes the “riskscape” of environmental hazards, and a full understanding of urban environmental inequality demands an understanding of community activism.136 The social meanings of industrial pollution and waste have changed drastically since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era of the most rapid U.S. industrialization and urbanization. During the period in which industrial, utility, and waste infrastructures were built in older U.S. cities, people welcomed the industry for its employment prospects, knew little about possible health impacts, and viewed environmental “nuisances” such as air pollution with resignation.137 But after 1970, the rise in ecological concern, and a dawning awareness of the toxicity of industrial facilities and their wastes, made people much more resistant to the prospect of living close to such hazards.138 In Michigan, this growing resistance to toxic hazards resulted in a shift in the siting of hazardous waste facilities from predominantly white areas before 1950 to minority areas after 1970.139 But the imposition of new waste disposal facilities (such as sewage composting facilities, recycling centers, and waste-­to-­ energy incinerators) on less powerful communities sparked much resistance which, when successful, changed the pattern of environmental inequalities.

Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality  •  55

One example of successful resistance is the sharp decrease in attempts to build incinerators after 1990. Although the decrease in popularity of incineration occurred for reasons other than community resistance, environmental justice activists did drive up the cost of siting an incinerator, thus decreasing the profitability of the industry.140 Theories that ignore what historians have discovered about the historical progression of social inequality, industrial development, waste disposal practices, and community resistance to environmental inequality are likely to remain contradictory and fragmented.141 Given the need to build an awareness of relationality, intersectionality, and time into our environmental justice research, I argue that a research design that joins spatial research with historical research focused on specific metropolitan areas—­here, the Philadelphia area—­holds the most potential for crafting theory that can explain the complex processes that gave rise to urban environmental inequalities. While Philadelphia is in some ways unique, it is in other ways quite similar to other northeastern early-­industrialized cities that became centers of manufacturing throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, only to lose most of their manufacturing employment in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. In the historical chapters that follow, I will show that Philadelphia has much to teach us about the formation of environmental inequalities.

3

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia

Although the landscapes of cities such as Philadelphia are the legacies of the past, representing thousands of decisions about the location of buildings, bridges, and roads, they are not as frozen in place as they appear in a map or photograph. Instead, they are constantly changing—­being modified in response to the needs of corporate business owners and investors, wealthy residents, growth coalitions, political entrepreneurs, and urban grassroots activist groups.1 In the Philadelphia area, the long history of the making and remaking of industrial landscapes has created three distinct spatial configurations of industry. None of these has entirely disappeared; it is more accurate to think of the oldest as the first layer, upon which the others are built. In Layer I, noxious industry (defined as petroleum refining, chemicals, paper manufacturing, machinery manufacturing, primary metals, and leather goods) was located along waterways in industrial suburbs close to the center of Philadelphia.2 In Layer II, noxious industry moved out and spread throughout the city along rail lines and along the Delaware in industrial satellite cities such as Camden. In the latest layer (Layer III), noxious industry spread out into the suburbs, eventually vanishing from much of the city.3 Within each of these layers of industrial expansion, industrial and residential districts were layered on top of earlier configurations, producing a mosaic of environmental inequality that today still contains elements of earlier eras (see figure 4). The movement of people has been much more fluid than the movement of industrial plants and waste disposal businesses. As the decades pass, industrial 56

FIGURE 4   Layering of industrial and social landscapes in the Philadelphia area.

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areas here tend to remain industrial, while some people have left these areas and other people have moved in. These dynamics have changed the groups of people affected by the legacy of the industrial past. One thing that slows down the process of land use change in industrial areas of a city is the possibility that a parcel of land used by industry has been contaminated with toxic substances. If soil contamination is suspected to have occurred on that site, redevelopment to a different land use will be more costly and thus will be less likely to take place.4 It is also more difficult to change existing zoning to designate new parcels of land for industrial use than it is to add new facilities to land already zoned for industrial use. This means that, unless there are city-­specific conditions (such as extremely expensive housing or an urban growth boundary) that make it more likely for an industrial area to be redeveloped as a residential one, factories and waste disposal facilities may have more “staying power” than other types of land uses.5 When new hazardous or polluting facilities are added to existing ones, the hazard burdening of industrial communities, and the environmental inequality they suffer, is increased. The process of environmental inequality formation is embedded within more general processes of change and development; these processes change throughout history, and are different in different cities. The historical studies focusing on other cities that were discussed in chapter 2 revealed ten different factors that were important in the process of environmental inequality formation in a variety of U.S. metropolitan areas: 1. The location of industry near water bodies or transportation routes.

2. Industrial boom-­and-­bust patterns that drew certain types of people

into the industrial areas of cities in search of work.

3. Social class inequalities that benefited the wealthy and middle class. 4. Racial inequalities that benefited whites.

5. Residential segregation by economic status, and by race/ethnicity. 6. The racialization of labor.

7. Widespread suburbanization of people and industry.

8. Deindustrialization, which eliminated the benefit of industrial employ-

ment more than it eliminated the risks of polluting industry. Because deindustrialization changed the balance of risk to benefit for people living in industrialized areas, it also changed the racial/ethnic and social class composition of deindustrialized spaces. 9. Patterns of gentrification, which also changed the social composition of spaces. 10. Implementation of environmental laws, which changed the nature and location of waste disposal facilities.

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  59

Some of these aspects of metropolitan life played a more important role in the development of environmental inequality in some metropolitan areas than others, and some played a crucial role in the development of environmental inequality at certain points in history but were relatively unimportant at other times. While the first six factors were important in setting the stage for the changes to come (and thus will be emphasized in the remainder of this chapter), later developments such as widespread suburbanization, deindustrialization, gentrification, and changing environmental laws will be discussed in chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Layer I Philadelphia: The River-­Bound Industrial Economy, 1820–­1845 Industrial development was already established in Philadelphia by 1820, much earlier than in most U.S. cities, where an extensive infrastructure of manufacturing did not develop until after the Civil War. Between 1820 and 1860, Philadelphia’s economic base was transformed from shipping and trade to manufacturing.6 The importance of the Delaware River (and, to a lesser extent, the Schuylkill River) to this transformation and to the creation of Layer I Philadelphia cannot be overestimated. At the time of the American Revolution, there were about 16,500 residents of Philadelphia, all of whom lived close to the docks of the Delaware; the farthest edge of the city was only a half-­mile from the river.7 This urban form was not unique to Philadelphia: cities such as Boston also developed by slowly spreading outward from the oldest port area of the city.8 Besides serving as a source of drinking water and fish, the Delaware was essential to the livelihood of nearly all in early Philadelphia. Most wealthy residents were commercial merchants who bought and sold grain, furs, and other goods by shipping them to and from other cities along the east coast, and to other countries along the Atlantic route.9 Many nonwealthy residents worked in shipbuilding, in rope making, as sailors, or as suppliers to the mercantile trade.10 But the War of 1812 and competition from New York Harbor (which, unlike the Delaware River, did not freeze over in the winter) destroyed Philadelphia’s mercantile industry. By 1824, mercantile trade and capital investments in trade had slowed to a trickle. Instead, Philadelphia’s investors and businessmen were embracing the new technologies of manufacturing. Cotton and woolen cloth, twine, earthenware, window glass, buckshot, red lead, and camphor were all produced in Philadelphia. The Schuylkill River (a much smaller river that borders what is now West Philadelphia as the Delaware River borders the city on the east side) gave Philadelphia manufacturers a natural advantage: the city was located on

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a fall line, meaning that the Schuylkill’s streams were fast-­flowing enough to provide waterpower to factories.11 This was a time before electricity, steam engines, or the widespread use of coal to power machines, so waterfalls and rapids were extremely important to the operation of Philadelphia’s mechanized mills. By the early 1830s, huge stone water-­powered textile mills had been built at Manayunk on the upper Schuylkill, employing so many workers that the owners had to build tenements to house them.12 Most of the factories of the time were textile mills, but there were also factories producing chemicals, dye, glass, steel, and locomotives.13 Besides the need for waterpower, Philadelphia’s factories needed riverbank locations because railroads did not exist in the area until around 1850, and the area’s rivers could carry much heavier loads faster than horse-­drawn wagons, making water the cheapest and most practical way to ship raw materials in and finished goods out. The building of a network of canals for shipping was important in facilitating Philadelphia’s industrial boom from 1820 to 1830.14 Even fifty years later, the canals were used for shipping coal, so steam-­powered factories fueled by coal still needed to be located close to water.15 As we saw in chapter 1, a disproportionate number of the communities that were extensively burdened with environmental hazards in 2010 bordered the Delaware River (see map 3, chapter 1). This demonstrates the power of early industrial land use to shape environmental inequalities in the present day: it was these early land uses that set the precedent for where industrial, power generation, and waste-­ disposal facilities in Philadelphia would be located nearly two centuries later. A location near water bodies was essential to industries that used water to produce goods as varied as beverages, clothing and textiles, iron and steel, leather, and chemicals. These industries (along with slaughterhouses and other businesses) also used the rivers as convenient places to dispose of wastes. It is impossible to know the impact of those early nineteenth-­century industries on the quality of river water, or which groups of Philadelphia residents were exposed to their effluents; but at the time, few recognized the danger of drinking water into which raw sewage was discharged, let alone the danger of coal tars, early dyes, and other industrial wastes.16 Most of Philadelphia’s population was located in the eastern part of the city, and as in other cities of its era, residents drew their water supply from wells and cisterns nearby, in a low-­lying area near the Delaware River. These water sources were easily contaminated by urban runoff and the underground flow from cesspools and outhouses, resulting in the spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid.17 Protest from citizens resulted in the creation of a Watering Committee (the precursor of the Water Department), which helped build the nation’s first waterworks, Fairmount Water Works, in 1801. The Water Works drew water not from the Delaware, but from the relatively cleaner Schuylkill River. First powered by steam engines, then by waterwheels,

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  61

the Water Works was so beautiful and efficient that by 1848 it was one of the city’s main tourist destinations and the model for water systems in New York, Boston, Detroit, and Cincinnati.18 Despite these improvements, water quality remained poor. Household garbage disposal contributed to the problem: even in the genteel neighborhoods, it was generally dumped into the streets, where it was eaten by scavenging hogs and packs of wild dogs.19 As the city grew and became increasingly industrialized, these conditions were eliminated by reforms, only to be replaced by water pollution from factory wastes, air pollution, and other modern environmental problems.

Social Class, Race, and Residential Segregation in Layer I Philadelphia Philadelphia in 1790 has been characterized as a community of “merchants, mariners, and mechanics,” in which nearly all residents lived densely packed together, with few social divisions.20 But this description overstates the social harmony: in reality, Philadelphia’s population was then already quite divided by race, social class, skill level, and country of origin.21 During the years of Philadelphia’s first industrial boom (from about 1820 to 1841), very few of the established upper class were involved in manufacturing businesses. Most of Philadelphia’s elite were British and Scots-­Irish (Irish Protestant) in ethnicity, descended from wealthy merchants who had played important roles in the American Revolution.22 But as these men got old and died, a new class of businessmen rose to take their places as city leaders. By 1845, 60 percent of Philadelphia’s wealthy were merchants or brokers, or had inherited wealth. Ninety-­two percent of the wealthy had been born into rich families. Only 5 percent of the rich were manufacturers.23 The dearth of homegrown capitalists left room for manufacturing entrepreneurs who came to Philadelphia and built some of its largest, most technically advanced, and most profitable factories. But these huge manufacturing plants were the exception: the vast majority of manufacturing in Philadelphia was done in small nonmechanized “manufactories” making small batches of specialties.24 The owners of these factories, like the owners of small shops, were middle-­class people.25 In the early nineteenth century, white working-­class residents of Philadelphia were of two types. The most sought after and best-­paid type was the highly skilled “mechanic”—­a man skilled in making machines, an occupation that was growing more important in the era of mechanized manufacturing and transportation. Unlike the artisans of preindustrial times who, as blacksmiths, rope makers, candle makers, innkeepers, or bakers had nearly total control over the terms and conditions of their work, the mechanic had a master (a boss) who oversaw his work and set his wages. Yet if the mechanic was not as free as the artisan, neither was he an indentured servant or a slave. Indentured servants (nearly all white) were immigrants who were bound to serve a master in return for their passage to America. Although not paid and considered

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the master’s property, the servant was freed after he had served for a period of years. Slaves (nearly all black), whether skilled or unskilled, were considered the master’s property, never paid, and were forced to serve the master until they died. Mechanics were eager to distinguish themselves from slaves and indentured servants as “free labor.”26 The second type of white working-­class laborer was the unskilled laborer, whose wages were at the lowest end of the wage scale. Disproportionate numbers of unskilled laborers were immigrants from Britain and Ireland, and a large proportion of them were women and children. In the 1830s, it was not uncommon for whole families to work for a pittance in the huge mechanized textile mills in the Manayunk district outside of Philadelphia.27 The General Trades Union of the City and County of Philadelphia organized the unskilled immigrants together with mechanics, creating a powerful union that won a strike for the ten-­hour day in 1835.28 Aside from racial unity in organized labor, unskilled white immigrants had few ways to gain power aside from asserting their difference from and superiority to black people. Both African Americans and the Irish were despised by native-­born whites. Although the Irish were of European origins, their racial status was unclear, and many people thought the “Celtic race” quite distinct from the British.29 In 1820, only about 1  percent of Philadelphia’s African Americans were slaves; the rest were free laborers competing with unskilled Irish immigrants for employment.30 As Philadelphia industrialized, tensions between the two groups grew, culminating in a race riot in 1837, in which black men, women, and children were beaten and terrorized and their homes and churches looted. This was only the first of several race riots that took place in Philadelphia in the 1830s and 1840s. Observers characterized the rioters as young white men “of the lowest social classes.”31 Although it is likely that rioters were motivated by a desire to get rid of black workers and take their jobs, racial hatred itself was also an important motivation for the riot. Racist thought was already well established in British and Irish culture before the immigrants came to America.32 Thus, in Philadelphia violent racism coexisted with the high-­minded abolitionist ideals of the Quakers in the years before the Civil War. Inevitably, urban social divisions based on race and social class were expressed in the spatial differentiation of people’s homes and neighborhoods, which grew more complex and more obvious as industrialization progressed in Philadelphia. In the early nineteenth century, the main residences of the wealthy were clustered together in the center of Philadelphia. Compared with the outlying industrial suburbs, the Center City neighborhood had a disproportionate number of wealthy doctors, lawyers, merchants, and dealers.33 To escape the humid swelter of Philadelphia’s unhealthy summers, the rich built summer homes near the city in forested places at higher elevations, in what are

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  63

now the northwest Philadelphia neighborhoods of Chestnut Hill, Germantown, and Mount Airy.34 Outside the city’s boundaries were the areas where laborers, the poor, and recent immigrants lived. Each district was focused on one economic specialty in which one ethnic group predominated as laborers. Some districts were industrial suburbs such as Bridesburg, Kensington, Manayunk, Moyamensing, Northern Liberties, Port Richmond, and Southwark (see map 6). Manayunk was a textile mill district, where weavers from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany produced cloth at water-­powered mechanized looms in huge factories. Kensington and Moyamensing were handloom districts, where most workers were unskilled Irish immigrant weavers paid by the piece of cloth, laboring in their own tiny cottages.35 Northern Liberties specialized in making leather goods; 26 percent of the taxpayers on its tax rolls in 1800 were laborers. Eastern Southwark bordered the Delaware, and accordingly, 26 percent on its tax rolls were seamen or mariners. Western Southwark was an iron foundry district where skilled men forged locomotives using some of the most modern equipment in the world. More than 10 percent of those on Western Southwark’s tax rolls were laborers; few immigrants lived in Southwark.36 Bridesburg was a heavy industrial district, and Port Richmond a docks, shipping, and warehouse district.37 Between 1790 and 1850, African Americans in Philadelphia were highly segregated into a few small sections of the city. Most lived in South Philadelphia, but others also clustered in the manufacturing districts of Kensington, Northern Liberties, and Spring Garden. Although most were poor, elite African Americans lived in the same neighborhoods as slaves and ex-­slaves. Even those who possessed important skills and had undergone extensive training still lacked a secure livelihood because of racial prejudice. For example, as of 1837, 23  percent of African American artisans complained that racial prejudice prevented them from practicing their trades. Seventy percent of black men worked in just five occupations: as laborers, waiters, porters, seamen, and carters. Only 1  percent of African American men were employed in manufacturing.38

Environmental Inequality in Layer I Philadelphia Philadelphia’s industrial landscape began its development at a time in history when manufacturers needed access to waterpower and shipping along a network of canals, rivers, and waterfalls. Nearly two centuries later, factories, electric power stations, and waste disposal facilities remain clustered in the locations of Philadelphia’s earliest industries. Although records of industrial and waste disposal activities during this point in Philadelphia’s industrial development are spotty at best, we do know that both the skilled and the unskilled tended to live close to their industrial

MAP 6   Philadelphia industrial districts, c. 1830. Source: Adapted from Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds., The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-­Class Life, 1790–­1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1973), v.

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  65

workplaces. The old industrial suburbs (such as Kensington, Manayunk, and Northern Liberties) were the location of both low-­status people (African Americans, the Irish, and unskilled workers) and industry. There is also evidence that environmental inequalities in housing harmed the health of Philadelphia’s poor and working people. The terrible yellow fever epidemic of 1793 killed five thousand people—­one-­tenth of Philadelphia’s population. Although not understood at the time, human infection was transmitted through the bite of an Aedes aegypti mosquito infected with the yellow fever virus.39 Seven-­eighths of those who died in the epidemic were estimated to be among the poor, probably because the stagnant pools and puddles on slum streets, and the dank cellars in which the poor lived, were perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes.40 Irish immigrants and African Americans were among Philadelphia’s poorest residents during this time. While all in Philadelphia suffered from diseases borne by unsanitary water, poor blacks and poor white immigrants were confined to certain slum districts, and thus likely suffered the most from the ills of poor housing.41

Layer II: The Workshop of the World, 1845–­1949 The century following 1845 brought an industrial boom that greatly increased industrial land use in Philadelphia, and railroads expanded industrial production outward from the waterfront into the rest of the city. This was the period when industrial satellite cities and the first affluent suburbs were developed outside of Philadelphia. By the 1920s a flood of people, including immigrants from Europe and African Americans from the South, had come to Philadelphia to grab employment opportunities generated by World War I and the rise of manufacturing. The demographic profile of Philadelphia was transformed, and population density, job competition, and racial/ethnic tensions were all greatly increased. During World War II, war production brought increased manufacturing and an expanding population. These developments caused environmental damage from air and water pollution, and produced irresponsible waste disposal practices that reached an unhealthy peak.

The Evolving Spatial Form of Philadelphia in Layer II Between 1840 and 1860, Philadelphia’s population mushroomed to 565,529. At this point, almost all of the manufacturing businesses and jobs in the eight-­ county region were located in Philadelphia.42 The development that had led to this population explosion and transformed all types of land use in Philadelphia around 1847 was the building of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad lines, which shipped coal into the city at half the price of the old canals.43 Technological advances—­first steam power,

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then at the turn of the twentieth century, electric power—­allowed the city’s manufacturers to spread out farther from the riverbanks into the expanded city, eventually dotting it with factories.44 By 1910, Philadelphia ranked third in the United States in the number of manufacturing jobs and the value of goods produced. With 251,900 manufacturing workers, the Chamber of Commerce that year proclaimed it “the Workshop of the World.”45 The dockyards and waterfront areas still remained a center of manufacturing. By the 1860s, Philadelphia had become a shipbuilding center, with Cramp’s Shipyard in Port Richmond and the huge Navy Yard at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in South Philadelphia.46 Despite these flourishing waterfront enterprises, Philadelphia had only twenty wharves in 1907, and most could not accommodate the larger boats. Many wharves were owned by private railroad companies, and were unavailable for public use. For this reason, Philadelphia ranked thirty-­eighth among world ports in the amount of tonnage handled in 1900, but had slid to fifty-­first by 1907.47 Compared with other cities, Philadelphia’s factories tended to be smaller in size, and to fill a diverse array of “specialty” manufacturing niches.48 Those who supplied retailers (such as clothing manufacturers) tended to locate in the center of the city; but this was not the case with Philadelphia’s noxious industries (rendering plants and tanneries, chemical manufacturers, iron and steel producers, locomotive and machinery manufacturers, and petroleum refineries), which caused bad odors, smoke, and loud noise. These tended to locate between one and two miles from the center of the city in areas that were sparsely populated, usually near a river or railroad.49 By the 1850s, Port Richmond (near the Delaware River) was the location of many nuisance-­industry plants including one of Philadelphia’s largest chemical manufacturers, various iron works, carpet factories, and distilleries.50 Dye works, shipbuilders, coal yards, and glass factories were all located in the adjoining industrial districts of Port Richmond, Kensington, and Bridesburg.51 Although workers in these industries faced a variety of lethal hazards, no laws gave state governments the right to regulate hazards to workers until 1867, when Massachusetts passed the first “factory inspection law.” Although needed, such state laws were virtually unenforceable.52 Both industrial expansion and a huge increase in the number of homes were fueled by the Consolidation Act of 1854, which allowed Philadelphia to annex and absorb all of its outlying districts, including the old industrial suburbs. Consolidation benefited the city and city dwellers by increasing Philadelphia’s shrinking tax base with revenues from its suburbs.53 The cheap land in these outlying districts was soon gridded with streets filled with narrow brick “rowhomes,” Philadelphia’s distinct form of housing that allowed factory workers to become homeowners.54

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Until about 1919, when the subway system was built, public transportation was the expensive horse-­drawn omnibus (or later, the expensive streetcar). During the time of rapid expansion of home building (about 1860–­1880), most working-­class people preferred to live within walking distance of their workplace, causing workers’ neighborhoods to cluster around the industries that employed them. This meant that in Philadelphia, immigrants tended to live among other workers in the same industry, rather than clustering together in ethnic enclaves as was the case in other cities such as Chicago.55 The largest cluster of immigrants from Germany and Poland lived in the Kensington and Port Richmond districts near the Delaware River, which were home to 95 percent of skilled workers in manufacturing.56 Outside the city, “satellite cities”—­industrial suburbs where goods were produced and working-­class people lived—­were developing.57 By 1900, two of these towns on the Delaware River had become important centers of population and manufacturing. Camden City ranked second in population after Philadelphia and held 79  percent of Camden County, New Jersey’s, jobs. Camden boasted such employers as Campbell’s Soup, Esterbrook Pens, the Victor Talking Machine Company (as of 1901), and the New York Shipbuilding Company. That year, Chester City ranked fourth in population after Philadelphia and held 55 percent of Delaware County, Pennsylvania’s, jobs. In addition to the development of industrial areas, this was a time in history when elite residential districts developed in the western part of the city and beyond its borders. One prestigious district developed in the city by 1850 was Rittenhouse Square, the location of a small public park in the western part of the center of town, which was ringed by fine homes.58 Another such district was West Philadelphia beyond 40th Street, which between 1850 and 1860 went from woods and farmland to streets filled with houses for the middle class. West Philadelphia was an attractive location for professionals, as it was the location of both the University of Pennsylvania and Presbyterian Hospital.59 By 1880, suburban development extended west beyond the city limits along the Main Line of the railroad, where a string of very affluent and segregated towns developed, settled by the wealthiest independent professionals and corporate executives (see map 7).60

The Creation of Fairmount Park But it was the wealthy merchants and bankers whose summer mansions fronted the Schuylkill River bordering Philadelphia who would wield perhaps the most significant influence on the environmental condition and spatial development of the city by helping to create and administer Philadelphia’s

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MAP 7   Philadelphia area affluent communities, c. 1880. Sources: U.S. Census Tiger Line Map 1950; U.S. Census Consolidated Places, 2000.

Fairmount Park. In 1855, a year after Philadelphia incorporated the undeveloped land along the Schuylkill River, wealthy residents raised $60,000 (half the purchase price) to buy two adjoining estates located on a bluff overlooking the Schuylkill River, just north of the Fairmount Water Works. City authorities put up the other half of the purchase price, and the land was designated a recreational area.61 By 1859, city officials came under pressure from citizens lobbying for the creation of an urban park to rival New York’s newly built Central Park, and held a competition for the best design to unite the two estates into an urban park. In 1867, the Pennsylvania legislature passed the Fairmount Park Act, dedicating land on both sides of the river to public use and creating the Fairmount Park Commission.62 Members of the commission were concerned about more than just recreation: they faced a water quality crisis along the Schuylkill, which supplied drinking water to all who lived west of Broad Street (those who lived to the east drank from the Delaware River).63 Since 1686, waterfalls at the north end of the Schuylkill River had powered grain mills.64 In the surge in prosperity after the Civil War, huge textile plants, dye works, chemical factories, oil refineries, paper mills, breweries, and ale houses accumulated along the river. All of these businesses discharged their waste directly into the river, and had

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  69

succeeded in blocking the passage of legislation that would have outlawed that practice.65 The Supplementary Park Act of 1868 allowed the city to prevent further industrialization along the Schuylkill River by acquiring a tract of land on the northwestern bank of the river, through which Wissahickon Creek flowed. The area around the Wissahickon featured forested ravines and had a wild and natural beauty. It was also the site of the summer homes of the wealthy who sought to escape the city’s sweltering, fever-­filled summers.66 But by 1868 more than fifty mills and tanneries were already located there, and were engaged in constant dumping of noxious waste into the creek (which flowed into the Schuylkill River). Incorporating the Wissahickon into Fairmount Park ensured that the mills would close, and thus created a buffer against industrial water pollution. City officials found it less expensive to add only new roads and pedestrian paths to the Wissahickon, believing that landscaping could not improve the beauty of what was already there.67 But while the city as a whole benefited from halting the further toxification of its drinking water, the wealthy residents of Chestnut Hill benefited most. Although separated by the Wissahickon Gorge from the noise and stench of industry, Chestnut Hill residents were concerned about the encroachment of more industry. Besides creating a recreation area for the public and protecting the city’s water supply, the setting aside of land for Fairmount Park also prevented more polluting businesses from locating along the Schuylkill River, ensuring that the sections of the city on either side of the Schuylkill (the West Philadelphia and Fairmount neighborhoods) and the wealthy Chestnut Hill and middle-­class Mount Airy neighborhoods bordering Wissahickon Creek would remain free of polluting industry. These developments have also enhanced the value of homes and land for local property owners and land developers, in effect solidifying the privilege of Chestnut Hill residents.68 The preservation of land in these areas of the city, built for and populated by the middle class and wealthy, explains the dearth of industrial areas in much of the western part of the city and is one cause of the environmental inequality we see today. The Fairmount Park system now totals 8,900 acres (10 percent of Philadelphia’s land area), and is thus among the largest urban parks in the world. But the land comprising the park is fragmented, and park areas are best maintained in areas bordering wealthy neighborhoods, while areas bordering poor ones are allowed to decline.69 In addition, the Wissahickon section of the park is particularly inaccessible to people in the most densely populated eastern parts of the city—­those who need its benefits the most.

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The Evolution of the Industrial Economy in Layer II Philadelphia’s industrial growth over this hundred-­ year span cannot be accurately characterized as a technology-­driven progression from the tiny, hand-­assembly operation to the huge, mechanized factory. Instead, it was characterized by all types of smaller manufacturing establishments, some of which were mechanized and many of which were not.70 These smaller firms were able to expand further outward into congested areas of the city. The spatial expansion of Philadelphia’s manufactories was evident in changing patterns of manufacturing employment: in 1850, 51.2 percent of all manufacturing jobs were located in the central business district of Philadelphia, but by 1880 only 40.5 percent were located there.71 Most of these smaller manufacturers required skilled or semiskilled workers; Philadelphia’s lack of large iron and steel foundries meant that it could not absorb large numbers of unskilled laborers (as was the case in Pittsburgh). But the early oil boom positioned Philadelphia as an early refining center for petroleum. By the 1870s, Philadelphia also made a large proportion of the nation’s locomotives at the Baldwin Locomotive Works, which employed three thousand workers.72 During this period, recent immigrants to Philadelphia were much preferred over native-­born African Americans for manufacturing employment. In 1900, 63 percent of immigrants from Russia worked in manufacturing, as did 56.2 percent from Great Britain, 55.5 percent from Poland, and 40.2 percent from Ireland. Forty percent of native-­born whites but only 8.2 percent of native-­born African Americans worked in manufacturing.73 By 1880, African Americans were less segregated from whites in Philadelphia than they had been before the Civil War. Although the bulk of the city’s black population was still concentrated in Center City and South Philadelphia, a few black families were mixed in to nearly every neighborhood in Philadelphia. Ironically (given their lack of integration into factory employment), they tended more than recent immigrants or native-­born whites to live in parts of Philadelphia with more factories and factory jobs. However, this was not due to their location in outlying areas of the city where noxious industries were located; instead, it was because at that point in time they were concentrated in the heavily industrialized central parts of the city.74 When they did manage to get hired in manufacturing, African Americans were paid less than whites and often subjected to the most hazardous and uncomfortable working conditions. In Philadelphia’s glass factories, black women were preferred by employers as workers because they could “stand the heat without suffering.” In steel mills, black men did the dirty jobs “that even Poles didn’t want.”75 These are probably the reasons that, as of 1880, African American men were best represented in some of the lowest-­paying or most noxious manufacturing industries, including stone, clay, and glass (where they made up 6.4 percent

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  71

of the workforce), chemicals (2 percent), food processing (1.8 percent), petroleum refining (1.3 percent), and boots and shoes (1.3 percent).76 (See table 5.) In the first years of the twentieth century, most factory workers worked long hours at work that was hard and dangerous. This was true not just for adults, but for child workers under fourteen years old as well. One 1903 strike in Philadelphia involved the walkout of 75,000 Kensington textile workers, who were demanding better pay and shorter hours. During the strike, Mary Harris (“Mother”) Jones led a march of Kensington’s child textile workers from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, New York. The march began with a rally in front of the Philadelphia City Hall, where Harris lifted children up onto a platform where the crowd could see their missing fingers and maimed hands.77 Such injuries were hardly rare: the industrial workplace was so hazardous that in 1907, the Bureau of Labor reported that 15,000 to 17,500 of 26 million male workers died on the job.78 Although industrialization was expanding rapidly, there existed no system for regulating industrial hazards to employees. From 1890 to 1910, the steel industry expanded its output, its profits, and its political influence greatly. But injury and death rates in this industry were so high that they became a national scandal, and accidents were so frequent that they had begun to interfere with production. To counter these problems, the steel industry in 1910 began a Voluntary Accident Relief Plan to compensate injured workers. It was this program that became the model for worker’s compensation laws, under which injured workers receive employer-­funded treatment for workplace injuries Table 5

Black Male Representation in Manufacturing Industries, Philadelphia, 1880 Industry

Stone, clay, and glass Chemicals Food processing Petroleum refining Boots and shoes Machinery manufacturing Iron, steel Locomotives Railroad cars

Median annual wage, 1880

Percentage black males

$350 $473 $230 $607 $375 $465

6.4% 2.0 1.8 1.4 1.3 0.5

$453 $515 $410

0.3 0.0 0.0

Percentage Percentage first-­generation first-­generation German males Irish males

7.1% 21.0 11.3 5.1 30.3 10.3 5.6 0.0 4.2

Percentage native-­born white males

16.9% 16.7 11.5 14.4 21.8 11.7

35.2% 28.4 54.1 54.2 28.8 51.4

20.3 11.8 15.3

43.0 52.9 52.1

SOURCE: Stephanie W. Greenberg, “Industrialization in Philadelphia: The Relationship between

Industrial Location and Residential Patterns, 1880–­1930” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1977), 78–­79, 211.

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and illnesses, and compensation from employers (at less than 100 percent of wages) for disabilities caused by workplace hazards. In return, employees are prohibited from suing their employers.79 Organizing Philadelphia’s workers had never been easy, but in 1905 union organizers faced not only social divisions between the skilled and the unskilled, blacks and whites, the native and the foreign-­born, but also a strong alliance between business and an entrenched Republican political machine. As a result, only about 10 percent of Philadelphia’s 500,000 workers that year were unionized.80 But even unions were not focused on workplace hazards: few union actions were focused on health and safety until the 1960s. Unions’ involvement in the safety of the work process and working conditions was preempted by the worker’s compensation system, which made workplace safety the business of employers and state regulators. Until the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1971, unions and workers lacked the right to control (or even to know about) workplace hazards.81 Accordingly, none of the most important strikes in Philadelphia history were sparked by demands for health and safety improvements.82

Race, Ethnicity, and Labor in Layer II Philadelphia: The 1920s Philadelphia’s nuisance industries, particularly chemical and gasoline refining, metals, and machinery manufacturing, grew substantially between the late nineteenth century and the early 1920s.83 The outbreak of World War I in 1915 had increased demand for what Philadelphia produced, boosting the economy and changing the city’s population. Ships, artillery shells, railroad gun mounts, steel helmets, and military boots and saddles were all made in Philadelphia.84 The number of manufacturing workers in Greater Philadelphia’s larger firms had grown from 271,000 in 1900 to 340,000 by 1910 and then to 465,000 by 1920.85 This was a time when increased immigration had brought a greater variety of languages and cultures to Philadelphia. At the same time, the Great Migration had greatly increased Philadelphia’s African American population, which was 134,229 (7.4 percent of the city’s population) by 1920.86 All of these newcomers to Philadelphia faced social prejudice, which was illustrated in the spatial segregation of the city. A large proportion of Philadelphia’s foreign-­born population in 1920 were Russian, Italian, Irish, German, and Polish. At that time, Jews, Italians, and Poles were all considered to be something other than “white.”87 While less segregated than African Americans, foreigners were seen as threats to established white neighborhoods, and faced discrimination from realtors and homeowners.88 Ideologies such as eugenics (the idea that the human population could be improved if genetically superior whites had more children and genetically inferior “others” had fewer children) were promoted by many prominent

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  73

academics of the day, and were widely accepted by the public.89 Social Darwinism (the idea that among humans, poverty indicated a lack of evolutionary “fitness,” and thus the population could be strengthened if aid was denied to the poor) also found a wide audience in the 1920s.90 Only Anglo-­Saxons were judged to be white; recent immigrants who spoke a language other than English were not. Compared with those of native-­born whites, the occupational opportunities of foreign-­born whites were constricted. Philadelphia’s Jews tended to solve the hiring problem by becoming peddlers, merchants, and shopkeepers. Many Jewish women worked in sweatshops as seamstresses. Italians worked as unskilled laborers in construction and maintenance occupations, and built Philadelphia’s railroads and large public buildings. Many Italian women also worked in “needle trades,” but they tended to do piecework in their homes rather than in sweatshops. Of the immigrants, only those from England, Germany, and Poland were able to obtain industrial jobs: in 1915, 80 percent of Polish immigrants in Philadelphia worked in either manufacturing, general labor, or construction.91 Polish immigrants created twelve distinct Polish neighborhoods, each of them in an industrial district. The prevalence of Polish men in metal, chemical, glass, rubber, and leather factories explains the large Polish community in Bridesburg and Port Richmond, where some of the largest manufacturing plants were located during the 1920s.92 The largest concentration of Italians was in South Philadelphia, where they lived near Russian Jews and a large proportion of Philadelphia’s Irish immigrants.93 If immigrants faced rough conditions in Philadelphia, conditions were even harsher for unskilled African American migrants from the South. Although nearly 50,000 African Americans had poured into Philadelphia since 1910, most were crammed into South Philadelphia’s notorious “Seventh Ward” slum near the Delaware River, where the housing was the most dilapidated in the city. Although rents were high, many of the newcomers had no running water or indoor toilets. If they managed to scrape together enough money to purchase a home, they encountered discrimination from mortgage lenders.94 At the turn of the century, about 70 percent of African American Philadelphia residents were among the “working poor,” earning a living as manual laborers or domestic servants. But World War I, with its combination of war production and labor shortages, offered opportunities that drew very poor African Americans from the South to the northern cities. It was only during wartime that African Americans gained footholds in Philadelphia industries. Accordingly, the proportion of Philadelphia’s black steelworkers doubled during the war, rising from 464 (7.2  percent) in 1910 to 2,572 (13.8  percent) in 1920.95 By the 1920s, African Americans, while still segregated, had spread out

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a little beyond the boundaries of the old South Philadelphia ghetto: by 1923, 20 percent of black Philadelphians lived next-­door to a white neighbor, usually an Irish, Jewish, or Italian immigrant who was also working-­class. Since before the Civil War, social class differentiation among African Americans had existed in Philadelphia, where there was a small group of elite, wealthy, and well-­educated African Americans, and many others who were prosperous or at least middle-­class. By 1896 there were at least three hundred black-­owned businesses located in Philadelphia, most of them catering firms, restaurants, and barbershops serving the black community. There were also African American professionals, including fifteen doctors, three dentists, two successful lawyers, forty teachers, and more than sixty ministers.96 But by the 1920s, the influx of poor newcomers that crowded into the black neighborhoods of Center City caused middle-­class African Americans (including physicians, merchants, teachers, and social workers) to flee to better housing in North Philadelphia, Germantown, and West Philadelphia.97 This shows that in Philadelphia, the middle class and wealthy of all groups—­including African Americans—­had the ability to escape adverse neighborhood conditions that the working class and poor lacked. However, this does not mean that affluent African Americans enjoyed housing choices equal to those of affluent whites: African Americans still faced formidable barriers, including outright racial discrimination by mortgage lenders, and violent resistance to integration from potential neighbors.98 Although most black migrants to Greater Philadelphia settled in the city, others moved to suburban towns outside the city limits.99 In 1915, some of these new arrivals were agricultural workers who lived in outer-­ring suburbs such as Avondale and Kennett Square. Others worked as domestic servants, commuting every day from predominantly black suburbs such as Morton to segregated towns such as Swarthmore where they were not allowed to live. Still others lived in industrial towns such as Ambler, where African American men worked in the asbestos mills, or Manayunk, where they worked in steel mills. A 1915 report noted five thousand “colored” residents living in Chester City; most of these were lumber mill workers who lived in the waterfront portion known as South Chester.100 Two years later, white violence greeted the southern migrants when they took wartime jobs at the massive Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Chester. Black Chester residents were terrorized by white rioters for three days, and mobs also attacked and lynched a black man who had been hired to work at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. The following summer, mobs attacked black families attempting to move into neighborhoods near the shipyard in Chester, killing four people.101 Despite the brief wartime boom, all was not well in the shipbuilding, metals, or textile industries in the early 1920s. Workers at Cramp’s Shipyard in Kensington went out on strike in 1920, in defense of union officials who had

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  75

been fired by the company. After a bitter year and a half without pay, they lost the strike; the company permanently laid off more than one thousand workers. Those who remained took a pay cut, but still Cramp’s closed its doors in 1927. In 1921, Baldwin Locomotives cut eight thousand workers. In 1922, Midvale Steel laid off eleven thousand workers. Overall, the workforce of Philadelphia’s metal industries contracted by 25  percent in 1928 (before the onset of the Great Depression),when more than 10 percent of Philadelphia wage earners were already jobless.102 Philadelphia’s textiles industries could not cope with changes in product demand or competition with nonunion southern textile plants that were built during the 1920s. Between 1923 and 1929, at least 7,500 textile workers lost their jobs. The textile industries never recovered their strength, even after the Depression ended.103 But across the Delaware River, times were better for manufacturing workers, where the completion of the Delaware River Bridge (later to be named the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) in 1926 eased the flow of commerce and traffic to and from the city of Camden, fueling its industrial boom. By 1920, Camden had 365 factories and a population of 100,000.104

Layer II from 1930 to 1949 The Great Depression hit Philadelphia hard. One year after the stock market crash of 1929, the unemployment rate had jumped from 10 percent to 15 percent. The city provided $10 million in relief money, and private donors added another $14  million; but it was not enough to ease the terrible poverty. By 1932, social workers noted “definite cases of starvation” in Philadelphia. The worst year was 1933, when 11.5 percent of whites, 16.2 percent of African Americans, and 19.1  percent of foreign-­born whites were unemployed.105 African Americans suffered from the worst housing problems, which were illustrated graphically in 1936 when two dilapidated rowhouses in a black neighborhood in South Philadelphia collapsed, six people died (at least three of them children), and another twenty were injured. The tragedy sparked interracial organizing for housing rights, and marked the start of black political activism in Philadelphia.106 During the 1930s, the location of the heaviest concentrations of Philadelphia’s African Americans shifted from the Seventh Ward and South Philadelphia to Lower North Philadelphia. By 1940, North Philadelphia’s African American population had grown by 25 percent, while South Philadelphia had become predominantly white.107 To reduce the number of home foreclosures during the Depression, the federal government created the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to underwrite mortgage loans. HOLC appraisers created residential security maps to indicate which neighborhoods were good (or bad) risks for mortgage lenders. “A” grade areas represented the lowest

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risk to lenders. Colored green on the map, they were described as “homogenous” places that were always in demand, and had room for new residential growth. Areas graded “D” represented the highest risk to lenders. Colored red on the map, these areas were described as having lower home ownership rates, poor housing conditions, and “undesirable population or an infiltration of it.” Appraisers gave an “A” grade to areas farthest from the center of the city, such as the part of Northwest Philadelphia close to Fairmount Park and the undeveloped area in Northeast Philadelphia. Predominantly black neighbor­ hoods in South Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, and West Philadelphia north of Market Street were graded “D” and marked with red lines to indicate areas unfit for lending (this is the origin of the expression “redlining”). But some segregated white areas, including Fishtown, Kensington, and Port Richmond, also received a grade of “D.” Areas with greater numbers of immigrants received lower grades.108 World War  II brought desperately needed employment opportunities, which extended to groups such as African Americans who were normally denied them. The Sun Shipbuilding Company in Chester tripled its workforce, hiring eight hundred black workers to build warships in a segregated yard known as the “Negro Yard.” In 1943, they launched the first steel-­hulled ship constructed entirely by African Americans. But for African American workers, prosperity was short-­lived: by 1946, when war production ended, about 75 percent of Sun’s black workers were laid off.109 Camden also enjoyed a manufacturing boom during World War II, with many new jobs in metals and chemical production.110 But RCA, one of Camden’s three largest employers, reacted to labor disputes in the 1940s by moving many product lines out of Camden, to be manufactured elsewhere.111

Water Provision, Waste Disposal Practices, and Political Corruption in Layer II Philadelphia In every U.S. city, environmental quality fell far short of today’s standards in the period from 1845 to 1949. It was a time characterized by rampant industrial growth, production stimulated by two world wars, little knowledge of the consequences of the profligate use of fossil fuels and pesticides, and the careless disposal of industrial wastes. Philadelphia faced two obstacles to environmental improvement: the state lawmakers and politicians who crafted laws catering to the monetary interests of manufacturers, refiners, and other polluters; and the city’s own politically corrupt administrators, who repeatedly found ways to profit from shoddy environmental practices.112 Before the Civil War, U.S. cities that provided drinking water to their citizens typically drew it directly from water bodies, without disinfection or even filtering.113 This practice was followed even in Philadelphia, where the Water Works, built in 1801, was a national model for the provision of drinking water to

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  77

city dwellers. In 1846, a Philadelphia Water Works engineer proposed the installation of filters to eliminate larger contaminants from the water supply. The city rejected the proposal, noting that the Schuylkill water contained only 6.1 grams of solid matter per gallon while New York’s Croton Reservoir contained 10.94 grams per gallon.114 Water was particularly unsafe for residents of Kensington, an industrial Philadelphia neighborhood near the Delaware River. In the mid-­1860s, Kensington was supplied by the Kensington Water Works, which drew from a part of the Delaware River that received over 13 million gallons of raw sewage a day.115 In 1872, the Philadelphia city solicitor tried to respond to public complaints about water pollution by prosecuting the Manayunk factory owners who discharged “foul matter” into the Schuylkill River, but was repeatedly thwarted by city councilmen.116 At the time, water quality was so poor that no respectable person would drink Schuylkill water. Instead, people bought spring water from private companies.117 Until 1877, political corruption limited the capacity of the Philadelphia Water Department to improve or even maintain the water system. James McManes, a Republican boss in the existing political machine, controlled the city councils and financed his operation by appropriating the profits of the water department for many years. He was finally defeated in 1885 when the city’s public works departments were consolidated.118 But by the turn of the twentieth century, the health consequences of Philadelphia’s impure water were evident in its typhoid fever death rate, which was higher than that of any other major U.S. city.119 As industrialization progressed, water quality was increasingly degraded not just by human pathogens, but also by industrial effluent. In 1885, Philadelphia Water Department engineer Dana Barber noted that breweries, tanneries, textile plants, and chemical plants routinely dumped cowhides, ash, alum, vitriol, and acids into the river.120 Most of the practices reducing the safety, beauty, and wholesomeness of Philadelphia’s land, air, and water were perfectly legal. Yet one serious barrier to environmental improvement was the widespread graft, fraud, and appropriation of resources throughout Philadelphia’s city government, which was controlled by a Republican machine. Despite the corruption of the city government, the “city sanitary” movement of the early 1900s brought a spirit of reform to Philadelphia, which joined other U.S. cities in finally beginning to address the contaminants that fouled urban drinking water.121 To this end, the Philadelphia Water Department built large new water filtration plants on both the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in 1908, and three more were built in 1911.122 But the effectiveness of these new water treatment plants was compromised by political corruption. At the turn of the twentieth century, two technologies for water filtration were vying for use in the United States: the European “slow

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sand” filter, which cleaned water by manually sifting it through a sand filter; and the “rapid sand” filter, an American invention that could process much more water and render it cleaner using mechanical devices.123 Unfortunately, all of these plants were the inefficient “slow filtering” plants with sand filtration built by the brother of a city official, and were thus both expensive and substandard.124 The most important step toward safe drinking water was taken in 1913, when filtration plants in Philadelphia began to chlorinate drinking water in addition to filtering it.125 As a result, typhoid fever deaths dropped by 90 percent, from thirty-­five in 1900 to seven in 1915.126 But routine practices involving the dumping of sewage and industrial waste into the rivers continued. Improvement in the sanitation of drinking water was accompanied by neither improved sewage treatment nor pollution reduction, and water quality in the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers remained poor. Fishing and oystering began to decline, and yields of American Shad (lauded as “America’s Founding Fish”) declined from 16 million pounds in 1900 to 3 million pounds by 1905, and only 200,000 fish by 1921.127 By the 1930s, water pollution in the Delaware River had become so severe that it could no longer be ignored, even in the midst of a depression. A 1940 report contained the observation that more than four hundred gallons of untreated sewage and industrial wastes were discharged daily into the Delaware River between Chester, Pennsylvania, and Burlington, New Jersey.128 The ramp-­up in war manufacturing accompanying the outbreak of World War  II only exacerbated the problem. By November 1940, Philadelphia manufacturers had received about $1  billion in defense contracts from the federal government. Durable manufacturing had increased 33  percent, exports through Philadelphia’s port were up 29  percent, and payrolls were up 12 percent over 1939.129 This increase in manufacturing was accompanied by increased waste outputs from traditional industries (such as metals, food, and petroleum), while it spurred the development of new products derived from synthetic chemicals, such as pesticides, plastics, and synthetic detergents. Much of the wastewater from manufacturing was being discharged directly into the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. Although Pennsylvania had passed laws governing water pollution in 1935, state legislators had responded to pressure from industry and built in loopholes that would allow industrial effluent to continue to flow untreated into water.130 Throughout the 1940s, water pollution became so severe that large areas had no dissolved oxygen in the water. The river also contained millions of tons of toxic coal silt. Gases from the Delaware River discolored paint on buildings and ships, corroded metal parts in ship engines, sickened dockworkers, and even dissolved the paint on a Red Cross hospital ship, which needed to be repainted before going out to sea.131 These conditions represented a new type of hazard to the health of people and ecosystems from new, more toxic industrial effluents.

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  79

In addition to water quality issues, the city had long faced the problem of cleaning the streets of refuse and disposing of garbage. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, corrupt politicians such as the Vare brothers had begun accumulating power and wealth by contracting with the city, which allowed bidding for street cleaning, garbage hauling, and other municipal services.132 Public outrage over corruption in Philadelphia city government eventually crystallized into a movement for better city government resulting in the revision of the City Charter in 1919. Among other provisions, the new City Charter granted Philadelphia the authority to do its own street cleaning and paving and to collect and dispose of its own garbage.133 A new city bureau, the Street Cleaning Bureau, was added to Philadelphia’s Department of Public Works. The task of the two thousand men it employed was to collect and dispose of household trash six days a week from Philadelphia’s 450,000 private residences. Most of them received just three dollars per day, much less than the pay of manufacturing workers. The majority of these workers were immigrants from Ireland and Italy and African American men; by 1940, it was estimated that black men made up about half of Philadelphia’s Street Cleaning Bureau workforce.134 On a typical workday, sanitation workers lifted as much as seven tons of trash into horse-­driven trash carts covered with eye-­stinging coal dust (in winter) and surrounded by clouds of flies (in summer). Added to these hazards was the danger of disease and infection from frequent trips to the dump, where rats bred amid the garbage.135 Despite the new arrangement, vestiges of the old contracting system remained, as a 1941 report showed. That year, Philadelphia allowed 77 percent of its nonresidential trash to be hauled away by licensed private contractors—­ who now paid the City for the privilege of collecting its garbage.136 Open dumping was the end point of Philadelphia’s garbage disposal process. Half of the food waste collected was separated for sale to New Jersey pig farmers.137 Then, the remaining garbage was taken to a reduction plant. Reduction was similar to incineration, and involved extracting saleable grease and nutrients for fertilizer from food waste by heating it and then burning the leftover refuse. One of the disadvantages of reduction was that it was expensive; for this reason, US reduction plants were built only in the largest cities. Another disadvantage was the horrendous odors produced by reduction plants, which made life unpleasant for those unfortunate enough to live nearby.138 In 1941, Philadelphia had two operating reduction plants—­the Harrowgate Incinerator, located in Kensington, and the City Reduction Plant, located in South Philadelphia near the Delaware. These plants were indeed expensive: even after deducting revenues from the sale of grease, both plants together cost the City more than $100,000 a year to operate.139 After reduction, the unsaleable waste was incinerated; the incinerator ash and the garbage that could not be burned was dumped directly onto land.

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Dumping caused many severe environmental problems, including vermin, stench, fires from burning garbage, and explosions from the buildup of methane gas.140 Although precise records showing the location of all of Philadelphia’s dumps in the 1920s are hard to come by (and likely no longer even exist), the City did keep maps showing the location of all the facilities used in the waste disposal process by municipal workers, from the stables and model farms where the horses hauling trash wagons were kept, to the reduction works, incinerators, and ash wharves, and finally the dumps.141 Both the 1924 map and the 1929 map show twenty-­three city-­owned dumps that dot the city (see map 8). The location of the dumps appears to be, to at least some extent, dictated by efficiency: the Streets Department divided up the city into twelve districts, and the dumps are scattered in various locations along the edges of the city. This single-­minded focus on expediency in waste disposal would be transformed in the 1970s and 1980s with the passage of environmental laws governing how (and where) waste disposal could occur.

Environmental Inequality Formation in Philadelphia, 1845–­1949 The long history of Philadelphia illustrates the first stages in the process of environmental inequality formation in a Rust Belt city.142 Tracing the history up to this point reveals that the first six factors outlined at the beginning of this chapter did play an important role in the formation of environmental inequality in Philadelphia. Perhaps the most remarkable factor is the long persistence of industrial districts along the Delaware River, which were established with the location of the earliest factories and mills along water bodies. Although the advent of rail lines extended industrial activity throughout the city after 1845, much of the Philadelphia area’s waterfront is still characterized by industrial land use more than two hundred years after the first mills were built there. The industrialization of the waterfront was intensified on both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey sides of the Delaware River with the development of industrial “satellite cities” such as Camden, New Jersey, and Chester, Pennsylvania. Also evident from 1820 to 1949 is the way in which social class inequalities shaped the spatial organization of Philadelphia and its suburban counties. The wealthy used their economic power to create Fairmount Park, which functioned as a buffer zone against the encroachment of noxious industry on the drinking water of the Schuylkill River and on their vacation homes. The creation of Fairmount Park repelled industrial development from the banks of the Schuylkill River west of Center City after 1850. This contained industry

MAP 8   Philadelphia City dumps, c. 1929. Source: Bureau of Street Cleaning, Streets Department, “Annual Report, 1929,” Streets Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives.

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and industrial activity on the east side of the city, near the Delaware River, contributing to the economic segregation of the city. Although some poorer areas were established in the western part of the city (particularly in Southwest Philadelphia), wealthy neighborhoods such as Rittenhouse Square and wealthy suburbs along the “Main Line” extended along rail lines west of the city while working-­class whites occupied industrial areas on the eastern border of the city. Another important factor was the industrial booms that brought waves of people to Philadelphia. The first to arrive were immigrants from England, Germany, and Ireland who staffed the early textile mills, some as highly skilled “mechanics,” others as unskilled factory hands from England’s industrial districts or rural Ireland. After the Civil War, the burgeoning industrial economy brought other immigrants from Poland, Italy, and Russia. Skilled Polish men staffed the factories of Port Richmond, and populated neighborhoods of small rowhomes near noxious industries such as dyes, iron and steel, and chemicals. Although the work was hard, dirty, and dangerous, white immigrants were preferred over African Americans for industrial employment. Few African Americans were hired in manufacturing, but when hired they occupied the lowest-­paying, dirtiest, and most hazardous jobs, such as work in stone and glass industries. Before the Civil War, only 1 percent of Philadelphia’s African Americans were slaves: 99 percent were free, and in competition with native-­born and immigrant whites for jobs. At that time, African Americans were concentrated in only a few slum districts in South Philadelphia and near the center of the city. They were surrounded by factories but found it hard to gain employment. When they were employed in noxious industries, African Americans’ journey to work was longer than that of immigrants from Europe because noxious industries tended to locate away from the center of the city, and it was immigrant groups rather than African Americans who tended to live in these areas close to the most polluting industrial plants in Philadelphia. But throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these white, non-­English-­speaking immigrants were considered low-­status groups of people who were not really “white”; they were more segregated and had fewer choices with regard to housing (and employment) than native-­born whites. Thus, although both groups suffered from unhealthy working conditions, a greater number of European immigrants suffered at work, and it was they and their families who suffered most from proximity to the noxious factories that emitted smoke, foul odors, and toxic liquid wastes. Although a few African Americans were mixed in to most neighborhoods in the city by 1900, working-­ class immigrants tended to enforce color lines to keep more than a few African Americans from moving into their neighborhoods in industrial districts. Thus, from 1845 to 1949, due to the racialization of labor and the complex mix of social privilege (over African Americans) and social devaluation (compared

The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia   •  83

with native-­born whites of higher social class), it was these immigrants who suffered most from environmental inequality. By 1940, European immigrants and their descendants had “achieved whiteness” while African Americans still faced the color bar. As industrialization progressed and the Great Migrations increased Philadelphia’s black population after World War II, African Americans spread out into industrialized North Philadelphia and residential West Philadelphia. Waste disposal labor was also racialized, with African Americans and low-­ status immigrant groups (such as Italians) seizing opportunities to make a living through providing city-­run sanitation services. Although incinerators and dumps were undesirable neighbors, their distribution was still dictated mostly by efficiency in the city’s organization of trash collection and disposal services, and was not yet influenced by notions of what was ecologically desirable. At this time in history, environmental consciousness was entirely absent from the legal, socially accepted practices of the Philadelphia area’s businesses and residents. These practices were responsible for the bulk of the environmental degradation that occurred in the Philadelphia area from 1820 to 1949. But a recap of water quality issues throughout Philadelphia’s history shows that the actions of politically corrupt city officials have repeatedly blocked or slowed down needed improvements in environmental quality. Although environmental degradation tended to affect all city residents, those who could not afford to escape factory smoke and noise by moving to the suburbs, or to avoid drinking polluted, unhealthy water by purchasing spring water, suffered the most. Thus, who would be affected by environmental inequality at this time in history was dictated as much by social class status as by race. Other factors (such as deindustrialization, gentrification, and changes in environmental laws) would not become important shapers of environmental inequality in Philadelphia until after 1970. But by that time, the important changes that began in the 1950s (including widespread suburbanization, an increased awareness of racial/ethnic inequalities sparked by the civil rights movement, and new ways of dealing with household garbage) had already taken place. It is these changes that will be discussed in the next chapter.

4

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969

The year 1950 marked the peak of Philadelphia’s industrial boom. For decades, Philadelphia had been an industrial powerhouse, and in 1950 it led the nation in the production of textiles, ships, locomotives, and many other commodities.1 Although many environmental justice studies have examined who lived near polluting factories and waste disposal facilities in recent decades, few have examined where these were located and who lived near them before 1970.2 This history of environmental inequality in the Philadelphia area would not be complete without an inquiry into who lived near hazardous or noxious facilities before 1970. Given the racial discrimination against African Americans that took place routinely in the 1950s, and their exclusion from unionized, relatively high-­ paying manufacturing work that runs throughout Philadelphia’s industrial history (see chapter 3), we would expect to see that the factories in the most pollution-­intensive industries were clustered in or near predominantly white areas of the city, such as the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond area. Before 1970, waste disposal activities were poorly regulated in all U.S. cities, and Philadelphia was no exception. Zoning regulations were also less strictly enforced, and decisions about where to place dumps, incinerators, and other waste disposal facilities appear to have been almost exclusively up to the City of Philadelphia (specifically, its Streets Department). In any case, they were not within the purview of the city’s manufacturers, so we cannot assume that these would be located in the same areas as the factories. This chapter focuses on proximity 84

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  85

to polluting factories and waste disposal facilities in the 1950s and 1960s, and follows the Philadelphia story forward to 1969 and the first indications of changing waste disposal practices.

The Rise of the White Ethnics and Persisting Racial Inequality in Philadelphia in the 1950s The identities of those whose parents and grandparents had come to America from Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had shifted and changed by 1950. World War II had discredited theories of foreign inferiority by associating them with the atrocities of the Nazi enemy. Instead of an immigrant identity rooted in ethnicity, whites could now claim a more uniform identity as “Euro-­Americans.”3 This identity allowed them educational and occupational opportunities (such as college admission, union apprenticeships, and housing in the suburbs) that were denied to African Americans.4 During the 1940s, 92,000 whites left Philadelphia; a substantial number took advantage of federally insured mortgages, which were only available to those who bought newly built, single-­family homes.5 There remained little room in Philadelphia to build this type of housing, and African Americans who tried to integrate racially restricted suburbs faced a great deal of resistance. The white Euro-­Americans who remained in Philadelphia’s industrial neighborhoods stayed because of strong ties to their church, their community, and their ethnic organizations. But as working-­class people, they were threatened economically by the short-­term loss of manufacturing jobs in the late 1950s and by the long-­term economic decline that was already manifest in Philadelphia. From 1951 to 1959, the Philadelphia area lost 7.42 percent of its manufacturing jobs, while the city of Philadelphia lost 18 percent. The loss of inner-­city manufacturing jobs also harmed minority residents, as it was primarily the relatively low-­paying textiles and food processing industries where minority job loss occurred. Both industries employed higher proportions of both African American and Puerto Rican women than higher-­paying manufacturing industries. In 1950, 55.9 percent of Puerto Rican women and 35.5 percent of Puerto Rican men were employed as operatives or laborers, compared with 32.3 percent of African American women, 22.7 percent of African American men, 27.9 percent of all women, and 31.9 percent of all men.6 The white residents of industrial communities were socially threatened by increasing populations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans seeking better housing, which resulted in open racial conflict in areas such as the Woodlawn neighborhood in Southwest Philadelphia in the 1960s.7 They responded by leaving urban industrial neighborhoods: between 1940 and 1960, the proportion of white residents in the Kensington and South Philadelphia neighborhoods declined.8

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Meanwhile, 90,000 African Americans moved to the city, which increased the city’s black population by 31 percent compared with a 7 percent increase in its white population.9 By 1950, African Americans made up 18 percent of Philadelphia’s population, and 13 percent of the population of greater Philadelphia (including the seven suburban counties).10 As whites left the city for the surrounding suburbs, more blacks were beginning to move to North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia.11 But fewer of these new residents were homeowners: a 1940 study found that 40  percent of whites but only 10  percent of African Americans owned their own homes.12 Philadelphia households headed by African Americans had a 1949 household income only 59 percent of that of households headed by whites. Employment discrimination was largely the reason: in the 1950s, Philadelphia newspapers routinely published want ads asking for “whites only.”13 When hired, African Americans were generally stuck in unskilled, low-­paying jobs. In 1950, Philadelphia’s Fair Employment Commission received 215 complaints of employment discrimination; 65 percent alleged racial discrimination, and 32 percent alleged discrimination by employers in manufacturing industries.14 Unions had succeeded in making construction jobs secure and well paid, but even when they had union cards, black carpenters were routinely turned away at hiring halls. But the Cold War social climate of the early 1950s blunted civil rights activism. Philadelphia activists strove to avoid being branded as communists, abandoning more radical tactics for ineffective ones such as education and persuasion.15 The 1960s ushered in a time of more forceful civil rights activism in Philadelphia. Most organized efforts of the civil rights movement in Philadelphia in the early 1960s were aimed at bringing about economic equality between African Americans and whites, which was not surprising, as African American men made up only 14.4 percent of skilled crafts workers and only 12.5 percent of Philadelphia’s 200,000 union members in 1960.16 That year, the 400 Ministers, a group of black clergy led by Baptist minister Leon Sullivan, began to protest employment discrimination with the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, which boycotted local businesses that refused to hire African Americans. In 1963, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Cecil B. Moore, began a campaign of civil disobedience targeted at Philadelphia’s city government for not enforcing its own laws against racial discrimination against black construction workers.17 In 1964, civil rights leaders launched a nonprofit organization called the Opportunities Industrialization Centers (OIC) to provide job training for the unemployed residents of Philadelphia’s predominantly black neighborhoods. Many of Philadelphia’s African American youth lived in neighborhoods with substandard schools and emerged from high school with inadequate training. But neither civil rights campaigns nor federal job training programs were able to

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  87

do enough to improve employment opportunities for Philadelphia’s African Americans, who continued to suffer from much higher unemployment rates than whites throughout the 1960s.18

The Location of Philadelphia’s Pollution-­ Intensive Industries in 1950 Although environmental laws were weak and factory emissions were neither reported nor monitored in the 1950s, those who lived in industrial districts were exposed to noise, smoke, bad odors, and the risk of accidents. Lacking the information we have about the present (such as the Toxic Release Inventory), it takes more work to discover where polluting factories were located in 1950, and who lived near these factories. But combining data from manufacturing directories for 1949 and 1950 for New Jersey and Pennsylvania manufacturers with 1950 census data enables us to find the location of factories, determine whether they were spatially clustered, learn to what extent they were located in the city versus the suburban counties surrounding Philadelphia, and discover who lived near these factories in 1950. In 1949 and 1950, New Jersey and Pennsylvania manufacturers were listed in directories that provided an address for each firm’s office and each firm’s factory, a description of the product, and the number of employees.19 Map 9 depicts the location of each Philadelphia factory employing more than ten people, which was created by geocoding each location onto a census map of Philadelphia for 1950.20 Although most factories outside Philadelphia did not have street addresses listed, the town where they were located was listed, enabling the number of factories in each industry to be assigned to each suburban community. (For more details on methods, see the appendix.) Factories in 1950 were not required to report the pollutants they emitted into the air, water, or land, and air monitors that measure the amount of air pollutants were not yet in use. Thus, we do not have any record of how much pollution came from factories in each industry. But we do know that, in general, some industries cause more pollution per unit of goods produced than others.21 The six industries that stand out as the most pollution-­intensive are chemicals, fabricated metals, paper products, petroleum refining, plastics and rubber, and primary metals. The distribution of factories in these industries is shown in map 10. Once these pollution-­intensive factories were mapped, a test for statistically significant spatial clustering was run. This test (the Getis-­Ord Hotspot Analysis) indicated that factories in pollution-­intensive industries were spatially concentrated in eastern parts of Philadelphia. Clustering is depicted in map 11; the darkest areas indicate the parts of the city where spatial clustering of factories in pollution-­intensive industries is strongest.

MAP 9   Locations of all Philadelphia factories employing more than ten, 1950. Source: Twelfth Industrial Directory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, 1950).

MAP 10   Locations of Philadelphia pollution-­intensive factories, 1950. Source: Twelfth Indus-

trial Directory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, 1950).

MAP 11   Hotspot for pollution-­intensive factories, 1950 (GiZ scores indicate number of

standard deviations above the mean for spatial clustering). Source: Twelfth Industrial Directory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, 1950).

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  91

Throughout Philadelphia’s industrial history, African Americans were excluded from unionized, relatively high-­paying manufacturing work and the neighborhoods surrounding factories (see chapter 3). This being the case, we might expect that the population inside the boundaries of the spatial cluster of pollution-­intensive factories in 1950 would have been predominantly white. And in fact, 31 of the 55 census tracts (56 percent) inside the cluster boundary were more than 88 percent white. But while the cluster area encompassed predominantly white census tracts in predominantly white neighborhoods such as Fishtown, Kensington, and part of Port Richmond, it also encompassed some racially mixed tracts, and also some predominantly black tracts in neighborhoods in Lower North Philadelphia, Center City, and South Philadelphia. Nine of the 55 census tracts (16 percent) inside the cluster area have populations that are less than 50 percent white (see map 12). Compared to the population of Philadelphia as a whole, the population inside the pollution-­intensive factory cluster had a higher proportion of African Americans, a lower proportion of college graduates, more low-­income households, and fewer high-­income households (see table 6). But as map 12 shows, in 1950 most of the people within the pollution-­ intensive factory cluster were white. Thus, it was mostly white people who were exposed to the air pollutants, noise, and other adverse conditions of the pollution-­intensive factories they lived near. Those who worked in pollution-­ intensive industries and lived near their workplaces were exposed to a double dose of any toxic pollutants generated by the manufacturing process. They certainly suffered from environmental inequality compared to more affluent Philadelphia residents who lived in cleaner areas. However, from the standpoint of fairness (in this case, the balance between the benefits that come from living in an industrial neighborhood and the

Table 6

Descriptive Statistics for Philadelphia Census Tracts, 1950

Mean percentage white Mean percentage black Mean percentage college graduate Mean percentage low-­income households (1949 income $500–­$2,499) Mean percentage high-­income households (1949 income $5,000–­$10,000)

All Philadelphia Census tracts N = 404

Census tracts within pollution-­intensive factories hotspot N = 55

86.66% 13.17 6.55 30.36

79.08% 20.53 3.59 45.44

9.68

4.14

Percentage White, 1950 PCT_WH 0.00 - 22.91 22.92 - 48.83 48.84 - 74.27 74.28 - 91.51 91.52 - 100.00

Pollution-Intensive Industry Hotspot

0 0.5 1

2 Miles

MAP 12   Philadelphia Census tracts by percentage white, 1950 (pollution-­intensive factory

cluster area outlined in white). Source: Twelfth Industrial Directory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, 1950).

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  93

risks), white residents were preferred for manufacturing work, and thus many received economic benefits from their closeness to industry. But African Americans living within the industrial cluster in 1950 suffered the worst of both worlds. They lived within the area where polluting factories were densest, suffered the risks and inconveniences that come with industry, but had much less access to industrial jobs. In a 1955 report, the City’s economist wrote that “the incidence of unemployment among Negro workers [was] at least twice as high as among whites . . . and indicates still existing discriminatory practices.”22 The unemployed black residents of industrial neighborhoods breathed the same factory effluents as their white neighbors, but without an equal chance to partake in prosperity. Interestingly, this situation shows how the location of noxious factories had changed since 1880. At that time, African Americans lived in factory-­rich areas near the center of Philadelphia; but this was not the location of the noxious industries of the day, which were generally located farther out on the boundaries of the city instead of near the center.23 By 1950, most of Philadelphia’s African Americans still lived in areas near the center of the city (in Center City, Lower North Philadelphia, North Philadelphia, South Philadelphia, and West Philadelphia), but by then noxious industry had spread from the margins closer to the center of town. Mapping the locations of all factories employing ten or more people also shows that in 1950, Philadelphia was still the “bull’s-eye” of the area’s manufacturing: 67.06  percent of all factories (and 67.64  percent of factories in pollution-­intensive industries) in the eight-­county Philadelphia area were located in Philadelphia (see map 13 and map 14). That year, the spread of industry out to the suburban counties bordering Philadelphia was still confined to the industrial “satellite cities” of Camden, New Jersey, and Chester, Pennsylvania, and a few other manufacturing centers outside the city. Whites who did not wish to live near industry and who could afford to move out of the city into racially segregated residential suburbs could do so—­an option not open to African Americans. For whites, environmental inequality was closely connected to manufacturing employment. For African Americans, the concentration of both industry and black neighborhoods in the city contributed to their proximity to polluting factories; thus, environmental racism was manifest in both their lack of housing choices and their lack of economic benefits from life in industrial neighborhoods in 1950.

Suburbanization and Demographic Change from 1950 to 1969 The demographic composition of the city and, to a lesser extent, the suburbs, would change more rapidly from 1950 to 1969 than at any time before or after. A large proportion of Philadelphia’s population, among them a

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MAP 13   Number of factories per community, 1950. Sources: New Jersey Industrial Directory (Union City, NJ: Hudson Dispatch, 1949); Twelfth Industrial Directory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, 1950).

disproportionate number of whites, would flow out of the city into the suburban counties surrounding it. By 1960, an additional 340,000 whites had left the city, decreasing the white population by 13 percent as 65,000 African American newcomers increased the black population by 41 percent. During the 1950s, the in-­migration of Puerto Ricans further changed the racial/ ethnic composition of the city. Between 1940 and 1960, Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican population swelled from fewer than 2,000 to more than 14,000.24 While housing developments such as Levittown were transforming open land into suburbs in the counties surrounding Philadelphia, rowhomes were rapidly built in the booming Roxborough and Germantown neighborhoods in Northwest Philadelphia and in Southwest and Northeast Philadelphia.25 Population in the city’s “Negro wards” in North and West Philadelphia had increased during World War II, packing more people into already overcrowded neighborhoods.26 Lower North Philadelphia also received many new African American residents, who had moved from South Philadelphia. The concentration of black Philadelphians in North and West Philadelphia would increase still more from the late 1950s to the mid-­1960s as the historic Society

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  95

MAP 14   Number of factories in the chemicals, fabricated metals, paper products, petroleum

refining, plastics and rubber, and primary metals industries per community, 1950. Sources: New Jersey Industrial Directory (Union City, NJ: Hudson Dispatch, 1949); Twelfth Industrial Directory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, 1950).

Hill neighborhood in Center City became gentrified, affluent, and white.27 The overall effect was to increase the city’s racial segregation. After 1950, environmental inequalities would extend to suburban towns farther from the city, as the examples of the adjoining towns of Falls Township and Bristol Township show. Both towns were located in Lower Bucks County along the Delaware River. Bristol Township had evolved from a ferry crossing into an industrial suburb long before two of the city’s largest chemical manufacturers (Rohm & Haas and 3M) built new plants there in the early 1950s.28 At that time, Bristol’s population was 98  percent white. Between 1950 and 1960, Bristol Township’s population grew from 12,184 to 59,298.29 Falls Township grew even more rapidly after U.S. Steel built their Fairless Hills plant there in 1952: the town’s population mushroomed from 3,500 (90 percent white) in 1950 to over 28,000 by 1960.30 The huge population increase in both towns (and in Lower Bucks County, where five more large manufacturers had built plants in the early 1950s) created a need for one of the most famous suburban housing developments, the moderately priced Levittown development that spanned both Bristol and Falls

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Townships. Built in 1958, Levittown was a racially restricted community where residents were prohibited from selling their homes to African Americans.31 These developments created extensively burdened, predominantly white communities, and extended environmental inequalities outward into the suburbs. While the residents of these white industrial towns were the beneficiaries of the exodus of manufacturing jobs to the suburbs, they suffered from poor air and water quality at a time when factory pollution was poorly regulated and waste disposal practices were very different from what they are today. As of 2010, Bristol and Falls were among the thirty-­three Philadelphia area communities determined to be extensively burdened with environmental hazards (see table 17 in the appendix).

Air and Water Quality and Waste Disposal Practices in the Philadelphia Area in the 1950s While not quite as dramatically bad as in other cities such as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia’s air quality was poor by the 1940s. The combination of emissions from inefficient truck and automobile engines, the burning of coal for electric power generation and home heating, and the concentration of polluting industries in the city produced foul and dirty air that was beginning to worry the Health Department. In 1948, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health founded the Division of Environmental Health, which included an Air Pollution Control section. In 1959, when air pollution science was still in its infancy, the Air Pollution Control Section conducted Philadelphia’s first air pollution studies. Philadelphia’s air was found to contain a concentration of particulate matter—­the small particles of soot from burning materials—­ ranging from 155 micrograms per cubic meter in 1958 to 145 micrograms per cubic meter in 1959.32 This was considered good news, although it would meet today’s air quality standards for only the largest particles (PM 10).33 Air quality in the city was far from uniform, as 24 percent of all complaints about air quality and 30  percent of all observed violations occurred in the city’s heavily industrialized Frankford, Bridesburg, and Port Richmond neighborhoods.34 Air quality in the industrial Kensington neighborhood was just as bad. In 1950, a sociologist conducting a survey of neighborhood quality came to Kensington, and described it thus: “The freight trains rumbling by on southern and eastern borders contribute to the noise as do factories . . . smoke from nearby heavy industries leaves a gritty film on the visitor’s car and when the wind is favorable, factory odors pollute the air.”35 If air quality in the city was poor, water quality in the Delaware watershed had been just as bad or worse for decades due to Philadelphia’s inadequate, outmoded, and poorly maintained sewage treatment plants. Starved for funds

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  97

during the 1920s and 1930s, in 1944 the city finally won the right to charge sewer rents and began to collect the money needed to modernize existing water treatment plants and build new ones. Construction began on the Northeast, Southeast, and Southwest plants in 1947, and by 1955 all three were in operation.36 The improvement in water quality inspired the Philadelphia Water Department to claim that by 1957 “nearly all pollution from industrial sources has been eliminated.”37 But this claim was more optimistic than accurate: that year, a federal report listed ninety-­ two Philadelphia area manufacturers (seven of which were located in the city of Philadelphia) producing a variety of goods including chemicals, metals, petroleum, leather, and food. All of these were still discharging untreated industrial wastes directly into local water bodies.38 If there was little progress in the battle against water pollution, trash disposal methods had been improved during World War II when the U.S. Army developed the sanitary landfill. Public health experts and engineers recommended this method to replace open dumping, and public works officials began to advocate for a shift to it in the 1950s. The sanitary landfill improved on the open dump by covering the refuse with soil, thus eliminating problems including noxious smoke from refuse burning, and the proliferation of rats and mosquitoes at dump sites. But this method was inferior to today’s landfills, since it involved dumping on unlined ground which led to the leaching of toxic substances into groundwater. It also generated flammable methane gas from putrefying garbage.39 Philadelphia sought to improve landfilling practices by drafting a set of regulations governing private dumps and landfills, adopted by the city government in 1956. On paper at least, Philadelphia landfills were tightly regulated. All private waste disposal sites had to be licensed and were to be operated as sanitary landfills and covered with six inches of soil at the end of each day. Although landfills could receive “materials which are explosive, radioactive or toxic” (materials which would today be classified as hazardous wastes and banned from landfills handling household garbage), they were supposed to have special procedures for handling and disposing of these materials.40 In the 1950s, there were also a number of licensed private dumps used by businesses.41 City officials’ oversight of these dumps left much to be desired. In 1956, City Health Department officials complained that they lacked a list of licensed dumps—­even after requesting the list from administrators in the Licensing and Inspection Department, who were responsible for issuing the licenses. They also noted that dump locations had altered over time.42 City officials continued to be plagued by citizen complaints about smoke and odors from the open burning of trash at dumps. Violations of existing regulations were rampant at Philadelphia landfills. In 1955, the Department

98  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

of Public Health inspected fourteen dumps in South Philadelphia, nine in Southwest Philadelphia, and six in Northeast Philadelphia, racking up a total of 97 violations for dense smoke and 156 for night burning.43 But city officials did prosecute dump operators for violations, generating 199 court cases in 1957 alone.44 Although incineration was a more expensive method than dumping or landfilling, Philadelphia built four new incinerators between 1953 and 1956, and two more were added by 1965.45 Incineration was not a new method for garbage disposal: the first wave of incinerators appeared in U.S. cities during the period from 1885 to 1908, but these proved too smoky and costly. By 1909, more than half of these 180 first-­generation incinerators were no longer operating. Incinerators became more widely used in the 1920s and 1930s, especially by suburbs and smaller communities. They were favored by sanitary engineers, who touted the efficiency of the cleaner-­burning models. At a time in history before household refuse contained plastics and other materials producing toxic smoke and ash, the effluent of incinerators was not seen as particularly unhealthy or dangerous by engineers or the public (although the foul-­smelling smoke they produced made them unpopular neighbors).46 The first incinerator in Philadelphia was the City Reduction Plant in South Philadelphia, which was built in 1905 and then purchased by the City in the 1920s. The Reduction Plant rendered meat scraps and other garbage into substances that could be used to make soap and other goods. In addition to the Reduction Plant, and the Harrowgate Incinerator which had been operating since at least 1932, five new incinerators were built in 1951: the Bartram Incinerator, the East Central Incinerator, the Southeast Incinerator, the Northeast Incinerator, and the Northwest Incinerator.47 Considering all the known waste disposal sites in the 1950s (private dumps, city-­owned dumps, incinerators, and reduction works), South Philadelphia was the location of 37 percent of all the waste facilities inside the city, but only 6 percent of the noxious factories. Southwest Philadelphia held 23 percent of the waste facilities, but only 3 percent of the noxious factories. Only in Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Port Richmond (the location of 20 percent of the waste facilities and 16 percent of the noxious factories) was the distribution of waste disposal facilities and factories about even (see table 7). Although neither the locations of waste disposal facilities nor the locations of noxious industry clearly follow along racial/ethnic or social class lines, their distribution in the 1950s was far from equal. The location of polluting factories reflected their spatial clustering in the central part of the city and in the eastern part along the Delaware River. A disproportionate number of waste disposal facilities were located in two areas: South Philadelphia (with 37 percent of all waste disposal facilities in the city) and Southwest Philadelphia (with 23 percent). South Philadelphia had always been the portal for recent immigrants

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  99

Table 7

Number (%) of Waste Disposal Facilities and Factories in Pollution-­ Intensive Industries by Philadelphia Planning Analysis Area, 1950–­1959

Planning Analysis Area

Bridesburg-­Kensington-­ Richmond Center City Far Northeast Germantown–­Chestnut Hill Lower North Philadelphia Near Northeast Olney-­Oak Lane Roxborough-­Manayunk South Philadelphia Southwest Philadelphia Upper North Philadelphia West Philadelphia City of Philadelphia

Percentage Percentage of of Number (%) Number households households factories in Percentage with 1949 with 1949 (%) waste pollution-­ disposal intensive of whites income income facilities, industries, Percentage foreign-­ $500–­ $5,000 or 1950–­1959 1949–­1950 black, 1949 born, 1949 $2,499 more

7 (20%) 0 (0%) 1 (3%) 0 (0%) 1 (3%)

129 (16%) 99 (13%) 6 (1%) 32 (4%)

200 (25%) 2 (6%) 67 (8%) 0 (0%) 19 (2%) 0 (0%) 15 (2%) 13 (37%) 50 (6%) 8 (23%) 24 (3%) 2 (6%) 114 (14%) 1 (3%) 35 (4%) 35 790 (100%) (100%)

0.47%

11.62% 33.53%

18.01%

22.00 11.14 9.37

10.50 8.43 9.54

54.63 22.65 32.03

10.61 19.02 25.68

44.38

9.60

56.10

7.36

1.61 0.50 2.39 23.15 8.50 4.06

10.15 14.85 7.26 14.08 8.88 11.89

20.78 21.91 27.67 46.64 27.89 35.66

27.33 29.53 30.56 12.52 20.55 14.93

27.92 18.15

10.92 11.23

42.91 39.74

15.67 17.11

NOTE: Factories in pollution-­intensive industries include all Philadelphia-­area factories with more than

ten employees in the following industries: chemicals, fabricated metals, paper products, petroleum refining, plastics and rubber, and primary metals.

arriving in Philadelphia, and historically it held the city’s first black ghetto. Thus, it has long been home to the city’s low-­status residents.

The Philadelphia Area in the 1960s: Changes and Continuities In the 1960s, federal urban renewal programs began to transform Philadelphia while suburbanization transformed the counties surrounding the city. Philadelphia civil rights movement activists began to agitate for the removal of racial barriers for skilled and educated African Americans, resulting in the expansion of the black middle class.48 But the area’s industrial neighborhoods and the dominant methods of waste disposal changed much more slowly. Only in 1969 were the beginnings of change in waste disposal practices evident.

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Changes in the Spatial Form of Philadelphia during the 1960s Throughout the city’s history, Philadelphia’s urban built environment had been constructed, modified, and filled in in a way that was largely uncontrolled and unplanned. The city’s first zoning code was enacted in 1933, but it amounted to nothing more than a land use map of existing conditions rather than a comprehensive plan. Professional city planning did not take place in Philadelphia until 1962.49 Due to the lack of planning, there was little relief from industrial noise, dust, or smoke in Philadelphia’s factory neighborhoods. The streets were narrow and lined with factories interspersed with rowhomes, with little open space. Land uses that would be considered appallingly unsafe today (such as rail lines transporting hazardous materials on densely populated, narrow residential streets) were commonplace. Since 1962, Philadelphia has had hierarchical zoning, which means that upper-­level land uses (such as residential) are protected from hazardous or incompatible land uses, while lower-­level land uses are not.50 This means that in Philadelphia, factories cannot be built in a neighborhood zoned “residential” but housing can be built in areas zoned for “industrial” use, even near the most hazardous industry. Before 1970, this was not viewed with the alarm that it would cause today, as environmental awareness was generally low. As late as the 1950s, few knew of the health-­damaging potential of industrial pollutants, and most city dwellers viewed industry as a valuable source of employment and had few reservations about even the most intensive industrial land use.51 Mike Saier, a lifelong resident of Port Richmond, a heavily industrialized neighborhood which was discussed in the introduction, described neighborhood conditions in the 1950s and 1960s: “First of all, we had a factory directly across the street, which was a metal galvanizing place. Which used to let off terrible smells day and night. And we had a diesel train go by the front of the house. Used to deliver lumber from the yards and chemicals to all the chemical plants around here . . . when the factories used to let out the emissions it was basically horrible. Because you had all kind of different chemical smells. Some of them were dangerous, but being a kid you didn’t know at the time.” Mike described one incident that occurred in the 1960s: “We had a major leak down at the river, one of the chemical plants, chemical storage facilities. And the whole area was covered in ammonia gas. And I didn’t know what it was, I thought it was just fog. And I went to go to school, and my dad grabbed me and pulled me back in the house, he said, ‘Stay inside.’ And it actually took about four hours for it to dissipate.” How did Port Richmond residents feel about the danger and unpleasantness of being in such close proximity to hazardous industry? Mike Saier put

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  101

the views of industrial neighborhood residents in context when he spoke of what appears to be the complacency of people in industrial neighborhoods: How did people really feel about the pollution back when you were a kid? Were people really worried about the smoke and the odors? Or did they not really care? MIKE SAIER:  Well, they were concerned about it, but they didn’t fully understand the consequences of what they were breathing in at the time. Some of the old-­timers knew, they didn’t know exactly the new terms for it, like what types of cancers and all . . . if you breathe something in long enough, you just get basically used to it, I mean, like a coal miner. They know they’re gonna die of black lung disease but every day they go down in the mine. It was just something you had to do, you had nowhere to go.52 INTERVIEWER: 

Many of Philadelphia’s industrial neighborhoods bordered the waterfront, which, by the 1950s, had become outmoded and dilapidated. The city had lacked money to modernize since the 1920s, due to the Great Depression, followed by World War II.53 Technological changes, such as the shift from small-­scale cargo handling on small piers to containerization (which required cranes to load and unload cargo ships), had made Camden’s and Philadelphia’s piers outmoded; chronic underfunding by both cities was accompanied by conflict between pier owners that led steamship lines to abandon the Philadelphia area for the Port of Baltimore and the Port of New York. As a result, both Camden and Philadelphia were left with large continuous tracts of abandoned industrial land on their waterfronts. The political influence of the Pennsylvania Railroad (with heavy investments in the Port of New York) kept the Delaware River Port Authority from acquiring the power to redevelop waterfront areas.54 This political wrangling is a major reason that neglect of the Delaware River waterfront has persisted into the twenty-­first century. If Philadelphia’s waterfront was inadequate and dilapidated in 1950, the same could be said of its housing stock. That year, about half of the city’s housing had been built in the nineteenth century. Over 70,000 dwellings lacked indoor plumbing or were in some other way dilapidated.55 The Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority recommended that 26 percent of the city’s housing stock be demolished in the worst areas in North Philadelphia and Center City. By 1962, the city had demolished more than nine thousand housing units in North Philadelphia, but had replaced only a fraction of them.56 A new residential area in the Eastwick neighborhood in Southwest Philadelphia was to be the destination for African Americans displaced from redeveloped areas. The Eastwick area was one of the few racially integrated parts of

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Philadelphia, but had remained sparsely developed because it lay in a swampy area of the city prone to flooding, where both legal and illegal garbage dumping had occurred for many decades.57 Despite the protests of Eastwick residents in 1957 and 1958, the city condemned and demolished blocks of homes, displacing about 12,800 people and then leaving the land vacant.58 But after 1957, the city focused its redevelopment efforts on Center City, ignoring other neighborhoods. The disinvestment following demolition is one of the causes for the severe deterioration of housing in North Philadelphia and other Philadelphia neighborhoods.59 The city’s first redevelopment project focused on Society Hill, one of the oldest parts of Philadelphia located near the Delaware River. An affluent part of the city in the eighteenth century, it had become dilapidated since. It bordered the Seventh Ward area, Philadelphia’s oldest black ghetto, which by 1950 was a run-­down “skid row” area with a racially diverse population. Using federal monies, the city acquired and cleared thirty-­one acres of land by condemnation. In the early 1960s, the thirty-­one-­story high-­rise luxury Society Hill Towers apartments were then built on the site, changing the composition of the neighborhood to white and affluent.60 A different type of development occurred in the 1960s in the Far Northeast part of Philadelphia. The area was sparsely populated until the 1950s, when the Nabisco food-­processing plant joined other large plants that had relocated from Bridesburg and North Philadelphia to Far Northeast. Rowhomes and duplexes were soon built close to these workplaces. Most residents were white ethnics who resisted the extension of subway lines into their neighborhood.61 Outside the city, there was much more room to build new housing. This was one of the reasons for the attractiveness of the suburbs, which was evident as early as 1950. Between 1940 and 1950, the total population of Philadelphia increased 7 percent, while the population in the entire Philadelphia metropolitan area increased 14.26 percent (see table 8). The ten years between 1950 and 1960 were the first decade without population growth in the city. In contrast to the city, the suburbs on both the New Jersey and Pennsylvania sides of the Delaware River grew rapidly.62 Many of greater Philadelphia’s suburban communities were “defended spaces,” bolstering their borders against the urban malaise of the city. Economically segregated, most of the suburban communities were middle-­class, and many (but by no means all) were almost exclusively white in racial/ethnic makeup. Since the 1920s, the need for regional planning was recognized but resisted by the governments of suburban towns surrounding Philadelphia, which feared that cooperation would result in annexation into the City.63 The severe political fragmentation of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, characterized by each town’s separate metropolitan government, prevented any

1970

1960

1950

1940

1930

1920

1910

1900

1860

907,413 (100.00) 1,892,128 (100.00) 2,268,209 (100.00) 2,715,262 (100.00) 3,137,040 (100.00) 3,199,637 (100.00) 3,671,048 (100.00) 4,342,897 (100.00) 4,817,914 (100.00)

Total

63,578 (7.01) 71,190 (3.76) 76,530 (3.37) 82,476 (3.04) 96,727 (3.08) 107,715 (3.37) 144,620 (3.94) 308,567 (7.11) 415,056 (8.61)

Bucks County, PA

49,730 (5.48) 58,241 (3.08) 66,565 (2.93) 81,770 (3.01) 93,541 (2.98) 97,013 (3.03) 135,910 (3.70) 224,499 (5.17) 323,132 (6.71)

Burlington County, NJ

34,457 (3.80) 107,643 (5.69) 142,029 (6.26) 190,508 (7.02) 252,312 (8.04) 255,727 (7.99) 300,743 (8.19) 392,035 (9.03) 456,291 (9.47)

Camden County, NJ

74,578 (8.22) 95,695 (5.06) 109,213 (4.81) 116,120 (4.28) 126,629 (4.04) 135,626 (4.24) 159,141 (4.34) 210,608 (4.85) 278,311 (5.78)

Chester County, PA

Philadelphia Area Counties’ Share of Population, in Number and (%), 1860–­2010

Table 8

30,597 (3.37) 94,762 (5.01) 117,906 (5.20) 173,084 (6.37) 280,264 (8.93) 310,756 (9.71) 414,234 (11.28) 553,154 (12.74) 600,035 (12.45)

Delaware County, PA

18,444 (2.03) 31,905 (1.69) 37,368 (1.65) 48,224 (1.78) 70,802 (2.26) 72,219 (2.26) 91,727 (2.50) 134,840 (3.10) 172,681 (3.58)

Gloucester County, NJ

70,500 (7.77) 138,995 (7.35) 169,590 (7.48) 199,310 (7.34) 265,804 (8.47) 289,247 (9.04) 353,068 (9.62) 516,682 (11.90) 623,799 (12.95)

Montgomery County, PA

565,529 (62.32) 1,293,697 (68.37) 1,549,008 (68.29) 1,823,770 (67.17) 1,950,961 (62.19) 1,931,334 (60.36) 2,071,605 (56.43) 2,002,512 (46.11) 1,948,609 (40.45) (continued)

Philadelphia City and County, PA

5,036,646 (100.00) 5,259,673 (100.00)

2000

2010

1990

4,716,818 (100.00) 4,856,881 (100.00)

1980

Total

597,635 (11.87) 625,249 (11.89)

479,211 (10.16) 541,174 (11.14)

Bucks County, PA

423,394 (8.41) 448,734 (8.53)

362,542 (7.69) 395,066 (8.13)

Burlington County, NJ

508,932 (10.10) 513,657 (9.77)

471,650 (10.00) 502,824 (10.35)

Camden County, NJ

433,501 (8.61) 498,886 (9.49)

316,660 (6.71) 376,396 (7.75)

Chester County, PA

550,864 (10.94) 558,979 (10.63)

555,007 (11.77) 547,651 (11.28)

Delaware County, PA

Philadelphia Area Counties’ Share of Population, in Number and (%), 1860–­2010 (continued)

Table 8

254,673 (5.06) 288,288 (5.48)

199,917 (4.24) 230,082 (4.74)

Gloucester County, NJ

750,097 (14.89) 799,874 (15.21)

643,621 (13.65) 678,111 (13.96)

Montgomery County, PA

1,517,550 (30.13) 1,526,006 (29.01)

1,688,210 (35.79) 1,585,577 (32.65)

Philadelphia City and County, PA

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  105

cooperation or coordination in planning during the initial period of rapid growth in Philadelphia’s suburbs between 1950 and 1970.64 But if the newer suburbs grew rapidly, this was not the case for most of Philadelphia’s older, industrial suburbs, which grew slowly if at all and suffered more from the loss of manufacturing jobs after 1970. One such community was Camden City, New Jersey. In 1940, Camden had been growing more slowly than other towns in Camden County but was still a viable place. Until the 1950s, Camden had no Hispanic residents except the few Puerto Ricans who came to Camden in the 1940s to work at Campbell Soup.65 Although this is not visible in the census data (since the census did not ask respondents whether they were “of Spanish origin” until 1980), between 1950 and 1970 the Hispanic population in Camden grew. Camden’s slide from thriving manufacturing town to a center of poverty began in the 1960s. Specifically, its decline began in 1967, as misguided urban renewal plans cleared nearly a hundred acres of blighted buildings, displacing nearly a thousand families. That year, the first of many large manufacturing businesses began to shut down their operations in Camden. The departure of the Esterbrook Pen Company, RCA, and the New York Shipbuilding Company closed the three plants responsible for 70  percent of employment in Camden. In 1960, there were 58,883 jobs in Camden, 67.43 percent of them in manufacturing; but by 1970 there were 41,588 jobs in Camden, only 47.90 percent in manufacturing.66 Camden lost more than half its manufacturing jobs between 1950 and 1970, resulting in a decline in the tax rolls and the onset of fiscal desperation.67

Waste Disposal in the 1960s In the 1960s, two of the city’s incinerators, the Northwest Incinerator (located in Roxborough-­Manayunk) and the East Central Incinerator (located in Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond) generated many complaints from people living nearby. In March 1966, the Department of Public Health received a letter from the Dearnley Park Civic and Athletic Association complaining about the Northwest Incinerator, which read: “In 1956, the Dearnley Park Civic and Athletic Association agreed not to continue their objection to the installation of the Northwest Incinerator . . . in the ten years that have elapsed since then, there has [sic] been frequent palls of thick black smoke which discolors the paint on our homes, pits our aluminum doors and blackens the laundry. What effect it has on our health remains to be seen.”68 In May and June 1966, the Air Pollution Control Section of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health logged four complaints about the Northeast Incinerator, one about the Harrowgate Incinerator, and one about the Reduction Works.69 Similar complaints may or may not have factored in the closing

106  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

of the Reduction Works by 1969, but despite these complaints the Northwest and Northeast Incinerators would continue operating until the late 1980s. Aside from incinerators, landfilling remained the predominant method of disposing of Philadelphia’s garbage. By 1969, Philadelphia’s twenty-­two city-­ owned dumps had been consolidated into three landfills: the sixty-­three-­acre Penrose Landfill, located in Southwest Philadelphia; the forty-­four-­acre Swanson Street landfill, located in South Philadelphia; and the fifty-­one-­acre House of Correction landfill, located in Far Northeast Philadelphia on the Delaware River waterfront. In Bucks County, the forty-­acre Grows Landfill was built in Falls Township to receive Philadelphia’s municipal waste. In addition to these landfills, Philadelphia also leased landfill space in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and Burlington County and Gloucester County, New Jersey.70 These developments illustrate two trends in methods for managing Philadelphia’s household garbage that would become more pronounced in the future: fewer, larger landfills; and the exporting of trash from the city to surrounding counties.

Environmental Inequality Formation in Philadelphia, 1950–­1969 In 1950, the vast majority (67.64 percent) of pollution-­intensive factories in the chemicals, fabricated metals, paper products, petroleum refining, plastics and rubber, and primary metals industries were located within the boundaries of Philadelphia. These factories were significantly clustered together, along the east side of the city near the Delaware River. While most residents in the census tracts within the cluster area were white, the cluster also encompassed some predominantly black and racially mixed census tracts in Lower North Philadelphia, Center City, and South Philadelphia. The distribution of the pollution-­intensive factories in 1950 was such that most of those affected by adverse environmental conditions caused by noxious industry (including air pollution, noise, and risk from the transportation of hazardous materials through neighborhoods near the factories) were white. Most residents were victims of environmental classism who faced double exposures, working in factory effluent and then coming home from work to a home wreathed in the same smoke. But there were also some African Americans who lived in the area where pollution-­intensive factories were most densely clustered. For them, the balance between the risks and benefits of life in an industrial neighborhood were more skewed toward risk, because they lacked access to industrial jobs. Compared with whites of equal income, African Americans also found it more difficult to leave industrial neighborhoods in Philadelphia for the less polluted

Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969  •  107

suburbs in the 1950s due to the resistance of white suburban residents and racially restrictive policies that existed in new housing developments such as Levittown, where only whites were permitted to buy homes. These were the manifestations of environmental racism in Philadelphia throughout the 1950s. But beginning in the early 1950s, suburbanization of people and industry extended environmental pollution out farther from the city, creating new working-­class industrial suburbs in Bucks County such as Falls Township. Once industrialized, these towns would draw landfills and other waste disposal land uses, becoming among the most environmentally burdened by 2010. Despite the decline in environmental quality, the racially restricted nature of housing kept these communities predominantly white. Many other whites would also move out of the city into the suburbs surrounding Philadelphia during this time. Areas of Philadelphia that had long been industrialized (such as Bridesburg and Port Richmond) remained industrialized and predominantly white throughout the 1960s; but a huge influx of Puerto Ricans in the 1950s and 1960s swelled the Hispanic population in Philadelphia and surrounding industrial suburbs such as Camden. African Americans became a larger proportion of Philadelphia’s residents because of the third wave of the Great Migration in the 1940s and 1950s, which brought many new black residents from the South and increased the concentration of African Americans in North and West Philadelphia. During this time, Center City and South Philadelphia became predominantly white. The new environmental laws of the 1970s were still to come, but changes in waste management were already under way in Philadelphia. In the 1950s and 1960s, new, modern sewage treatment plants were built; but Philadelphia was still relying on incineration to deal with much of its garbage. Wherever new incinerators were built, they caused complaints about unhealthy smoke and ash. Most of the complaints about problems caused by garbage dumps came from residents of South and Southwest Philadelphia. No longer an area of African American concentration by 1950, South Philadelphia had always been racially diverse, with a disproportionate number of foreign-­born residents. In contrast to Falls Township (a predominantly white suburb with an influx of large factories in the early 1950s), land in South Philadelphia had always been used for industry and waste disposal. It was the population of South Philadelphia that changed: by 1950, African Americans left the old Seventh Ward area for North and West Philadelphia, leaving behind the children and grandchildren of the white European immigrants who had lived there in the past. Southwest Philadelphia was more sparsely settled but remained racially diverse. The city replaced its twenty-­two smaller landfills with just three huge

108  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

landfills, and began to contract with suburban counties to accept the remainder of Philadelphia’s garbage. All of these developments would set the stage for the new environmental laws of the 1970s and 1980s, which would do as much to transform environmental quality in the Philadelphia area as the large-­scale loss of manufacturing plants and employment. But the poverty that job loss would generate in Philadelphia’s industrial communities would also lay the groundwork for the rise of greater environmental inequality after 1970. The difference was that in these newly impoverished communities, deteriorating environmental conditions were not balanced by increased economic security.

5

The Making of Waste Magnets Environmental Burdening after 1970 After 1970, two enormous changes transformed the environmental hazardscape of the Philadelphia area: the passage of key U.S. environmental laws from 1969 to 1987; and, at the same time, the disappearance of the manufacturing industries that had been the economic base of the Philadelphia area for over a century. These converging developments resulted in both the improvement of environmental conditions overall, and the accumulation of environmental burdens in Philadelphia’s struggling industrial communities. The loss of manufacturing jobs impoverished some predominantly white industrial communities, leading to population loss and their transformation into predominantly minority communities. At that point, these negatively racialized and environmentally stigmatized communities sought out waste-­processing projects as one of their few options for economic development. Other predominantly white industrial communities were simply less affluent than other predominantly white towns in their county, and this, combined with large tracts of land zoned for industrial use, made them appear to be the appropriate places for waste disposal facilities. In some cases, waste disposal facilities moved to the suburban industrial communities where manufacturers had relocated when they moved out of Philadelphia. 109

110  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

Although it has become commonplace for environmental researchers to think of polluting factories and waste disposal facilities as environmental hazards, these different types of environmentally regulated businesses have had very different social meanings throughout history.

The Social Meaning of Environmental Hazards In cities with well-­organized, comprehensive zoning, both manufacturing facilities and waste disposal facilities tend to be located in the same places. But although all may be viewed as risky or undesirable to live near, the social meaning of refineries, steel mills, plastics factories, chemical plants, and other such businesses was very different from that of waste disposal sites throughout the industrial age. In Europe and North America, polluting businesses were seen as the source of people’s livelihoods, and were thus desirable; but places where waste accumulated were seen as the source of disease-­causing “miasmas,” to be avoided at all cost.1 In the nineteenth century, the obvious smoke from London’s coal-­burning factories was linked in the public mind with wealth and referred to as “beloved smoke.”2 The thick, choking coal smoke of Manchester in the 1840s was seen as such a symbol of economic prosperity that it was referred to as “the golden breath of life.”3 English immigrants fleeing Manchester’s collapsing textile industries in the 1830s and 1840s made up the bulk of the textile workers in the mills of Philadelphia’s Manayunk district; whether they actually viewed mill smoke with resignation or delight, it is likely that they brought their attitudes about factory-­generated smoke with them.4 A Pittsburgh poet during the Great Depression wrote a poem called “Pittsburgh 1932,” in which she lamented the city’s lack of smoke as a symbol of the misery of unemployment.5 And although a sociologist visiting the Kensington district of Philadelphia found that the “heavy industrial noise” and “air pollution” degraded the quality of life in the neighborhood, he was surprised to find that neighborhood residents had no complaints about these conditions.6 In contrast to these positive views of polluting industry, the things that society disposed of were viewed as dirty and menacing. The anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote that dirt is “matter out of place” that attaches to certain groups of people within a hierarchical structure of social relations.7 The modern concept of “waste” became associated with capitalist notions of idleness and poverty during the nineteenth century.8 Finally, Charles Mills pointed out the association between dark skin and filth, death, and evil embedded in American thought in which people of color and waste were conceptually linked; he termed this link “black trash.” In this way of thinking, waste is devalued and belongs in devalued spaces with devalued people.9 Those who lived near waste

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  111

disposal sites were thus at risk for being devalued. The stigma attached to waste disposal sites only increased after 1970, as the public became more aware of the risks and dangers attached to hazardous chemicals and wastes.10 Both types of stigma would play a complex role in the environmental burdening of a few communities in the Philadelphia area after 1970.

Changes in Environmental Practices after 1970 Before the passage of federal laws in 1969, air and water pollution in the United States were poorly controlled by a patchwork of state laws, which varied widely from state to state. These laws were ineffective because local industrial interests wielded a great deal of influence over mayors, state legislators, and governors; thus, it was quite easy for local industry to block the enforcement of state laws.11 But in the 1960s, American activists began to embrace the cause of “the ecology,” and environmentalism broadened out from its traditional emphasis on wilderness conservation to an awareness that crimes against the environment also threatened the survival of humans. Environmental movement activists pushed relentlessly for a set of federal laws, and the government faced mounting pressure from the public to do something about air and water pollution, acid rain, species extinction, and many other severe environmental problems facing the world in the late 1960s.12 In response to these pressures, the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) was passed in 1969, which created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). With the structure created by NEPA in place, federal laws controlling air and water pollution followed swiftly: the Clean Air Act in 1970, the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974. The Resources Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA) regulated both household garbage and hazardous wastes “from cradle to grave,” transforming waste disposal decisions, technologies, and practices.13 The RCRA ended municipal control over the disposal of household garbage, and industry control over methods of hazardous chemical waste disposal, replacing both with federal oversight and standards mandating safe disposal. But although waste disposal practices were reformed, the consequences of past disposal practices lingered and had to be dealt with. By the early 1970s, it had become evident to EPA just how unsafe the old pre-­RCRA dumps were. Hazardous chemical wastes had often been buried in dumps and landfills meant for household garbage. This practice was so common that thousands of old dumps contained large quantities of liquid hazardous waste, and had to be cleaned up under another new federal environmental program, the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1981, popularly known as the Superfund. Soil and groundwater

112  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

contamination were caused by the practice of dumping household trash directly on the ground, as trash decomposed and its toxic components leached into soil, aquifers, and groundwater. More stringent requirements for landfills were needed, and in 1984, amendments to the RCRA were passed. The amendments prohibited land disposal of hazardous liquid wastes, and mandated states to consider implementing recycling programs. Instead of simply disposing of hazardous wastes in a landfill, it was now necessary to ship them to a treatment, storage, and disposal facility (TSDF) for safe disposal.14 The new, stricter standards for landfills meant substandard ones had to be closed down. In both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, officials had closed between 1,200 and 1,500 substandard landfills by the mid-­1980s.15 While it was necessary to close unsafe landfills to further dumping, their closing and cleanup greatly reduced the number of landfills available and increased the cost of dumping in the remaining landfills. At the same time, the amount of household garbage generated each year in the United States was rising exponentially, from 88 million tons in 1960 to 166 million tons by 1980.16 In 1977, New Jersey enacted the Solid Waste Management Act, and in 1980 Pennsylvania enacted its own Solid Waste Management Act, known as Act 97. Both laws gave county officials responsibility for designing a plan to deal with the county’s refuse. In 1982, Philadelphia burned about half of its trash at its two operating incinerators, the East Central and Northeast incinerators; the other half was dumped in landfills in Burlington and Gloucester Counties in New Jersey.17 But New Jersey had closed more than 100 substandard landfills, and New Jersey officials had made it known that after 1985 there would be no room in its landfills for Philadelphia’s garbage, at any price.18 Alongside the environmental transformation in the way trash was collected and disposed of, there had been a transformation in the business of waste disposal. The recessions and budget cuts of the 1970s and early 1980s put pressure on the mayors of most U.S. cities to cut labor expenses, particularly those associated with unionized city employees. As a result, most cities outsourced their trash collection to private companies. Small waste management companies were bought out by large corporations, and by 1980 the business was dominated by just a few huge corporations.19 All of these developments were the reasons for the “garbage crisis” unfolding in the 1980s in the Philadelphia area and the entire nation. The amount of trash was increasing, disposal was increasingly expensive, and there was a decreasing supply of landfills. The new landfills were more efficient and better for the environment, but their efficiency was based on their larger size: they handled all the household garbage for their entire county, and some took in waste from other cities and states as well.20 There were few places in the densely populated Philadelphia area where such huge landfills could be built.

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  113

The ecological, spatial, and economic limitations of landfills spurred a search for alternative methods of disposal. Two proposed alternatives to landfills were put forth as possible solutions to the garbage crisis: increased recycling that could divert more solid waste from landfills; and the new “waste-­to-­energy” incinerators. Incineration was not new to Philadelphia: it had long been used as a supplement to landfilling, but it had a poor reputation. By the 1980s, only two Philadelphia incinerators were still in use: the Northeast Incinerator and the Northwest Incinerator. Since the 1960s, the neighbors of the Northwest Incinerator had pressured city administrators to do something about the smoke and odors it generated, and to clean up the piles of toxic ash accumulating outside the plant.21 Finally, in 1988, Philadelphia officials responded to public pressure and shut down both incinerators.22 But proponents of the new “waste-­to-­energy” incinerators claimed that technological advances allowed them to burn garbage at higher temperatures, so that fewer toxic pollutants were emitted.23 An additional benefit was the energy generated by the garbage they burned, allowing municipalities to profit from selling electricity and to burn less fossil fuel such as coal.24 Given these purported benefits, even EPA endorsed and promoted “waste-­to-­energy” incinerators in the late 1970s as a solid waste solution.25 Many plants were built with municipal, county, and state money, making incinerators attractive investments for stock portfolios. Corporations that operated incinerators, such as Ogden Martin, Wheelabrator, and Westinghouse, stood to profit from waste-­to-­energy plants, and touted their benefits.26 But the public was not convinced by claims that the new incinerators were safe and clean; they instead saw them as sources of toxic pollution.27 Scientists, residents, and local politicians contended that the new facilities’ technical capacity to burn trash at higher temperatures did not eliminate air emissions containing unacceptable quantities of extremely toxic air pollutants such as furans and dioxin. Another thorny problem was how to dispose of incinerator ash, with its high concentrations of dioxin, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, and lead.28 In places where an incinerator was proposed, these drawbacks fueled the suspicions of residents that their community had been chosen because it was seen as a place that lacked the capacity to successfully resist unwanted and unhealthy waste disposal technologies. In 1982, Philadelphia’s mayor, William Green, had proposed the building of a huge incinerator in South Philadelphia’s Naval Yard to handle Philadelphia’s garbage. A long battle followed, in which Philadelphia activists formed coalitions with other environmental justice groups, demanded increased recycling as an alternative to the incinerator, and finally won the cooperation of city council members—­and the Navy Yard incinerator was defeated.29 Afterward,

114  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

the search for places to put Philadelphia’s gargantuan and growing mountains of garbage continued. Of necessity, all of these places would now be outside Philadelphia’s borders. In addition to the new methods for disposal of household garbage, new practices for disposing of industrial hazardous wastes were required. After 1976, the dumping of liquid hazardous wastes into landfills with household garbage was banned, generating the need for specialized hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs). These facilities, typically businesses that receive hazardous waste from many different generators for a fee, represent a much better disposal option than sites where the waste was simply dumped or buried. Some researchers have claimed that TSDFs are in fact quite safe, since they are under closer surveillance than plants generating the hazardous waste, and have logged few accidents, releases, or groundwater contamination incidents.30 But the chemical wastes these facilities handle are either corrosive, toxic, reactive, or flammable, and thus are risky by their nature. People living near a TSDF face the risk of exposure to hazardous vapors or gases during transportation or processing, fires involving the release of toxic gases and smoke, and the contamination of groundwater under the facility. Furthermore, all communities along the route used to transport hazardous wastes from where they are generated to the TSDF face the risk of evacuation, injuries, or deaths due to accidents.31 By 1980—­when the TSDFs operating in 2010 in the Philadelphia area first opened their doors—­public knowledge and concern about hazardous and toxic wastes had grown as a result of the Love Canal disaster.32 Across the United States in the 1980s, most communities chosen as the site of a new TSDF opposed the facility, often succeeding in preventing it from being built.33 Two important early 1980s studies on environmental inequities in the location of TSDFs showed that they were disproportionately sited in or near minority communities; to many, TSDFs thus became a symbol of environmental racism.34 Most longitudinal studies examining changes in the siting of TSDFs during long periods showed that the types of communities that became “host communities” for TSDFs changed over time. Facilities that were sited before the mid-­1970s tended to be placed in predominantly white communities without a high percentage of poor residents or low housing values, while those sited after 1975 tended to be placed in poorer communities with lower housing values and higher proportions of minority residents.35 Racial and social class disparities in the siting of TSDFs in Michigan followed this pattern, growing progressively worse throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These findings suggest that after 1975, the public’s changing view of hazardous waste provoked opposition to the siting of a TSDF from predominantly white communities, so that

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  115

TSDF operators sought out the path of least resistance (poor minority communities); but the sitings could also indicate the economic decline of industrial districts, as housing values declined, and minority and poor populations increased.36 The “path of least resistance” scenario observed from TSDF locations in other cities does not fit the location of TSDFs in the Philadelphia area. All of the TSDFs that were operating in the Philadelphia area in 2010 began operations between 1980 and 1995. (This does not necessarily mean that no TSDFs were operating prior to the 1980s; the new facility could have been built on the same site as an older one, or the TSDF could have been taken over by a new operator.) But even if these facilities were operating before 1970, the suburban communities that hosted them were predominantly white in 1950, and thus likely to have been so in 1970. None of the communities hosting TSDFs were high-­minority or predominantly black in 2010; only two (Falls Township in Pennsylvania and West Deptford Township in New Jersey) are among the extensively burdened communities in 2010 (see table 17 in the appendix). In contrast to the towns hosting TSDFs, about half of the towns hosting incinerators were high-­minority and disadvantaged; none of the incinerators existed in these towns prior to the late 1980s. All of the towns hosting incinerators (except Morrisville Borough, Pennsylvania) are among the extensively burdened communities in 2010 (see table 9). The search for disposal sites was fueled by the garbage crisis developing in the Philadelphia area. New Jersey’s Solid Waste Management Act of 1977 and Pennsylvania’s Solid Waste Management Act (Act 97) of 1980 transferred responsibility for waste disposal from the state level to the county level. The effect was to create competition between municipalities in each county as to which municipalities would be waste exporters, and which would host landfills or incinerators that served the entire county. In this political context, the social difference between affluent, predominantly white suburban municipalities and the financially strapped industrial suburbs close to Philadelphia mattered more in 1980 than it had before 1970. The economic inequalities that had always existed in the Philadelphia area grew in magnitude throughout the 1980s, as deindustrialization swept away skilled, unionized manufacturing jobs. Between 1970 and 1980, all of the Philadelphia area’s industrial towns and neighborhoods were transformed by the sudden and devastating disappearance of manufacturing jobs. This created a number of financially devastated communities with a surplus of industrial land, a situation that led to the transformation of some communities from manufacturing centers to places specializing in waste disposal.

*Complex spans two municipalities.

Covanta Plymouth Gloucester County RRF, Westville Wheelabrator Falls Republic Environmental Systems Safety-­Kleen (Burlington) Safety-­Kleen (Fairless Hills) Safety-­Kleen (Vincentown) Safety-­Kleen (West Chester)* Safety-­Kleen (West Chester)* Solvay-­Solexis Inc.

Camden County Resource Recovery Facility Covanta of Delaware Valley

Facility name

1992 1990 1994 1988 Unknown 1988 1996 1980 1980 Unknown

Household waste incinerator Hazardous waste facility

Hazardous waste facility Hazardous waste facility Hazardous waste facility Hazardous waste facility Hazardous waste facility Hazardous waste facility

1992

Household waste incinerator

Household waste incinerator Household waste incinerator

1991

Year opened

Household waste incinerator

Type of facility

Bridgeport Borough, PA Falls Township, PA Southampton Township, NJ West Chester Borough, PA West Goshen Township, PA West Deptford Township, NJ

Morrisville Borough, PA Hatfield Township, PA

Conshohocken Borough, PA Westville Borough, NJ

Chester City, PA

Camden City, NJ

Location

73.83 84.38 93.10 72.02 86.43 87.99

70.33 73.62

86.68 86.45

15.67

4.90%

Percentage non-­Hispanic white, 2010

Philadelphia Area Incinerators and Hazardous Waste Facilities as of 2010, by Year Opened for Operation

Table 9

$39,472 $67,494 $66,733 $49,993 $94,019 $69,046

$59,001 $66,134

$63,818 $49,854

$28,698

$27,215

Median household income, 2010

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  117

Deindustrialization in the Philadelphia Area, 1970 to 1980 Although decline and job loss had occurred in certain industries since the 1890s, Philadelphia’s manufacturing economy would not begin its large-­scale deindustrialization until the mid-­1970s. The earliest economic sector to experience decline was iron and steelmaking, when the center of the industries shifted from Philadelphia to the Midwest around 1890. Then, in the 1920s, an increasing number of textile manufacturers began to leave the cities of the Northeast for the nonunionized factories of the South. This was especially problematic for Philadelphia after World War II because by 1947 almost one-­third of the city’s manufacturing workers were producing nondurable goods, including textiles. New synthetic fabrics developed during the war could not be manufactured in Philadelphia’s outmoded plants; nor could U.S. textile manufacturers compete with foreign manufacturers.37 But the demand for gasoline was still high and steady in 1950, and the development of new synthetic drugs and pesticides during wartime kept the Philadelphia area’s chemical and oil refining industries robust.38 In addition to the loss of manufacturing to other regions, Philadelphia began to lose manufacturing jobs to the suburbs in the 1950s (see table 10).

Table 10

Number (%) of Total Manufacturing Jobs, by County, 1951–­2009 1951

Bucks, PA

21,751 (3.76) Burlington, NJ 12,437 (2.15) Camden, NJ 46,014 (7.96) Chester, PA 18,671 (3.23) Delaware, PA 51,890 (8.98) Gloucester, NJ 6,607 (1.14) Montgomery, 63,174 PA (10.93) Philadelphia, 355,566 PA (61.51) Total 578,061 (100)

1959

1970

1980

1990

2000

2006

2009

27,989 (5.21) 15,875 (2.97) 49,719 (9.29) 24,905 (4.65) 46,005 (8.60) 9,809 (1.83) 66,981 (12.52) 291,997 (54.56) 535,148 (100)

44,275 (7.81) 19,456 (3.43) 40,159 (7.09) 36,596 (6.46) 54,089 (9.55) 12,915 (2.28) 100,363 (17.71) 256,732 (45.31) 566,555 (100)

53,788 (11.79) 21,924 (4.81) 33,901 (7.43) 39,036 (8.56) 40,850 (8.96) 14,425 (3.16) 105,234 (23.07) 144,976 (31.79) 456,114 (100)

47,189 (13.29) 24,255 (6.83) 30,053 (8.46) 31,159 (8.77) 34,941 (9.84) 13,665 (3.85) 86,605 (24.38) 85,300 (24.02) 355,157 (100)

37,816 (16.20) 21,528 (9.22) 20,371 (8.73) 19,509 (8.36) 18,339 (7.86) 10,227 (4.38) 61,294 (26.26) 42,362 (18.15) 233,446 (100)

29,933 (15.03) 19,909 (10.00) 16,072 (8.07) 15,534 (7.80) 14,697 (7.38) 10,743 (5.39) 56,460 (28.35) 33,802 (16.97) 199,156 (100)

27,962 (16.54) 17,946 (10.61) 13,771 (8.14) 14,997 (8.87) 14,193 (8.39) 8,937 (5.29) 43,662 (25.82) 25,615 (15.15) 169,092 (100)

SOURCE: Bureau of the U.S. Census, County Business Patterns, 1951, 1959, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2006, 2009.

118  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

From 1951 to 1959, the Philadelphia area lost 7.42 percent of its manufacturing jobs, while the city of Philadelphia lost 18 percent. In this early phase of deindustrialization, job loss occurred in weakened, mature industries such as textiles and food processing—­two low-­paying industries that employed a disproportionate number of urban African Americans and Puerto Ricans.39 The greatest impact of the loss of manufacturing employment in the 1950s was felt by white, unionized, skilled craftworkers, who found it difficult to find secure jobs that paid as well outside of manufacturing. But when blacks working in manufacturing lost their jobs, they were more likely than whites to stay unemployed: in 1960, 10.7 percent of African American workers were unemployed, compared with only 5 percent of white workers.40 While some jobs were lost between 1951 and 1959, manufacturing employment overall grew 5.87 percent between 1959 and 1970, although it was the suburban counties that enjoyed the job growth (except Camden County, which lost 19 percent of its manufacturing jobs). Philadelphia lost 12 percent of its manufacturing jobs during this period (see table 10).41 By 1962, three major manufacturing industries—­electrical equipment, petroleum refining, and transportation equipment, which together accounted for 35,000 of Philadelphia’s jobs and 84,000 of the Philadelphia area’s jobs—­ were dependent on a very small group of companies. Throughout its history, a large proportion of Philadelphia’s manufacturing industries had been mid-­ sized or small companies; but the proliferation of larger companies without local ownership after 1920 left the manufacturing economy of the area vulnerable to national and international financial trends.42 These trends involved the withdrawal of capital investments from manufacturing industries in the United States. From the late 1940s until the early 1970s, corporations invested a growing amount of capital in foreign manufacturing and automation systems that would allow for the outsourcing of factories to other countries, while reducing the skills needed by manufacturing workers. At the same time, manufacturing production in the United States became increasingly concentrated in fewer (and larger) companies. In the early 1970s, the U.S. economy was characterized by “stagflation”—­a combination of economic stagnation with high inflation, which proved deadly to corporate profits. Corporations reacted by selling off parts of companies, merging with other corporations, or liquidating in order to finance other ventures. In the case of mature industries that were no longer growing rapidly, their strategy was to cut expenses by closing plants instead of modernizing them. This way, they could shift production from places where labor consisted of skilled, unionized people earning relatively high wages to places with low-­skilled, low-­paid people who were prevented from forming unions. The regions with the largest number of outmoded plants in mature industries (and the largest

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  119

proportions of unionized workers) were located in the “Rust Belt” regions of New England, the Mid-­Atlantic, and the Midwest.43 In the 1970s, corporate owners and managers saw Philadelphia as a manufacturing environment with high labor costs. In 1975, Philadelphia’s high-­ wage manufacturing industries included petroleum and coal (with an average annual wage of $14,000), transportation equipment ($13,100), chemicals ($12,400), and fabricated metals ($12,000); in contrast, the average annual wage in textiles industries was only $7,400 per year.44 In general, the higher the wage, the larger the proportion of employees who lived outside the city of Philadelphia: suburban dwellers made up 60 percent of transportation equipment manufacturing workers, 48  percent of electrical machinery workers, 40 percent of printing and publishing workers, 39 percent of chemical workers, and 32 percent of machinery manufacturing workers, but only 9 percent of textiles workers.45 By the 1970s, it was clear that suburban dwellers (most of whom were white) were the preferred employees for higher-­paid manufacturing work demanding a higher skill level; the declining number of textile jobs meant fewer factories and fewer jobs in manufacturing but an overall rise in the skill level needed and an overall increase in wages, salaries, and benefit costs for higher-­skilled workers. From about 1970 to the late 1990s, wages for manufacturing workers in Pennsylvania averaged 3.5 percent above the national average, and 9.6 percent above the national average in New Jersey.46 But this was no consolation when the waves of plant closings began. From 1970 to 1980, Philadelphia lost 111,756 manufacturing jobs—­44 percent of its manufacturing employment. By 1990, another 41  percent of manufacturing jobs had disappeared; by 2000 another 50 percent. From 1951 to 2009 a full 93 percent of Philadelphia’s manufacturing jobs had disappeared (see table 11). Manufacturing job loss was strikingly uneven, benefiting some areas in the Philadelphia area while devastating others. Burlington, Gloucester, and Bucks Counties, which were the least industrialized counties in the area in 1951, enjoyed an increase in both the number of manufacturing jobs and their share of all the area’s manufacturing jobs from 1951 to 2009 (see table 10). Chester and Montgomery Counties suffered a net loss in the number of manufacturing jobs, but not as much as other counties. This enabled them to gain a larger share of the area’s jobs in manufacturing, while still losing jobs. Camden and Delaware Counties both lost more than 70  percent of their manufacturing jobs between 1951 and 2009, but without greatly increasing or decreasing their share of all manufacturing jobs. Camden County had 7.96  percent of all eight counties’ manufacturing jobs in 1951, and 8.14  percent in 2009. Delaware County had 8.98 percent of the area’s manufacturing jobs in 1951, and 8.39 percent in 2009. Philadelphia suffered the worst losses, losing over 90  percent of its manufacturing jobs. It also suffered a dramatic

-­12.08 +5.87

-­17.88 -­7.42

-­43.53 -­19.49

-­15.58 +6.67 -­24.48 +11.69 +4.86

+21.47% +12.69

1970–­1980

-­41.16 -­22.13

-­11.35 -­20.18 -­14.47 -­5.27 -­17.70

-­12.27% +10.63

1980–­1990

-­50.34 -­34.27

-­32.22 -­37.39 -­47.51 -­25.16 -­29.23

-­19.86% -­11.24

1990–­2000

SOURCE: Bureau of the U.S. Census, County Business Patterns, 1951, 1959, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2006, 2009.

-­19.23 +46.94 +17.57 +31.66 +49.48

+8.05 +33.39 -­11.34 +48.46 +6.03

Camden, NJ Chester, PA Delaware, PA Gloucester, NJ Montgomery, PA Philadelphia, PA total

+58.70% +22.56

+28.26% +27.64

1959–­1970

Bucks, PA Burlington, NJ

1951–­1959

Percentage Change in Number of Manufacturing Jobs, by County, 1951–­2009

Table 11

-­20.21 -­14.69

-­21.10 -­20.38 -­19.86 +5.05 -­7.89

-­20.85% -­7.52

2000–­2006

-­24.22 -­15.10

-­14.32 -­3.46 -­3.43 -­16.81 -­22.67

-­6.58% -­9.86

2006–­2009

-­92.80 -­70.75

-­70.07 -­19.68 -­72.65 +35.27 -­30.89

+28.56% +44.30

Total change

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  121

decline in its share of the area’s manufacturing jobs. In 1951, 61.51 percent of all manufacturing jobs were located in Philadelphia; but by 2009 only 15.15 percent were in Philadelphia. By 2009, the largest pool of manufacturing jobs was found in Montgomery County (with 43,662 jobs), not in Philadelphia (with 25,615 jobs). By the 1980s, the Philadelphia area’s economy had transformed from one based on its factories to one based on services, particularly those provided by its hospitals and universities.47 This was felt by many as a wrenching economic change. With the decline of manufacturing industries, the relationship between industrial employment and proximity to industrial hazards was transformed. The reliable link between the undesirable aspects of industry and one’s livelihood no longer existed. Just at the point when the perils of industrial pollutants and wastes became known to the public, nearly all of the economic advantages connected with industry disappeared. Unlike the manufacturing economy, the new service economy offered fewer jobs that required only a high school diploma but paid a high enough wage to allow the comforts of at least a lower middle-­class lifestyle.48 The new economy exacerbated existing social class inequalities by replacing many jobs at a middle wage level with low-­paying jobs. There was growth in the number of high-­paying jobs, but these required a four-­year college degree or more. This pattern was particularly pronounced in communities in the urban core.49 As a result, unemployed city dwellers were increasingly unable to access middle-­ level wage-­paying work and had to settle for low-­wage work. The growth of socially detrimental trends that began in the late 1960s and devastated African American urban neighborhoods has been attributed to a large-­scale loss of manufacturing employment in the largest U.S. cities. This may be the case for the nation overall, and the scenario described above appears at first glance to fit Philadelphia as well as it does Chicago and Detroit.50 But throughout its industrial history, manufacturing was the economic mainstay for Philadelphia’s white workers, to a much greater extent than its black workers. When employed in manufacturing in the Philadelphia area, African Americans typically held jobs at the bottom of the pay scale: as recently as 1988, black workers in manufacturing earned just 45  percent of the wages of white workers in manufacturing. More than the shift from the manufacturing to the service economy, African Americans were harmed by the shift in the majority of jobs from racially diverse urban areas in the city to predominantly white areas in the suburbs.51 For black urban dwellers, this meant that low-­wage jobs were available in the suburbs, but these jobs required a long commute.

122  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

From Manufacturing to Waste Disposal The shift from manufacturing to service employment in the larger economy was paralleled by a similar shift from manufacturing plants to waste disposal facilities in the Philadelphia area’s industrial communities. Incinerators and hazardous waste facilities could only be built in places where land was zoned for industrial use; with the disappearance of factories, industrial communities had more land zoned for industrial use than they needed. Waste had become commodified, and was no longer spatially tied to the plant or households that produced it. After the 1970s, the waste disposal industry became dominated by a small number of huge corporations that handled every type of waste, which were looking for new markets for their services.52 Waste disposal jobs had always been more available to African Americans in Philadelphia than jobs in manufacturing. After the switch from private contractors to city-­run waste disposal services through the Streets Department of the Philadelphia city government in the 1920s, a large number of African Americans obtained unionized jobs collecting and disposing of waste. By the 1970s, these municipal workers were represented by the powerful American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The union was at the height of its power in the 1970s, when the average annual take-­home pay of a Philadelphia sanitation worker went from $9,256 to $18,414; but by the late 1980s, sanitation workers were again at the low end of the wage scale for city employees.53 As of 2010, 21  percent of employees in Waste Management and Remedial Services were African American, a figure far higher than in any manufacturing industry (see table 12). As of 2010, the average wage for these jobs was about the same as in manufacturing (see table 13). Yet there were still far fewer jobs in waste disposal than there had been in manufacturing. This fact meant that only the most financially desperate communities would welcome waste disposal facilities, just as they had once welcomed new factories. The environmental burdening of the Philadelphia area’s immigrant white working-­class communities occurred early in the city’s history, with the proliferation of segregated white neighborhoods near industrial plants. It was the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from Philadelphia and its surrounding industrial communities that led to the burdening of predominantly minority communities after 1970 by triggering a process of ethnic succession, in which one racial/ethnic group (in this case, whites) leaves an area to be replaced by others.

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  123

Table 12

Number of Employees by Industry and Racial Composition of All Employees, Philadelphia-­Camden-­Wilmington Metropolitan Statistical Area, 2010 Industry

Petroleum and coal products manufacturing Chemical manufacturing Fabricated metal product manufacturing Machinery manufacturing Plastics and rubber products manufacturing Primary metal manufacturing Transportation equipment manufacturing Waste management and remediation services

NAICS 3

Total number of employees, 2010

Percentage white

Percentage black

Percentage Hispanic

324

4,174

83.92%

9.66%

2.68%

325

66,704

79.35

7.74

3.36

332

8,959

72.33

12.75

8.25

333

3,963

83.75

4.90

6.03

326

5,992

65.20

13.23

7.84

331

4,104

79.31

13.08

3.24

336

14,488

67.66

11.85

7.72

562

2,534

62.51

20.99

14.52

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Industries at a Glance,” accessed October 2, 2012, http://​www​

.bls​.gov/​iag/.

Ethnic Succession in the Philadelphia Area’s Industrial Communities, 1970 to 1990 The concept of ethnic succession belongs to the human ecology paradigm of urban sociology, developed in the 1920s in the Chicago School of research. According to human ecologists, the social process of ethnic succession parallels the ecological process of succession in which one type of plant or animal replaces another in a niche within an ecosystem.54 But, as many sociologists have pointed out, it is theoretically invalid to liken a social process such as ethnic succession with similar processes in the natural world. In contrast to a community of ferns or foxes, ethnic succession in a city takes place within a context of urban power imbalances, political and business interests, racial and social class inequalities, and other social factors that determine which groups will end up in which parts of the metropolitan area.55 For these reasons, neither changes in the human populations that

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Table 13

Annual Average Wage by Industry, 2010

Industry

Petroleum and coal products manufacturing Chemical manufacturing Fabricated metal product manufacturing Machinery manufacturing Plastics and rubber products manufacturing Primary metal manufacturing Transportation equipment manufacturing Waste management and remediation services

NAICS 3

Average annual hourly wage, 2010 (all employees)

Average annual hourly wage, 2010 (production and nonsupervisory employees)

324

$33.62

$31.31

325

$27.64

$21.07

332

$21.27

$17.94

333

$24.37

$18.96

326

$19.72

$15.71

331

$23.52

$20.13

336

$28.93

$25.23

562

$22.72

$19.32

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Industries at a Glance,” accessed October 2, 2012, http://​www​

.bls​.gov/​iag/.

inhabit industrial areas nor the increased concentration of environmental hazards in these areas after the departure of whites can be described as “natural.” In the Philadelphia area, ethnic succession tends to take place in predominantly white neighborhoods that exhibit economic decline and that border expanding “ghetto” areas with concentrations of minority residents.56 It was the economic decline that took place in the first wave of deindustrialization between 1970 and 1980 that caused whites to abandon these industrial areas for suburbs further away from the city. Ironically, a move to the suburbs didn’t necessarily mean a move to cleaner environmental conditions: it was in the suburbs where high-­paying manufacturing jobs could still be found. For Camden City, New Jersey, deindustrialization and economic deprivation began to advance in the late 1960s. An industrial satellite of Philadelphia, in 1960 Camden had been 76.2 percent white and 23.4 percent black, with a median household income of $5,471, 96 percent that of the United States as a whole.57 By

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  125

1970, Camden had lost over half its manufacturing jobs and its tax rolls began to decline.58 Racial tensions began to grow as the city’s unemployment rate rose and its politicians failed to deliver on their promises to the poor. Rioting broke out in August 1971, when fire and vandalism turned whole blocks of the city into a burned-­out war zone. For many white residents, this was the last straw: 35,300 of Camden’s whites packed and moved between 1970 and 1980, and its white population dropped from 59.9 percent to 30.6 percent.59 Its black population increased from 27,463 in 1960 to 40,132 in 1970 and 45,008 in 1980, as impoverished African Americans moved to Camden in search of affordable housing. Median household income began a steep slide from 105 percent of the national average in 1970 to just 57 percent of the national average by 1980 (see table 14). By the early 1980s, newspaper stories about Camden covered the entire spectrum of urban problems: nearly three arson fires a day; abandoned, dilapidated housing; more than one-­third of Camden’s population on welfare; the repeated robbing and mugging of Camden’s senior citizens; a rising murder rate; and a number of out-­of-­wedlock births—­double the number of births to married women.60 The decline of Chester City, Pennsylvania, was similar to Camden’s, except that a higher proportion of Chester residents were African American in the 1950s, and Chester retained its manufacturing jobs throughout the 1960s (see table 15). Median household income for residents of Chester City was $8,511 in 1969, 113 percent of the national average. But between 1970 and 1980, Chester began to lose manufacturing jobs, losing more than 11,000 white residents and

Table 14

Population, Racial/Ethnic Composition, and Median Household Income/Family Income for Camden City, New Jersey, 1950–­2010

Year

U.S. Median household/ Percentage Median median family income Hispanic/ household/ household/ (as % of U.S. Total Percentage Percentage “Spanish family family median household/ population white black Origin” † income‡ income‡ family income) ‡

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

124,555 85.88%* 13.99%* 23.44* 117,159 76.19* * 39.23* 102,551 59.92 * 53.01* 84,910 30.62 87,492 15.20 54.24 79,904 7.49 46.26 77,344 4.90 44.32

. . . . . . . . . 19.21% 28.20 38.63 47.04

$2,872 $5,471 $7,954 $9,285 $16,439 $23,421 $27,215

$3,300 $5,700 $7,559 $16,354 $29,943 $41,994 $49,777

87.03% 95.98 105.23 56.78 54.90 55.77 54.67

*Includes Hispanics (census did not ask about Hispanic ethnicity through 1980). †Term “Spanish Origin” used in census questionnaire through 1980; term “Hispanic” used in 1990 and since. ‡Median household income available only after 1980 (prior to 1980, median family income used).

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Table 15

Population, Racial/Ethnic Composition, and Household Income/Family Income for Chester City, Pennsylvania, 1950–­2010

Year

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

U.S. Median household/ Percentage Median median family income Hispanic/ household/ household/ (as % of U.S. Total Percentage Percentage “Spanish family family median household/ population white black Origin”† income‡ income‡ family income)‡

66,039 66,658 56,331 45,794 41,756 36,854 29,972

79.00%* 66.58* 54.45* 41.66 30.88 17.78 15.67

20.94%* 33.42* 45.21* 56.80 64.95 74.63 72.16

. . . . . . . . . 2.24% 3.55 5.43 9.02

$3,104 $5,652 $8,511 $11,513 $19,960 $25,703 $28,698

$3,300 $5,700 $7,559 $16,354 $29,943 $41,994 $49,777

94.06% 99.16 112.59 70.40 66.66 61.21 57.65

*Includes Hispanics (census did not ask about Hispanic ethnicity prior to 1980). †Term “Spanish Origin” used in census questionnaire through 1980; “Hispanic” used in 1990 and since. ‡Median household income available only after 1980 (prior to 1980, median family income used).

gaining only 4,800 African American residents during that decade. By 1980, Chester had become a poor, predominantly minority community: 57 percent of Chester residents were black and only 41 percent were white; and Chester’s 1979 median household income was $11,513, an income level only 70 percent of the national average. By the early 1980s, Chester City had declined to such a degree as to have its own series of newspaper stories spotlighting problems, including homelessness and the absence of shelters; abandoned housing and widespread deterioration and blight; high unemployment; poverty and destitution “even worse than in Philadelphia”; rising crime, including rampant drug dealing and its associated violence, and twenty robberies of cab drivers in a single month; and abysmal public health and the dearth of medical services.61 But, considering the decline in quality of life in both towns, why did minority residents stay? Some may not have liked neighborhood conditions but may still have wanted to stay due to strong family ties, as some Chester residents pointed out (see the introduction). But many of those who wanted to leave faced poverty, bad credit, and the lack of affordable housing elsewhere; some may have felt a bit safer from violent crime due to good relationships with neighbors, which they would have to give up if they moved elsewhere.62 These and other factors narrowed their choices considerably. Racial/ethnic discrimination also blocked the efforts of African American and Puerto Rican residents to obtain new housing. A 2000 Philadelphia area study in which black and white “testers” answered advertisements for apartments to rent showed that discrimination was still occurring. African

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  127

American testers who sounded “black but middle-­class” on the phone had less access than white testers, but had more access to housing than African Americans speaking Black Vernacular English. African Americans were “steered” by realtors, property managers, and owners into units located in predominantly black census tracts, while whites were steered away from such units and into units that were located in predominantly white census tracts.63 Thus, a variety of factors kept people of color who had low incomes in declining industrial neighborhoods and towns; over time, they made up a higher proportion of residents. At the close of the 1970s, the transformation of both Chester City and Camden City from predominantly white industrial employment centers to very poor, jobless, stigmatized, predominantly minority places was complete. The timing of this transformation is important for understanding the environmental burdening of minority communities in the Philadelphia area. The deindustrialization and impoverishment of Camden and Chester coincided with growing middle-­class suburban populations in both Camden and Delaware Counties, and both counties’ need to build more waste disposal facilities—­facilities that would almost certainly be resisted by the towns proposed to host them. These communities were already seen as environmentally contaminated places with spoiled identities: they were already marked with environmental stigma.

Double Stigma: Environmental Stigma and Negative Racialization The concept of stigma comes from sociologist Erving Goffman, who saw stigma as a “tainting” and “discrediting” condition that spoiled identity.64 If a discrediting condition is known to others, a stigmatized individual suffers status loss, and is labeled and stereotyped by more powerful, nonstigmatized individuals.65 Since environmental conditions are a property of places, environmental stigma applies not to individuals, but to places. Places that host one or more environmental hazards associated with dread consequences (such as human carcinogens) are subject to a social phenomenon known as “technical” or environmental stigma.66 Environmental stigma adheres to places labeled as “contaminated communities” within or near the identified boundaries of an area known to contain toxic pollutants.67 Environmental stigma involves the viewing of a place as flawed, spoiled, dirty, or contaminated. Homes in environmentally stigmatized places often lose their value as observers perceive life there to be unpleasant and unsafe due to environmental contaminants.68 This occurred in the Philadelphia area in 1980 after the Gloucester Environmental Management Landfill (known as GEMS),

128  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

located in Gloucester Township, Camden County, New Jersey, was closed after it was found to contain asbestos, solvents, and heavy metals that contaminated groundwater. In 1983 GEMS was designated a Superfund site, and later remediated. But when information about the environmental contamination filtered down to the public, neighbors of the landfill lost much of the value of their homes and land, forcing homeowners to file for compensation from the State of New Jersey. Claims for compensation due to reduced property values were paid out at nine closed landfills in Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties.69 Environmental stigma can increase the concentration of environmentally hazardous land uses in industrial communities. In these areas, land already has the appropriate zoning; if the land was previously used for polluting industry or waste disposal, the perception that it is already tainted can result in the placement of more and more environmentally hazardous facilities.70 Environmental stigma brings with it serious consequences, not just for the individuals who live closest to locally unwanted land uses, but for the entire community. Abandoned industrial buildings, contaminated sites, and large waste disposal facilities or sites have all been designated “pariah land uses,” because they bring with them noxious odors, noise, traffic, and other conditions that reduce the physical quality of the landscape as well as the monetary value of land. When pariah land uses proliferate, better-­off residents sell their homes and leave, while potential investors lose interest in commercial or residential projects in the area. The result is an acceleration of environmental, economic, and social decline, a downward spiral.71 In addition to environmental stigma, after 1980 these communities also suffered from institutional neglect because they were negatively racialized. Across the nation, urban problems such as crime, bad schools, and pollution were worsening just as urban populations changed in the 1960s from predominantly white or diverse to predominantly minority. In this way, appalling urban conditions became associated with the predominant race of the city’s inhabitants in public discourse, and in the (white) public mind.72 Negatively racialized places are places where people of color are spatially designated as inferior, and the patterns of behavior and lifestyles associated with these places are seen as abnormal, aberrant, and in need of surveillance and control.73 Although heavily policed, such neighborhoods are places where residents wait longer for police response and are underserved by fire and ambulance services, medical services, school systems, and other public institutions—­reinforcing the perception that the area and residents are of little value.74 The resulting lack of amenities and safety adds to the stigma that burdens these areas, and reinforces the link with poverty, crime, economic disinvestment, and social disorder in the minds of outsiders.75 Disinvestment by corporations and municipal governments results in the physical dilapidation

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  129

that is common in negatively racialized areas; the declining built environment signals to residents, outsiders, and potential investors the low value of the area, and by implication its residents.76 Negatively racialized communities suffer from being simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. Places such as Chester City are hypervisible as places of crime, poverty, and social pathology; yet the unmet needs of community residents remain invisible.77 The effects of negative racialization can be seen in Chester’s status, from 2001 until 2013, as a “food desert,” a town without a single grocery store to serve its residents.78 Camden City also was without a grocery store for more than a year after its only grocery store closed its doors in 2013.79 But the spoiled and tainted identity of negatively racialized places is not just the result of environmental factors, it is also rooted in racist cultural beliefs that African Americans and other racial minorities are “socially polluted.” Thus the spaces they occupy are appropriate places for environmentally polluting land uses—­spaces of low social and economic value, where environmental pollution and waste “belongs.”80 Although these beliefs and perceptions are never discussed in public, they form the cultural background for land-­use decisions. As the number of businesses in deindustrialized satellite cities such as Camden and Chester declined, tax rolls plummeted and middle-­class residents were replaced by poorer people requiring more social services. As a result, the municipal governments of deindustrialized towns became more and more starved for revenue. In both towns, a combination of negative racialization with long industrial histories made them appear the perfect place to site the new waste disposal facilities that no other community wanted. By the early 1980s, there was an urgent need to find places to build waste facilities: the changed environmental regulations had triggered a “garbage crisis,” and county governments on both sides of the Delaware River were scrambling for alternatives to landfilling their municipal solid waste.

The Path of the Opposite of Resistance: Environmental Racism and Incinerator Projects in the Philadelphia Area The story of how trash incinerators came to be sited in Camden and Chester—­ two predominantly minority, poor industrial communities—­is not one of hazardous facilities imposed by the powerful on an unwilling community. Nor is it the story of racist white mayors colluding with county governments to impose hazards on their hapless constituents. Just as municipal leaders in Robbins, Illinois, sought an incinerator project, African American mayors in Camden and Chester actively sought out incinerators. In all of these cases, environmental racism is not manifest in discriminatory targeting of the community

130  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

as a waste repository by others, but in the impoverishment and institutional neglect of minority communities that creates a state of severe economic crisis. Within this context, providing waste disposal services can appear to be the only viable alternative for economic development.81 When such communities are negatively racialized, they may be perceived as the best candidates to host waste disposal facilities. Importantly, environmental racism is also manifest in the way that wastes are exported from predominantly white, affluent, and upper middle-­class communities, and imported into predominantly minority, poor communities. Apart from lacking other options, the reasons the mayors of Camden and Chester might consider polluting waste disposal facilities a vehicle for economic development were rooted in Philadelphia’s history. For a century, politicians in the area had been accustomed to using municipal public works and infrastructure such as water provision and sewage treatment, gas works, and trash collection services as a vehicle for diverting funds to political machines and consolidating power. In reaction to these tactics, suburban towns in all of the counties surrounding Philadelphia sought to separate themselves from the city’s corruption and poor services by creating and controlling their own waste disposal infrastructure.82 In doing so, these suburban mayors could also increase their own power and revenues. Both economic and political motivations may have been factors in 1969, when Camden’s director of public works, Angelo Errichetti, founded the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority (CCMUA), which would facilitate state and federal funding to build a $14  million sewage treatment plant in Camden. This plant would be a regional service provider for all the municipalities in Camden County. In 1975, a deal was struck for CCMUA to pay $2.5 million and later $11.3 million to the city of Camden to purchase the sewage treatment facility. After the CCMUA sewage plant was built in Camden, sewage sludge began to pile up around the plant, bringing sickening odors to churches, schools, and homes nearby. But despite the complaints of Camden residents, the sewage treatment plant set the precedent for the development of other large-­scale waste disposal projects. In 1982, Camden County freeholders (county commissioners) unveiled their plan to create a “waste-­to-­energy” incinerator that would burn not only sewage sludge but also the entire county’s garbage. Randy Primas, Camden’s African American mayor, was a major promoter of the incinerator, as the city was to receive $3 for every ton of trash burned. The proposed incinerator was bitterly fought by Camden’s residents, who formed an environmental justice group, Citizens against Trash to Steam (CATS). After the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) issued the facility a permit, CATS fought to overturn the permit with a city referendum. But their efforts failed in 1988 when a judge ruled that state approval trumped municipal

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  131

opposition, and the incinerator was built.83 It is still operating today, burning trash from all of Camden County’s municipalities. The incinerator project for Chester was first presented to the Philadelphia City Council in 1986 as an alternative to the large incinerator proposed for South Philadelphia’s disused Naval Yard, which was encountering serious resistance from local anti-­incinerator activists. Chester’s African American mayor, Willie Mae Leake, was the promoter. Her motivation was the revenues from the 2,000-­ton-­per-­day incinerator: $2.4 million when permits were approved and projected revenues of up to $2.35 million per year, which would go directly into the coffers of the financially strapped city.84 At first, there was little opposition from Chester residents. But Delaware County officials were really in control of Chester’s incinerator project from the beginning, brokering the purchase of waterfront land for the incinerator.85 Community opposition began to take shape as residents realized that a larger incinerator was planned that would financially benefit all of Delaware County while degrading environmental quality only in Chester. Despite the protest of many residents, Delaware County officials succeeded in building an incinerator with a capacity of more than 3,510 tons per day, to be administered by Delaware County. Under the final agreement between Delaware County and the City of Chester, Chester was to receive only $6.4 million over a three-­year period plus $2.50 million per ton of waste processed.86 Any additional revenues generated by the larger amount of trash processed would go to Delaware County. Whatever the motivations of the municipal leaders of Camden and Chester, it is clear that the siting of sewage treatment works and incinerators transformed these industrial cities into waste magnets, initiating both communities’ exploitative waste-­disposal relationships with the more affluent municipalities within their counties, and with the neighboring giant, Philadelphia.87

The Waste Magnet Trap: Repeated Struggles over New Waste Disposal Facilities Once established as waste magnets, Philadelphia’s extensively burdened communities found themselves continually engaged in fighting off new proposals for polluting land uses opposed by community residents. All too often, these battles drained off energy from other simultaneous battles to achieve equally important goals, such as improving local schools, getting needed health care facilities, and reducing crime. And all too often, the community lost the battle and was saddled with another pariah land use. It is usually very difficult for residents to win their fight to block an unwanted waste disposal facility, because the way in which incinerators, TSDFs, and other waste disposal projects are sited in the United States tends to exacerbate the inequalities between the host community and those

132  •  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

who want to place the facility in that community. Incinerators, trash transfer stations, and other locally unwanted waste disposal projects can be proposed by private developers, mayors, or county officials; but the ultimate decisions about the siting and permitting of these facilities are always made by officials from state environmental protection agencies. The developer decides the type, size, design, and location of the facility, and applies for a permit. The law assumes that the developer, the state permitting agency, and the community are all equals in power. But in practice, this is rarely, if ever, the case. Most communities selected for the siting of waste disposal facilities have average or below-­average proportions of college graduates; even when many are highly educated, they are unlikely to have the type of specialized knowledge that would allow them to effectively evaluate the risks posed by waste facility technologies such as incinerators. Community members typically find out about such projects relatively late in the process, when they have less influence over the outcome. Representatives for waste disposal technologies often use technical jargon that excludes and demeans community members.88 Waste management corporation employees are paid for eight hours’ efforts to site and build waste disposal facilities, while for most community residents, efforts to stop them from being sited and built take place after a full workday. All of these factors together greatly decrease the chances that collective action will block a waste facility proposed for an unwilling community. Typically, state environmental protection agency employees follow legal guidelines for consideration of whether the permit should be approved or denied. If the facility is found to be profitable, functional, safe, and legal, it will be permitted. Safety is defined as the prevention of risk to human health and the environment; legality is defined in terms of whether the facility meets legal guidelines and is proposed for a location zoned for waste disposal land uses, and whether the developer has followed the correct procedure in applying for the permit. The entire process is a legal adjudication of the rights of the developer on one side, and of the public on the other.89 State environmental protection agencies are tasked with protecting the environment; in practice, that often means finding environmentally responsible places to put wastes. In most states, they are prohibited by existing law from considering how many polluting land uses are already in or near the community—­instead, each new proposal is considered in a vacuum.90 This assures that all developers are treated equally under the law; but its unintended consequence is that the unfair accumulation of unwanted facilities in a few communities is enabled by these legal processes. Communities that are seen as waste magnets must struggle with these dynamics repeatedly, sometimes over facilities proposed for their community by the federal government. One such extensively burdened community was the Eastwick area of Southwest Philadelphia, which is represented by the

Environmental Burdening after 1970   •  133

Eastwick Project Area Committee, an umbrella group encompassing eleven different neighborhood groups. In 2009, Southwest Philadelphia reported a median household income of just $33,807, and was 83  percent black (see table 17 in the appendix). Southwest Philadelphia is located at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. It hosts the Philadelphia International Airport as well as two major traffic corridors: Interstate 95 and Highway 76. In the early 1980s, the need for federal redevelopment funds was one motivation for the Philadelphia city government’s decision to elevate the Eastwick area to partnership status with regard to land use planning (the other was the need to bureaucratize the process and alleviate pressures from neighborhood activists). After Eastwick became Philadelphia’s partner in land-­use decisions, developers had to come before the Eastwick Community Planning Committee for approval before they could obtain a zoning change from the City. The City generally abided by Eastwick’s decisions; thus, Eastwick enjoyed more power over land use than most Philadelphia neighborhoods. But Eastwick still faced continual struggles to fend off unwanted waste disposal projects. From 1980 to 2005, the planning committee rejected at least nine such projects, including a solid waste recycler, a sewage sludge incinerator, a toxic waste incinerator, and a nuclear waste storage facility. However, their power is local in nature and therefore limited: in 2007 the U.S. Postal Service built a large mail delivery depot near the airport, which was projected to bring many new diesel trucks (and diesel emissions) through the neighborhoods.91 As in Eastwick, the fight against new proposals for waste disposal land uses continued in Camden. From 1999 to 2001, a Camden environmental justice case of national significance was fought out in courts from the district court level to the U.S. Supreme Court. The story began in 1999 when New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman welcomed the addition of the St. Lawrence Cement Recycling Facility to Camden’s already burdened waterfront, adding tax breaks to sweeten the deal.92 Neighborhood residents were outraged by the prospect of the addition of multiple diesel trucks and the processing of 848,771 tons of slag. Emissions of nearly sixty tons of fine dust containing silica, lead, mercury, manganese, and other pollutants were expected when the facility began operating. Olga Pomar, an attorney representing the neighborhood group South Camden Citizens in Action, filed a lawsuit against the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection for violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by issuing St. Lawrence Cement a permit. The plaintiffs argued that the permit should not have been issued because it ignored the disparate impact on minority residents posed by adding another facility to the extensively burdened Waterfront South neighborhood. On April 19, 2001, a district court judge ruled for the plaintiffs, and prohibited the almost-­finished plant from operating; the company appealed to the Third District Court in Philadelphia, and the injunction was lifted. The plant began operating three days later.93 Plaintiffs continued to appeal, but

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the case was undermined by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Alexander v. Sandoval, which ruled that there is no private right to sue in order to enforce disparate impact regulations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The plant (now operated by Holcim) is still operating, and generating complaints from neighborhood residents. In a 2009 study by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, researchers found that the plant is responsible for generating 6 percent to 20 percent of the neighborhood’s dust.94 As in Camden, it was necessary for activists in Chester to keep up their efforts to block the addition of more and more waste disposal facilities after the incinerator began operating in 1992. The community group Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL, pronounced “circle”) fought a long battle to block Thermal Pure, an infectious medical waste sterilization plant next to the incinerator. With the help of Public Interest Law Center lawyer Jerome Balter, they succeeded in getting a Commonwealth Court judge to invalidate Thermal Pure’s permit; but they were ultimately defeated when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court used an obscure law known as the “King’s Bench” to overturn the lower court’s ruling and revalidate the permit.95 Chester residents had to live with Thermal Pure until it closed down in 1999.96 But CRCQL succeeded in repelling the next waste facility proposed for Chester, Soil Remediation Systems (SRS), an incinerator that would burn off petroleum and other contaminants from 960 tons of soil per day. Focusing the struggle on the Chester City Council, CRCQL persuaded them to amend the zoning code to make it more difficult to site waste facilities in Chester. In June 1994, a city law was passed that required waste disposal facilities to prove that their operations would not increase overall pollution levels in Chester. SRS could not meet the test, and lost its permit from the state because it could not get a license from the City of Chester. The SRS proposal was followed in 1997 by one for a facility similar to SRS, operated by the Cherokee Environmental Group. This time, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) denied the permit after more than two hundred residents turned out to a public hearing to protest the facility.97 While the intervention of PADEP may have discouraged other waste disposal corporations from seeking to build new plants in Chester’s waterfront industrial area, it did not stop existing plants from proposing new unhealthy practices. In 1999, Kimberly-­Clark, a paper-­products manufacturer located on the waterfront close to the incinerator in Chester, attempted to obtain a permit from PADEP to burn waste car and truck tires to fuel the factory. But in 2002, PADEP denied the permit.98 In 2004, PADEP established an enhanced participation policy expanding the public input process for Pennsylvania environmental justice communities

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facing permits for new or expanded polluting or waste disposal facilities. While the policy is sorely needed, it unfortunately defines “environmental justice communities” exclusively in terms of their demographics, as any census tract with 30 percent or more minority population or 20 percent or more people with poverty-­level incomes. This would exclude the extensively burdened but predominantly white census tracts in Port Richmond, and would include many census tracts in West Philadelphia, which hosts virtually no environmental hazards. Another problem with the policy is that, in practice, the enhanced review does not always get triggered, even for communities such as Chester with census tracts that clearly fit the demographic definition of “environmental justice community.” In 2009, the Delaware County Regional Water Control Agency (DELCORA) sewage treatment plant, located on Chester’s waterfront, applied to PADEP to amend their existing permit in order to increase sewage treatment capacity, and to allow the plant to process a million gallons of wastewater per day from Marcellus Shale hydrofracturing (“fracking”) gas drilling operations in western and northeastern Pennsylvania. A special permit was required because the wastewater from fracking operations contains many toxic chemicals and is radioactive. But despite the new policy, Chester residents were not given the opportunity to comment on the permit until after PADEP granted the permit amendments. At a public comment meeting of the Delaware County Council, PADEP officials recognized that DELCORA did not have the ability to treat this wastewater safely and effectively, and that the diesel truck traffic required to ship the water to Chester would increase traffic and pollution in its most extensively burdened neighborhoods. PADEP then had to rescind the permit, a situation that Philadelphia Public Interest Law Center lawyer Adam Cutler characterized as an “embarrassing public spectacle.”99 In 2005, the Covanta Corporation took over operations at the incinerator in Chester from the Westinghouse Corporation. Since its inception, the incinerator has burned trash from twelve Pennsylvania counties, plus trash from Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Puerto Rico. Although the amount has varied from year to year, from 25 percent to 33 percent of Philadelphia’s trash has gone to Chester every year.100 In August 2014, despite the protests of Chester residents, the Chester City Council approved the building of a 15,000-­square-­foot rail box building to house rail cars filled with up to 500,000 tons of household garbage from New York City. The trash will be shipped from New York to Wilmington, Delaware on barges, then hauled on trucks from Wilmington to Chester. The new mode of transport will replace sixty-­five open-­top trailer trucks that currently transport the trash to Chester with sealed rail cars, which should eliminate at least

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some odor; but since the rail cars are smaller than the old trucks, the new plan will mean at least five more diesel trucks per day coming to Chester. Although Covanta claims that the amount of trash from New York will not increase, some Chester residents don’t believe them.101 Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection records show that, from 2004 to 2013, there were 2,736,481 tons of New York’s trash burned in the incinerator in Chester. During that time, New York’s trash has made up from 16 to 48 percent of the trash burned in the incinerator in Chester each year.102 The experiences of Camden and Chester residents illustrate the detrimental effect on the community of becoming a waste magnet: once a community agrees to host large-­scale waste facilities, it becomes the “go-­to” place for more and more waste disposal land uses. Time and energy sorely needed for improving harmful conditions in the community (such as poor schools, high crime rates, poverty, unemployment, poor housing, and food deserts) instead must go to simply defending the community from being inundated with other people’s waste. Waste disposal sites also tend to repel other, more desirable land uses (such as retail or housing), and thereby make it more difficult to increase the tax base and the financial strength of the community. Because they bring added pollutants to parcels of land already zoned for industrial use, the addition of more waste disposal sites ensures that a cleanup is necessary to change the zoning to another land use. This makes it more difficult for the community to change the direction of land-­use development later.

Environmental Inequality Formation in the Philadelphia Area In the Philadelphia area, it was the industrial workshop areas that later became waste magnets. Racism and racial inequalities have been a thread running through the history of the area, and there is no period in which labor and employment have not been racialized, even today. But if the racialization of labor has affected the transformation of the Philadelphia area’s industrial communities from workshops to waste magnets in different ways during different times in history, the process has always been permeated with social class inequality and exploitation. The siting of waste disposal facilities in industrial neighborhoods that are still predominantly white represents a continuation of industrial land uses that were established early in Philadelphia’s history, as well as a continuation of class-­based inequality. But given African Americans’ historical exclusion from manufacturing work, it is the extensive burdening of predominantly minority communities that requires an explanation. In the Philadelphia area, the process through which this occurred was not a simple one (see figure 5). All of the communities that were extensively burdened in 2010 were either predominantly white working-­class communities or racially diverse, working-­class communities in

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Predominantly White Community Designated for Industrial Land Use (Precedent of Land Use, Industrial Zoning, Location of Industrial Employers)

Industrial Pollution

Environmental Stigma

Deindustrialization of Predominantly White Industrial Community

Decline (Increased Unemployment, Crime, Housing Vacancy, Decreased Tax Rolls)

Disinvestment by State and Federal Government

Accumulation of Environmental Hazards in Deindustrialized Predominantly White Industrial Community

White Flight, Ethnic Succession Negative Racialization Municipal Politicians’ Desire for Control over Public Works (Sewer, Trash Disposal)

County Government Need to Site Waste Disposal Facilities

Accumulation of Environmental Hazards in Waste Disposal Facilities in Deindustrialized Predominantly Minority Communities FIGURE 5   Theoretical representation of the processes through which predominantly minority and predominantly white Philadelphia area communities became extensively burdened.

1950, which suggests that today’s environmental burdening is a continuation of the industrial role of the past. The earliest inhabitants of Philadelphia’s industrial neighborhoods were European immigrants who were too “foreign” to have been considered white in the nineteenth century (see chapter 3). Lacking the educational and employment opportunities of native-­born, middle-­class whites, they were preferred over African Americans for industrial work and staffed the factories in Philadelphia’s chemical, iron and steel, machine manufacturing, and other polluting industries on the fringes of the city. The few African Americans who could get jobs in manufacturing generally worked in the lowest-­paying and least healthy positions, and had to commute further from work to their neighborhoods in more central areas of the city. Before 1900, labor in Philadelphia was highly racialized: white native-­born men worked in professional occupations, white immigrants in manufacturing jobs, and African Americans

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in service jobs. However, there was also a small wealthy and middle-­class black population, many of whom were professionals and all of whom enjoyed social class privilege. By 1950, the racial identities of European immigrants and their descendants had shifted: they had become “white ethnics,” and as social prejudice against their religious and cultural differences faded away, they began to enjoy all of the privileges conferred by their white skin. When heavy industry began its move to the suburbs early in the 1950s, they were able to follow and take advantage of government-­insured mortgages in racially restricted developments such as Levittown. At this point in history, African Americans in Philadelphia were still very far from equality in employment. After 1970, environmental laws changed waste disposal methods, triggering a garbage crisis and the hunt for new places to put household garbage and hazardous industrial wastes. Such places would be found in communities where land was already designated for industrial use. The disappearance of manufacturing plants and jobs that had been foreshadowed in the 1950s would begin in earnest in 1975, and would transform working-­class communities of production to impoverished places with very high unemployment rates. Poorer minority people came in search of better housing, which became available after whites abandoned these areas. The impoverishment of these communities was accelerated by the budget cutting and disinvestment that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. By 1980, the same places where immigrants had thrived in the new manufacturing industries a century earlier were now negatively racialized centers of poverty whose municipal leaders were desperate to find new revenue streams. Already plagued by the legacy of industrial pollution, they took on the waste management functions for the entire county that surrounded them, attracting more and more proposals for waste disposal facilities as air quality worsened. Better-­off communities had become waste exporters, while poorer (industrial) communities had become waste importers, increasing existing county-­scale inequalities between municipalities. In this chapter, race and class have been discussed as though they are two separate sources of privilege or disadvantage in order to tell the story of how such a diverse group of communities came to be extensively environmentally burdened in the Philadelphia area. But we know that these two social attributes (and others) intersect to make simple patterns of privilege and disadvantage much more complex. The role of the intersectionality of race and social class in environmental inequality formation in the Philadelphia area will be explored in chapter 6.

6

Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region In chapter 5, I pointed out that most of 2010’s high-­minority, extensively burdened communities were once predominantly white communities, and that all of them were once places where manufacturing was the major economic activity. This shows that the racial/ethnic composition and social class status of the Philadelphia area’s manufacturing communities changed after deindustrialization began to impoverish them in the 1970s. The poor, predominantly minority communities in crisis that emerged became negatively racialized. This historical sequence, which shaped the environmental inequities we see as of 2010, shows how social advantages and disadvantages affected employment and environmental burdening in differing ways throughout history. In this chapter, I will show that it was not just one social characteristic but combinations of social characteristics (intersectionalities) of the residents of these communities that influenced how environmental inequalities developed. Next, I will address the meaning of exploitation, and how communities turned into waste magnets have been exploited by others for profit. Finally, I will discuss three different waterfront redevelopment scenarios, and how they have progressed in three extensively burdened waterfront communities: the Bridesburg neighborhood in Philadelphia; Camden City, New Jersey; and Chester City, Pennsylvania.

139

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Intersectionalities in Place As discussed in chapter 2, intersectionalities are the multiple “facets” of one person’s social attributes that can combine in different ways, influencing a person’s life chances and their experience of discrimination or privilege (or both). Since people have a variety of social statuses, a person can be simultaneously African American, affluent, female, and lesbian; while this person would enjoy social class privilege, it is likely she would also suffer from racial discrimination, sexism, and homophobia. When we study places, we cannot assume homogeneity in the experiences of individuals who live there: proximity to hazard will vary with the size of the place, the number of hazards, and the condition of housing (and the social hierarchies that shape spatial arrangements within the place). However, places do tend to take on the statuses and identities of their residents, and have their own rankings in the social hierarchies of metropolitan areas; they also, to a great extent, determine the fates of their residents.1 Since most people’s wealth lies in the ownership of their home, people are extremely invested in preserving the cleanliness, safety, and beauty of their community. While people in all communities want to do this, some have much more power and resources to devote to this goal than others. The position of residents in multiple social hierarchies determines what resources are available to residents and their leaders, and thus they are important in shaping the community’s fate. When a community is almost exclusively white and most residents are affluent, it ranks high in both racial/ethnic and social class hierarchies. White privilege, combined with economic privilege, provides such communities with the power to control conditions both within and outside their borders. Although this has not been extensively studied by environmental justice researchers, privileged communities have also played instrumental if indirect roles in the burdening of other communities; they can generally succeed in keeping environmental hazards and wastes outside their borders, even if it means shipping them elsewhere. But communities can also have a more mixed status. Some communities in the Philadelphia area are predominantly white, but rank low on the social class hierarchy. This mixed social status can be a factor in being burdened with environmental hazards, or insulated from them. Communities with combined low-­status attributes are often found among the most burdened. The worst social problems tend to be concentrated in declining, predominantly minority neighborhoods; for such neighborhoods, environmental burdening is just one of many problems. Neighborhood decline in some places progressed along with the accumulation of environmental hazards, but economic decline doesn’t necessarily always follow the

Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality  •  141

accumulation of hazards. To understand and predict how intersectionality will affect a community’s chances for environmental burdening, we must consider communities in their place within the context of both today’s social hierarchy and the Philadelphia area’s industrial past. Below is a discussion of the ways in which intersecting social statuses among communities have influenced environmental inequality formation in the Philadelphia area.

White, Wealthy Communities The ability to control space, to shape and guide urban development, and to protect one’s own property interests by acquiring land uses that are viewed as desirable and keeping out land uses destructive to property values and quality of life, is disproportionately in the hands of the elite.2 Local property owners who enjoy economic, political, and cultural power are well positioned to protect and control their space. This allows them to claim the most beautiful, clean, and safe surroundings for themselves—­to turn social privilege into environmental privilege.3 It is worth noting that throughout most of the Philadelphia area’s industrial history, environmental privilege could be enjoyed by only a few: the majority of residents could not afford to live far away from the smoke and noise of manufacturing. Those who could afford to live outside the city wielded a potent combination of political, economic, and cultural power, which rested on more than just wealth. One component of their power was white privilege. Throughout most of U.S. history, white privilege has functioned as not only a shortcut to opportunity, but also a way to create and transmit wealth.4 The intersection between whiteness and wealth places Philadelphia’s wealthiest, most segregated communities at the top of the urban spatial hierarchy. This is where the elite towns located along the Main Line (and other places outside the city) can be found. In the 1850s, the intersection between whiteness and wealth allowed residents of Chestnut Hill to do more than merely distance themselves from industrial pollution.5 Through partnering with the City of Philadelphia to create and extend Fairmount Park, they halted industrial development along the Upper Schuylkill River, placed the city’s largest public park in their backyards, and preserved the closest thing to wilderness left in Philadelphia (see chapter 3). Wealthy Philadelphia residents who paid half the cost of the land purchase (the other half came from city monies) were widely admired for acting in the public interest by saving Philadelphia’s drinking water from greater industrial pollution and ensuring public access to nature that would “soften and humanize” city dwellers.6 But since Fairmount Park is fragmented (the bulk of the park lies in the northwest part of Philadelphia near Chestnut Hill) and poorly served by public transit, most who live in the city’s densest neighborhoods in

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the eastern and southern parts of the city have little access to the park.7 Thus, Fairmount Park maintains long-­established social and economic divisions across Philadelphia.8 Although today it borders the predominantly black and middle-­class Mount Airy neighborhood, Chestnut Hill remains one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Philadelphia.9 Yet like all of Philadelphia (save Center City), the Germantown–­Chestnut Hill Planning Analysis Area (which encompasses Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, and Germantown) continues to suffer from the industrial legacy of the city. In 2010, it ranked in the 80th percentile for the entire Philadelphia area, with four environmental hazards (20 hazard points). But this would put it in only the 30th percentile for environmental burdening when compared with other Planning Analysis Areas within the City of Philadelphia. By stopping further industrialization along the Schuylkill River, the creation of Fairmount Park also made the land west of the Schuylkill River (West Philadelphia) a more desirable location for upper middle-­class white professionals than it would have otherwise been. It is also unlikely that the elite Main Line towns extending west from West Philadelphia along rail lines would have been developed as close to Philadelphia as they were if industrial development along the Schuylkill River had progressed to the degree that it had along the Delaware River by 1880. Thus, the creation of Fairmount Park was a significant factor in the spatial sorting of residential areas and people in the Philadelphia area. It also shaped the fate of Manayunk, one of Philadelphia’s oldest industrial districts, located along the Schuylkill River slightly west and south of Chestnut Hill. Known as the “Manchester of Philadelphia” in the 1830s, Manayunk was the location of perhaps the oldest concentration of huge, mechanized industrial plants in Philadelphia. These factories were staffed by immigrants from England’s industrial towns, including women and children who labored alongside the men. But by 1860, the textile factories were blocked from expanding farther along the Schuylkill by the boundary of Fairmount Park. The businesses that remained in Manayunk grew increasingly outmoded and continued to decline until a large portion of the businesses on the district’s commercial street were boarded up. In the 1980s, a private investor bought more than fifty buildings and began redeveloping Manayunk into an arts-­and-­entertainment and specialty shopping district. Housing gentrification soon followed, and Manayunk’s industrial character shrank from a daily reality to a quaint historical flavor.10 Manayunk’s redevelopment trajectory was thus strikingly different from that of the deindustrialized districts on the eastern side of Philadelphia, which bordered the Delaware River. As of 2010, the Roxborough-­Manayunk Planning Analysis Area in Philadelphia contained five environmental hazards and 25 hazard points, which put it at the 30th percentile for the City of Philadelphia (and the 80th percentile for the Philadelphia area as a whole).

Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality  •  143

It is worth noting that the seven suburban communities identified as both affluent and substantially white averaged 0.14 hazards and 0.71 hazard points (this was because only one of the seven held even one environmental hazard, for a total of 5 hazard points). All affluent communities averaged 0.90 hazards and 6.64 hazard points, while all substantially white communities averaged 0.42 hazards and 2.92 hazard points. This is well below the average for the entire Philadelphia metropolitan area (which averages 1.78 hazards and 12.63 hazard points). The freedom from environmental hazards enjoyed by these communities was achieved largely through their location in outer-­ring suburban locations far from the city.

Predominantly White Industrial Communities Perhaps more than any other places in the Philadelphia area, the history of the white, lower middle-­class neighborhoods of Bridesburg and Port Richmond exemplify the intersection of two contradictory social statuses: whiteness and the privileges that come with it; and a social class higher than poor, but definitely lower than middle-­class. This contradictory status has contributed to the concentration of hazards that we saw in the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­ Richmond community in 2010 (see chapters 1 and 3). By 1850, chemicals, iron, liquor, glass, dye, and a variety of textiles were all produced in the adjacent neighborhoods of Bridesburg, Kensington, and Port Richmond. Racial tensions had simmered in the Kensington neighborhood since the race riots of 1834. Throughout the twentieth century, the modest rowhouses surrounding the factories in these neighborhoods were fiercely defended from African Americans seeking to move there. Racism only partly explained this hostility; another motivation was economic competition. The desperately poor Irish immigrants who settled in Kensington had some advantages due to their whiteness, but as unskilled laborers they had to compete with African Americans for jobs as porters and laborers. Throughout the twentieth century, many Kensington residents worked in textile factories, a relatively low-­paying industry. Employment prospects were very different for the skilled white immigrants from England, Germany, and Poland who settled in Bridesburg and Port Richmond. Most of them were union members who, for much of these neighborhoods’ history, could count on economic security. By the 1950s, the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond area held 20 percent of the city’s waste disposal facilities and 16 percent of its noxious manufacturing plants (see chapter 4). It was the white residents of these neighborhoods who held the unionized manufacturing jobs that provided a “family wage” and a decent pension. Their white privilege gave them an advantage over equally qualified African Americans, who were turned away at the gates. It also gave them greater freedom to leave their neighborhood and move out to the segregated suburbs if they wished (and if they could afford to do so). But relatively

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few of the residents of any of the Philadelphia area’s industrial communities were college-­educated. Despite white privilege, their economic prospects were limited. They were still at the mercy of their bosses, politicians, and others who affected their lives; their power was limited to defending and holding on to what they had, which was considerably less than the power to shape the city. With few alternatives that allowed them any economic security, they accepted the toxic pollution that pervaded their neighborhoods and defended their borders passionately (and sometimes violently) against the incursion of African Americans.11 These residents of polluted communities held multiple and competing interests.12 In working-­class communities, this often means that struggles over environmental hazards outside the workplace are fought inside the workplace, through union advocacy for workplace health and safety and pollution reduction. These battles have to compete with other battles over wages, hours, seniority, and relations between management and workers.13 However, this also means that the owners and managers of a polluting industrial plant and plant employees share a common interest in keeping the plant open in the face of protest over local environmental problems caused by the plant.14 These class-­related circumstances are not static but instead are always changing due to the constant search by capital for new markets, cheaper labor, and lower costs of production.15 Thus, understanding factory workers’ interests is crucial in theorizing the social processes that generated the disproportionate environmental burdening of these communities. Today, almost all of the factories and much of the economic security in the neighborhoods are gone. Bridesburg-­ Kensington-­ Richmond’s median household income in 2010 was $32,654, lower than the median household income for the city of Philadelphia in 2010 ($37,725) and the median household income for the whole Philadelphia metropolitan area ($71,563). As of 2010, an average of only 4 percent of Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond residents worked in manufacturing (compared with 8.39 percent of Philadelphia residents and 11.39 percent in the Philadelphia metropolitan area). The Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond Planning Analysis Area is classified as a lower middle-­class, substantially diverse community, but it is far from homogenous. Kensington (and its adjoining Juniata Park neighborhood, which is outside the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond area) have become predominantly Hispanic, low-­income areas. But the Bridesburg and Port Richmond neighborhoods remain among the few predominantly white neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Bridesburg is more than 90 percent non-­Hispanic white, and the eight census tracts that make up the Port Richmond neighborhood range from 70 to 90 percent white (see map 15). The Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond Planning Analysis Area is among the most environmentally burdened communities in the entire Philadelphia

Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality  •  145

MAP 15   Census tracts in the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond Planning Analysis Area,

2010 (by percentage white).

area, with 25 environmental hazards and 155 hazard points. This was well above Philadelphia’s average of 10 hazards and 59 hazard points, and the entire Philadelphia metropolitan area’s average of 1.78 hazards and 12.63 hazard points. Besides the Bridesburg and Port Richmond neighborhoods, there are three suburban communities classified as predominantly white and lower middle-­ class that were extensively burdened with environmental hazards in 2010 (see table 17 in the appendix). One of these is Falls Township, located in lower Bucks County along the Delaware River.16 In the early 1950s, with the building of the U.S. Steel Fairless Hills Plant, it was among the suburban communities to receive large plants in the wave of suburbanization of heavy industry. And in the late 1960s, it became the location of the huge GROWS landfill (see chapter 4). As of 2010, 84 percent of Falls Township residents were non-­ Hispanic white; median household income was $67,494 (slightly lower than the median for the metropolitan area of $71,563). A slightly higher proportion of Falls Township residents (11.85 percent) work in manufacturing industries, compared with the Philadelphia area average of 11.39 percent. But despite its demographics, in 2010 Falls Township was the most burdened of all Philadelphia area communities, averaging 25 hazards and 165 hazard points. The contradictory social status of these places (and their residents) shows that the intersection of white privilege combined with nonprivileged social

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class status was an important factor in shaping the fates of predominantly white communities as both thriving industrial communities and as communities extensively burdened with environmental hazards. But since this intersection was an integral part of the making of industrial communities at an earlier point in their history, it also shaped the fates of extensively burdened communities that later became substantially diverse or predominantly minority communities.

Middle-­Class and Affluent Predominantly Black Communities Despite the relatively recent formation of the larger black middle class in the 1960s, middle-­class black communities and class gradations within the black community are not new developments in the Philadelphia area. In 1896, the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois published The Philadelphia Negro, a classic study of black life in Philadelphia. Du Bois found three thousand prosperous African Americans living in the Seventh Ward in South Philadelphia, segregated together with poorer blacks; the southeast part of this ward was Philadelphia’s first black ghetto. Unlike areas regarded today as “ghettos,” the ghetto of that time showed a remarkable social class differentiation, boasting three hundred black-­owned businesses, mostly catering firms, restaurants, and barbershops. As of 1900, according to Du Bois, four social classes existed among black Philadelphians: the well-­to-­do; the decent hard workers (who earned a middle-­class income); the “worthy poor,” who, despite hard work, could scarcely survive; and the “submerged tenth,” who led lives of crime characterized by violence, drinking, and a lack of responsibility.17 Already Du Bois had noted a spatial pattern of black middle-­class settlement in the western part of the city. He wrote, “The best classes move to the west and leave the dregs behind.”18 Thus, the east-­west class divide seen in the Philadelphia area in 2010 was present even in the days of open, unapologetic racial segregation (see map 5, chapter 1). As was true across the United States, Philadelphia’s black middle class was a very small, largely urban population until after World War II. But as national-­ level studies showed, due to the decrease in residential segregation after 1970, the black middle class was increasingly able to escape declining urban neighborhoods for better suburban ones.19 However, since predominantly black middle-­class neighborhoods tend to be spatially closer to disadvantaged neighborhoods than is true for white middle-­class ones, they have been unable to truly escape the violent crime, dysfunctional schools, and social problems that plague the poorest urban neighborhoods.20 A 2009 national study showed that environmental quality was lower and more toxic substances were estimated to be in ambient air in middle-­class black and Hispanic neighbor­ hoods than in middle-­class white neighborhoods (but higher income was more strongly associated with lower air toxics levels in black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods).21

Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality  •  147

By 1990, increased spatial segregation by social class was evident among Philadelphia’s black communities.22 Elite African Americans tended to live in predominantly white areas of Philadelphia such as Chestnut Hill and Center City’s Society Hill neighborhood, and in suburbs close to the city. Middle-­ class blacks tended to live in racially mixed neighborhoods in the northwest part of the city such as Mount Airy and Germantown, the gentrified parts of West Philadelphia close to the University of Pennsylvania, and in suburban towns in the surrounding counties. All of these places are far from sites of industry; none of them is among the Philadelphia area’s thirty-­three extensively burdened communities (see table 17 in the appendix). In 2010, two predominantly black communities (Cheltenham Township in Montgomery County and Lansdowne Borough in Delaware County) were designated as middle-­class or upper middle-­class. Cheltenham Township averages 30.45  percent non-­Hispanic black, with a 2010 median household income of $81,369, which exceeds that of the entire Philadelphia Metropolitan Area ($71,563). Cheltenham averages more residents in management and professional occupations (55.13 percent) than the metro area (40.60 percent), and only 11.16  percent of its residents work in service occupations (versus 14.24 percent in the metro area). Lansdowne Borough in Delaware County (43.97  percent non-­Hispanic black) reported a median household income of $63,836, slightly lower than that of the metro area. But a higher proportion of Lansdowne residents (45 percent) were in management or professional occupations, while 14.25 percent were service workers, which was the same as the metro average. Only 6.5 percent of Cheltenham residents and 7.07 percent of Lansdowne residents worked in manufacturing industries (versus 11.39 percent of Philadelphia-­area residents overall). These communities are located far from the band of industrial communities bordering the Delaware River to the east. In 2010, Cheltenham Township had no environmental hazards and no hazard points. Lansdowne Borough had 1 environmental hazard and 5 hazard points (ranking below the 1.78 mean number of environmental hazards and 12.63 hazard points for the Philadelphia metropolitan area). This shows that middle-­class and affluent African Americans in the Philadelphia area have been able to use social class privilege to purchase homes in cleaner environments than other, poorer African Americans—­and also cleaner environments than the lower middle-­class white residents of areas such as Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond in Philadelphia.

Disadvantaged, High-­Minority Communities Among people who study social problems in poor, inner-­city communities, Philadelphia is well known for having large areas that are places of concentrated poverty, with predictably high rates of unemployment, high school

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dropout, drug addiction, and violent crime. Philadelphia also suffers from a large gap in health and longevity between African Americans and whites, which is largely due to the health disadvantages suffered by poorer African Americans living in these segregated areas of concentrated poverty.23 West Philadelphia, a predominantly black, disadvantaged community, is one area that epitomizes these problems. As of 2010, the forty-­one census tracts that made up West Philadelphia averaged 71 percent black; 29 percent were unemployed; median household income averaged $30,362 (80.48  percent of median household income for Philadelphia and 42.43  percent of median household income for the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area). Median home value averaged $136,000 (78 percent of median home value for Philadelphia and 48 percent of the median home value for the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area). But as of 2010, Philadelphia averaged 10.33 hazardous facilities or sites and a total of 59.17 hazard points, and the entire Philadelphia metropolitan area (suburbs included) averaged 1.78 hazardous facilities and 12.63 hazard points. West Philadelphia averaged 4 hazardous facilities and a total of 20 hazard points, placing it in only the 30th percentile for the city (although, like Germantown–­Chestnut Hill, it would rank in the 80th percentile for the entire Philadelphia area). West Philadelphia was spared environmental burdening due to its history as a middle-­class suburb, a place that was built to serve as a haven from the industrial city.24 From the beginning, West Philadelphia was predominantly residential and institutional with a concentration of universities and hospitals, but fewer commercial businesses than other parts of the city and almost no land zoned for industrial use. Although West Philadelphia is not among them, the list of communities extensively burdened with environmental hazards does include a disproportionate number of high-­ minority or predominantly black communities. Almost all of them fall into the disadvantaged category (see table 18 in the appendix). Two such disadvantaged, predominantly minority and environmentally burdened communities are Camden City, New Jersey (4.90 percent non-­Hispanic white, 44.32 percent black, and 47.04 percent Hispanic, with a median household income of $27,215 in 2010) and Chester City, Pennsylvania (15.67 percent non-­Hispanic white, 72.16 percent black, and 9.02 percent Hispanic, with a median household income of $28,698). Camden holds 17 environmental hazards and 100 hazard points, while Chester City holds 9 environmental hazards and 70 hazard points. Both communities are among the most burdened communities in the Philadelphia area. Clearly, the intersection of minority race and low social class status did affect a community’s risk for extensive environmental burdening—­but not in simple or predictable ways (see chapter 1 for a discussion of the risk of environmental burdening; see the appendix regarding measurement of risk, and results). Regardless of racial/ethnic composition or social class status, in the

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Philadelphia area only certain types of communities (urban communities or manufacturing towns near the Delaware River) were at risk for extensive burdening. Some of these communities were predominantly white; some were upper middle-­class. Some became factory towns after heavy manufacturing spread out into the suburbs in the 1950s. Changes in racial composition or economic status can boost the risk of environmental burdening for industrial communities (if these changes lead to their being characterized as the path of least resistance); but in the Philadelphia area, these developments in and of themselves did not draw environmental burdens to communities without a history of intense manufacturing activity. Negative racialization added to the environmental burdens of poor predominantly minority communities with such a history (such as Camden and Chester), as the precedent set by past industrial activity and the addition of the first waste-­processing facilities enabled the addition of more and more waste disposal facilities. But even the poorest minority communities (such as West Philadelphia) without such a history hosted few environmental hazards.

Commodified Waste, Distancing, and Exploitative Land Uses In the forty-­year period between 1970 and 2010, a series of changes shaped the Philadelphia area’s environmental “hazardscape” (see chapter 5). The environmental context changed with the implementation of new laws reforming environmental practices, which carried with them the necessity to deal with all types of waste differently, and to create and site new waste disposal facilities. The number of waste disposal firms rose dramatically during the 1970s but then began to decline in the 1980s as waste disposal corporations merged with others and became larger. Today, only a few large corporations dominate the waste management field. Waste has become abstracted and commodified, and moves in streams through the economy far from the place where it was generated.25 The commodification of wastes is a factor in the phenomenon of distancing, which contributes to worsening environmental conditions in extensively burdened towns such as Chester City. Thomas Princen has characterized distancing as beginning with increased distance between the places where raw materials are extracted, the places where goods are produced, and disposal sites. Distancing has resulted in both social and environmental impacts; but typically these are invisible to those who buy and use goods. The true cost of dealing with the wastes is displaced onto others, and so it is invisible to those responsible for generating the waste.26 Currently, distancing can be seen in the construction of a huge building near the incinerator in Chester to house rail cars filled with New York City’s trash (see chapter 5). It is the displacement of trash to Chester that has allowed New York Mayor DiBlasio to pledge (on

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Earth Day) that by 2030 the city will send “zero waste” to New York landfills. But it is the people of Chester—­where the trash will be burned in an incinerator—­who pay the true cost of keeping up New York’s “cleaner and greener” image.27 At the same point in history as the changes in waste-­disposal practices, a massive deindustrialization swept through the United States, with such varied and extreme consequences that they are still not fully understood. In the Philadelphia area, deindustrialization meant the disappearance of many industrial businesses, the abandonment of outmoded plants on polluted patches of land, the widespread unemployment and subsequent underemployment of manufacturing workers, and the breaking of the social contract between manufacturing workers and management. This social contract operated in the United States from the 1930s through the mid-­1970s. In return for refraining from unionization drives, strikes, and other types of labor activism, workers received job security, full-­time work, and benefits such as health care and vacations. But just at the point when the dangers of pollution began to be widely known and discussed by the public, the social contract was broken through employers’ actions such as exporting jobs to countries outside the United States, corporate “restructuring” resulting in mass layoffs, corporate mergers, wage and benefit cuts, and other developments that greatly decreased Americans’ job security.28 In the Philadelphia area’s industrial communities, this amounted to a transformation of the balance between the drawbacks of an unhealthy, polluted environment versus the benefit of economic security. In almost every industrial community, the resulting imbalance resulted in the exodus of better-­off people. The imbalance was then exacerbated by the addition of waste disposal facilities, which were almost exclusively sited in communities where many polluting factories already stood, and where there existed a backlog of Superfund sites in need of cleanup. The political context for the siting of hazardous facilities during the period from 1970 to 2010 included cutbacks in federal subsidies to urban areas, and the growing power of county governments and wealthy suburban municipalities.29 As a result of the growing economic polarization that resulted, social class inequality at the county level grew in importance as a factor shaping environmental inequalities, while racial/ethnic inequality continued to matter. Regardless of their racial/ethnic composition, the Philadelphia area’s extensively burdened communities all suffer a more subtle form of social class disadvantage: exploitation as providers of extensive, concentrated industrial, power generation, and waste disposal services used by waste disposal corporations and by the other, wealthier communities within the county. The exploitation enabled by county-­level decisions was motivated in part by the need to dispose

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of waste while avoiding political conflict between county officials and wealthier, more politically powerful municipalities within the county.30 As was discussed in detail in chapter 5, the federal-­level environmental laws passed in the early 1970s gave rise to state laws by the late 1970s in New Jersey (and the early 1980s in Pennsylvania). In both states, state laws decreed that each county would formulate its own waste disposal plan; and at this point, county-­level social inequalities between municipalities suddenly took on a new salience. Throughout its history, inequalities between municipalities in the Philadelphia area drove political fragmentation as each municipality competed with its neighbors within the county to maximize its advantages and gain access to services while minimizing its costs.31 This political fragmentation into small municipal governments increases both racial/ethnic and economic segregation.32 The economic polarization of the 1980s gave rise to a rapid increase in the proportion of poor suburbs and wealthy suburbs, while the proportion of middle-­class suburbs was shrinking.33 These conditions placed the wealthier suburban communities in a much stronger position when it came to resisting the incursion of locally unwanted land uses, which were then displaced onto lower middle-­class and poorer communities in the same county. In viewing these inequalities, it is important to see the “geographies of responsibility” that make visible not just those who suffer from the inequality, but those who benefit from it.34 Communities such as Camden and Chester that process all of the sewage and all of the trash for their entire county, while suffering a decline in air quality, home values, and quality of life, take on harms that are spared the communities that are the source of the sewage and trash. In the Philadelphia area, these waste disposal facilities did not just result in the continuing economic and social decline of environmentally burdened communities, but also functioned as barriers against residents’ efforts to change and improve the community. This is well understood by one of Camden’s residents, Father Michael Doyle of Sacred Heart Church, who said: “We’re a graveyard for everyone else’s problems, and there’s a feeling that this is somehow acceptable because those who live here are poor. What I have to say to the suburbs is this: ‘You’ve got your foot on our neck. That’s why we can’t stand up.’”35 But is it still exploitation if incinerators and other waste-­processing businesses were sought by community leaders? In both Camden and Chester, the mayor sought to bring waste disposal land uses to the community. I would argue that in both cases, economic blackmail is the explanation. Economic blackmail is the welcoming of a hazardous facility due to economic desperation and a dearth of better opportunities, which amounts to economic coercion.36

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If, during a depression, a desperate person accepts a job offer at half the usual wage, it does not matter if the employee sought and accepted the job; this still constitutes exploitation by the employer. Similarly, exploitation is also occurring when waste disposal corporations profit from processing the waste, and state environmental protection agencies and more affluent communities solve their waste disposal problems, while the pollution that results is seen and felt only in the host community.

Waterfront Redevelopment and Environmental Inequalities The transition from “waste magnet” to something that embodies more opportunity for economic development has been extremely difficult for the environmentally burdened waterfront communities in and around Philadelphia. As of 2014, a large proportion of the waterfront area along the Delaware River (including much of the waterfront that borders Philadelphia) remains strikingly ugly, outmoded, and polluted. As of this writing, at least three different redevelopment scenarios are proposed for Philadelphia’s waterfront. Some will add to the social and environmental inequalities that already exist, while others will improve the waterfront environment and serve the needs of waterfront community residents. For many decades, waterfront redevelopment was blocked by financial interests promoting Philadelphia’s shipping competitor, the Port of New York. Later it was hampered by political fragmentation, competition between public and private operators, and territorial bureaucrats.37 By the early 1950s, a growth coalition including city officials, real estate developers, financial institutions, universities, unions, and newspapers was united in pursuit of waterfront redevelopment plans that required little or no community involvement, and focused exclusively on large-­scale commercial and retail structures and high-­end condominiums.38 Despite spatial challenges (such as the placement of highways along the waterfront) and a lack of investors, this type of development would dominate Philadelphia’s waterfront redesign until the early 2000s.39 In the 1980s, waterfront redevelopment plans for Camden City, New Jersey, were driven by the quest for high profits. The dilapidated neighborhoods of Camden were ignored in favor of creating high-­visibility entertainment districts with regional appeal. These recreational spaces were meant to appeal to visitors from outside Camden; local residents were not consulted, but instead were told that the benefits of the new development (in the form of jobs and the infusion of money into the local economy) would trickle down to them. Plans for the entertainment venues that now exist began to gather steam in Camden in the 1980s, when the Philadelphia Zoo was seeking a site for a new aquarium. Developers envisioned a waterfront family entertainment

Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality  •  153

complex, complete with restaurants and hotels.40 Although not on the scale originally envisioned, entertainment venues including the Camden Aquarium, a baseball stadium, and a 7,000-­seat concert amphitheater (the Susquehanna Center) were eventually built. All of these destinations have been designed to maintain the “tourist bubble” that contains visitors within the entertainment district; thus it is not necessary for visitors ever to drive through much of Camden.41 Waterfront redevelopment projects have been of very little benefit to Camden residents, who struggle to survive in a city that still lacks jobs, safety, and decent schools. Residents feel that too much city money is going to Camden’s waterfront entertainment district and its huge hospitals, diverting funds from neighborhoods where they are badly needed.42 Urban researchers have discovered that large entertainment venues are in fact so expensive to build that a city adopting this plan for waterfront redevelopment must forgo other valuable uses for the money—­such as improving impoverished schools. They also have been shown to generate very little employment, and very little in tax revenues.43 But just south of the aquarium, the baseball field, and the concert stadium, very little redevelopment is evident in the Waterfront South neighbor­hood, Camden’s poorest and most industrial neighborhood. As of 2010, Waterfront South was 15.18  percent non-­Hispanic white, 52.05  percent black, and 36.41  percent Hispanic, with a median household income of $22,718. Although Waterfront South is less than one square mile in area, in 2005 it was the location of the sewage treatment plant for Camden County, the household trash incinerator, a cement recycling facility, and at least twenty-­four other polluting businesses.44 Air monitoring was conducted in two Camden neighborhoods during the summer from 2004 to 2006. It showed higher concentrations of toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene (TEX) in ambient air in Waterfront South than in the Copewood-­Davis comparison neighborhood. More than ten industrial facilities emitting TEX into the air were located in Waterfront South; TEX was also produced by the incinerator.45 Clearly, redevelopment has not reduced environmental or social inequality for the residents of Waterfront South. In Chester City, redevelopment has exacerbated both social and environmental inequality. The redevelopment strategy for Chester was quite similar to Camden’s: two huge waterfront redevelopment projects (a $400  million Harrah’s casino and racetrack, and an 18,634-­seat soccer stadium) have been completed there since 2000. These expensive sites of recreation were constructed at a time when Chester lacked even one grocery store. Other projects planned for Chester’s waterfront include a convention center, new office space, and high-­end condominiums complete with a boat marina. The waterfront entertainment venues are divided from the streets of Chester by Highway 291, which provides visitors with a direct route to the waterfront without

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having to drive through stigmatized Chester. Access to the casino and stadium is a bit more difficult for Chester residents themselves. Although casino revenues make up 20 percent of Chester City’s budget, residents have received few other benefits from these amenities except a few low-­paying service jobs. This type of redevelopment has been called “exclusionary redevelopment” since the spatial and social exclusion it causes tends to reinforce and normalize racial and social class segregation.46 This extreme segregation renders worsening environmental inequality invisible. One sign that environmental inequality is worsening in Chester is the expansion of its trash processing infrastructure, with the building of a 15,000-­square-­foot rail box building to house rail cars filled with up to 500,000 tons of household garbage from New York City (see chapter 5). The new building will solidify and make permanent Chester’s identity as a center of trash processing for New York and Philadelphia. It will also make it easy and convenient to increase the amount of trash processed at the incinerator, which would increase air and water pollution from the incinerator. The separation of entertainment venues from the daily realities of life in Chester and Camden through exclusionary redevelopment also contributes to environmental degradation through the phenomenon of distancing.47 Distancing reinforces the perception that the problem is solved, when it has only been displaced onto less powerful people. The result is an increase in environmental inequalities, and a lack of public outrage against environmentally damaging waste disposal methods in the waste-­generating communities. The redevelopment plans for Philadelphia’s waterfront were, for nearly fifty years, centered on large-­scale commercial attractions and luxury condominiums for the wealthy. Although few such projects were built, this vision for Philadelphia’s waterfront went unopposed until about 2002, when the Philadelphia Inquirer and the University of Pennsylvania began to question the wisdom of the city’s plans for redevelopment along the Penn’s Landing portion of the waterfront.48 They claimed that the site was too small and cut off from the rest of the city by Interstate 95 for the type of commercial and residential complex the developer envisioned, and that public space and public access to the Delaware River were lacking. Others criticized the city’s way of simply selecting developers without participation by city planners or any public involvement, which sparked the involvement of city planners from the University of Pennsylvania and increasingly vocal demands for public participation. As a result of these dynamics, by 2007 city officials had changed their redevelopment goals from lucrative private development to small-­scale development emphasizing public involvement and public access to the waterfront.49 For the Bridesburg neighborhood (part of the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­ Richmond area, one of the extensively burdened areas discussed in chapter 1), the shift to greater public participation opened up new land-­use possibilities.

Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality  •  155

Although Bridesburg borders the Delaware River, residents lacked access to the river because waterfront land use had been heavily industrial for many decades. By the beginning of the twenty-­first century, the decline in industry left many parcels of waterfront land vacant and contaminated. The largest vacant and contaminated parcel of land in Philadelphia is the sixty-­three-­acre Philadelphia Coke site, located in Bridesburg. From 1929 to 1982, the Philadelphia Coke Company produced and stored coke, a highly concentrated fuel made from coal that was used by iron and steel mills. Coke plant pollutants released to air and water included ammonia, benzene, cyanide, naptha, phenol, and toluene. Despite the fact that after 1970 coke plants captured and sold most of these by-­products for industrial use, they remained environmentally destructive because they discharged large amounts of waste to water and air, and used a great deal of water to produce coke.50 Philadelphia Coke closed its doors in 1982 and in 1988 demolished all the buildings and removed 30,000 tons of contaminated soil and other wastes from the site, leaving behind a brownfield site that could be redeveloped. Photos of the Philadelphia Coke site in 2011 show an overgrowth of grass and trees that appears peaceful and pristine, but groundwater on the site is contaminated with toxic chemicals, and the soil may still be too toxic for residential use.51 Some Bridesburg residents had strong opinions about the redevelopment of the Philadelphia Coke site, stating in public meetings that they opposed the return of industry and wanted recreational space. In 2014, they moved a little closer to getting their wish when the Delaware River City Corporation acquired nine acres of land adjacent to the Philadelphia Coke site and announced their plan to create a waterfront park there.52 Thus, there are indications that waterfront redevelopment in Bridesburg has taken a turn toward projects shaped and supported by people in the neighborhood. But the Philadelphia area’s residents may be facing an entirely different type of redevelopment if plans to make Philadelphia the next gas hub come to fruition. The plans involve the construction of a huge gas pipeline network that would be buried under the Delaware River, routing gas from the Marcellus Shale gas fields in northeast and western Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. Proponents envision a pipeline infrastructure that would position Philadelphia to compete with the existing gas hub in Louisiana to attract petrochemical businesses (which would yield many skilled, unionized jobs).53 But if this vision for the waterfront were realized, it would impose many grave risks upon Philadelphia residents, including increased toxic air pollution, the possible pollution of drinking water if the pipelines leaked, and fires and explosions from accidents during the shipping of gas by freight rail through the densely populated Philadelphia area.54 And despite pipeline boosters’ claims that the gas infrastructure will revitalize Philadelphia’s economy and provide thousands of jobs for the unemployed, this has not been the case in petrochemical

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communities in Louisiana, where highly skilled workers are imported from other regions while local residents stay unemployed.55 Looming over the prospect of this new gas hub is the threat from global climate change. Developing this type of energy infrastructure seems particularly foolhardy in light of new research showing that, in contradiction of its image as a “bridge fuel,” natural gas causes more greenhouse gas warming than oil or coal.56 Once developed, the gas distribution infrastructure will only bolster the technological lock-­in that makes it more difficult to transition away from fossil fuels.57 These contrasting and incompatible scenarios for waterfront redevelopment are currently being fought out on the political landscape. Only a limited amount of land borders the rivers—­and how should that land be used? Is it industrial land that should be developed for the shipping and refining of gas? Or should its potential to draw tourists to the city for gambling, shopping, concerts, and sports events be realized? Should the people who live nearby get a voice in redevelopment, and should the environmental health of the area (and not just its economic health) be considered? In decades past, it was Philadelphia’s industrial economy that shaped waterfront land uses, and gave rise to the environmental inequality that today plagues its waterfront communities. Given the realities of previous land use and zoning since 1980, it seems very likely that any added industrial activity will concentrate in the poorest and least powerful waterfront communities. If Philadelphia becomes the gas hub of the Northeast, environmental inequalities in refinery communities (such as Marcus Hook, Trainer, and South Philadelphia) will get worse. But exclusionary redevelopment for tourist entertainment venues or high-­end condominiums will not alleviate environmental inequality in waterfront communities, either: large-­scale waste processing activities can occur a short distance away without bothering anyone but the beleaguered residents of these towns. Only redevelopment plans that include community residents, that have as a major goal environmental sustainability, and that consider the fairness of the distribution of risks and benefits, can help to end environmental inequality in the Philadelphia area.

7

Toward a “Rust Belt” Theory of U.S. Environmental Inequality In chapter 2, I discussed research issues, incompatible research aims, and some other reasons why we haven’t gotten further along in our understanding of the process of urban environmental inequality formation in the United States.1 One thing holding researchers back from fully understanding environmental inequalities is that we are using research methods that allow inequalities to be documented, but that do not allow us to trace the process by which they came about. To theorize the root causes of environmental inequality and the processes by which environmental inequalities are formed, we need more multi-­method studies that combine spatial research with historical investigation. Studies that deeply excavate environmental and social conditions in one metropolitan area will help us to really understand not only where hazards and people are located in that place, but also the factors that shaped industrial and waste disposal locations, and how the situation changed at different important turning points in history. As more such studies of different cities and regions in the United States accumulate, we can begin systematically comparing some of the factors that drive environmental inequality in one city (or region) with those in another. Historical studies will give us a better understanding of the extent to which we can generalize theories of environmental inequality from one city (or region) to another, and ultimately help us develop testable theories of environmental inequality.2 157

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In chapter 5, I discussed my theory of environmental inequality formation in the Philadelphia region. In this chapter I extend the theory, and offer a regional theory of Rust Belt environmental inequality formation. The region known as the Rust Belt stretches from upstate New York through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, and West Virginia, and extends through Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois.3 This region is very important in the history of industrialization in the United States, as the Rust Belt once had more industry and more industrial communities than any other. As a Rust Belt city, Philadelphia’s racial/ethnic composition, patterns of industrialization, racialization of labor, residential segregation, deindustrialization, and gentrification are all more similar to those of other Rust Belt cities than to cities in other regions. Thus, it is logical to decide that the processes through which environmental inequalities were formed are likely to be similar in cities across the Rust Belt, and are likely to differ from the processes of cities in other regions. But although this is a starting point, we are still far from having determined how much we can generalize environmental justice research findings from one city to others.

Generalizability in Environmental Inequality Formation: How Far Does It Go? A number of environmental justice researchers have pointed to the need to discover the degree to which findings from one metropolitan area or city apply to others.4 Historical studies show that few if any of the social and economic processes that give rise to environmental inequality are uniform across the United States; instead, they vary widely across metropolitan areas.5 But does this mean that each U.S. city is totally unique and it is not valid to generalize at all? Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography seems to contradict this idea. It states, simply, that things that are closer together in space tend to be more similar.6 This suggests that some generalization is valid (although we still don’t know how close things have to be for the generalization to hold its validity). Even without having made systematic comparisons between cities, we can use two simple statements that provide some guidance for generalizing: cities within a region may be more similar to one another than they are to cities in other regions; and cities within a region that are closer together may be more similar than cities in a region that are farther apart. However, there are other important characteristics to be considered. Population size is one, as larger cities tend to have more diverse and complex industrial economies, more immigrants, and more complex patterns of residential segregation and gentrification. Population density is another factor. Rust Belt cities vary widely in density, but in general are higher in density than southwestern or southeastern cities. In cities with high population density, spatial inequality tends to be

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more fine-­grained: segregation can be seen at the block or block group scale rather than at zip code scale. Thus, metropolitan areas chosen for comparison should be not just geographically close, but comparable in terms of the size of the population and population density. Before discussing each of the factors relevant to environmental inequality formation, it is important to discuss the findings of spatial research on environmental inequality in the Philadelphia area.

Spatial Statistical Research on Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area Whether they are conducting spatial statistical research or historical research, all researchers measuring environmental inequality should be aware that, due to the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), choices of scope (whether the research area encompasses one city, one county, or the entire nation) and scale (whether the unit of analysis is census tracts, towns, or counties) will alter the findings of the study.7 For reasons discussed in more detail in chapter 2, I agree with researchers who have stated that the correct scope for research in which the aim is theorizing environmental inequality is the metropolitan area.8 But in general, environmental justice researchers have been working without any consensus regarding the appropriate scope or scale, causing their choices of study areas and units of analysis to vary widely. Studies of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area are complicated by the fact that it spans both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, encompassing the wealthiest and most industrialized part of Pennsylvania but not that of New Jersey.9 The first published environmental justice study of the Philadelphia area was conducted by Jeremy Mennis, a geographer. He used 1990 census data and included only five counties (Philadelphia, plus the counties bordering it on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River). Instead of using a conventional unit of analysis (such as census tracts), Mennis created a raster surface of tiny grid cells and examined the distribution of hazardous waste facilities (TSDFs) and factories reporting to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) for 1995. The study showed that population density, the proportion minority, and the proportion in poverty were all higher closer to a TRI facility (while the proportion with a college degree was lower).10 The next study, also by Mennis, was a statewide study of Pennsylvania using the same data as the first, but using census tracts instead of grid cells as the unit of analysis. In this study, percentage minority explained the largest amount of variation, and was associated with both population density and proximity to TRI facilities. Much of the state of Pennsylvania was (and is) rural and relatively unindustrialized; thus, it was not surprising that both minority populations and industrial polluters were found in cities. But in southeastern Pennsylvania (Philadelphia’s location), when the influence

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of poverty, college education, and population density were controlled for, concentrations of TRI facilities were associated with lower percentage minority. This suggested that, in southeast Pennsylvania, tracts with higher minority populations that were low in poverty were likely to be located relatively far from concentrations of TRI facilities.11 In a national-­level study by sociologist Liam Downey in which 2000 TRI data and census data were used, he examined the fourteen metropolitan areas with the largest populations, including the Philadelphia area. Downey converted census tracts into twenty-­five-­meter grid cells, and measured TRI pollutants within a quarter-­kilometer of the center of each cell. Statistical procedures tested whether a disproportionate number of racial/ethnic minority group members lived in areas with higher TRI air emissions. For African Americans, this was not the case in the Philadelphia area, where the relationship between average emissions and percent black was linear, significant, and negative. (This was also the case in Boston and Chicago.) But in Philadelphia, the relationship between average emissions and percent Hispanic was insignificant (as was the case in Baltimore, Boston, and Hartford). Downey hypothesized that environmental inequalities were occurring when the groups that benefited the most from industry (whites and middleand upper-­class people) were not the same groups living in high-­emissions areas. Despite receiving fewer economic benefits from industry, African Americans lived in higher emissions areas in all metropolitan areas except Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. Hispanics lived in higher emissions areas in all metropolitan areas.12 In another national-­level study by Downey, environmental inequality in the sixty-­one most populous U.S. metropolitan areas was examined, this time using 2000 census data at the tract level and EPA’s Risk-­Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI) database. RSEI uses a pollution-­plume model to estimate exposure to toxic air pollutants from TRI facilities across the United States. Toxic exposures were estimated for whites, blacks, and Hispanics, and compared with levels of racial/ethnic segregation and minority-­white income inequality. Results indicated that in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area, the average toxic concentration overall was 498, but the average toxic concentration was 1,887 for Hispanics, 679 for blacks, and 353 for non-­Hispanic whites. While this indicated environmental inequality, Downey noted that there was little relationship between segregation, income inequalities, and toxic concentration, and much variation between metropolitan areas.13 Another study, conducted by myself and graduate student Samantha Swanson, used 2000 census and RSEI data to examine who lived near the worst TRI facilities (those emitting the largest quantities of the most toxic air pollutants) in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area. Statistical tests were run to see whether racial/ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged, the working class

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(defined as those with incomes lower than middle-­class but higher than disadvantaged), or manufacturing workers lived within a one-­kilometer radius of (or ring around) the worst TRI facilities. Results indicated that, for the area overall, high hazard score was related to percentage black, percentage disadvantaged, and percentage employed in manufacturing industries. But when each county was examined separately, different patterns of proximity to high hazard-­score facilities appeared. In Philadelphia, hazard scores rose along with percentage black and percentage employed in manufacturing, while in Camden County they were negatively related to percentage black, but strongly and positively related to percentage disadvantaged and percentage in manufacturing. In Delaware County hazard scores rose significantly only with percentage Hispanic (and not percentage black), but a glance at the map explained why. The statistical test compared populations near high-­hazard facilities with populations near low-­hazard ones, but in Delaware County, almost all TRI facilities were located in predominantly black census block groups. Within these block groups, Hispanic populations tended to live near high-­hazard facilities but not low-­hazard facilities.14 Another study of the Philadelphia area that I conducted used 2000 census data to examine the distribution of a wider array of environmental hazards than TRI facilities, including Superfund sites, TSDFs, landfills, trash transfer stations, incinerators, electric power plants, large sewage and sludge treatment plants, and illegally dumped piles of car and truck tires. Instead of examining census tracts, the study followed Faber and Krieg’s method and used municipalities in the suburban counties and Philadelphia Planning Analysis Areas as the unit of analysis to test for risk factors that could predict which communities were extensively burdened with the fourteen environmental hazards.15 As shown in chapter 1 (which focused on the situation in 2010), a location bordering the Delaware River was the biggest risk factor for environmental burdening. In 2000, bordering the Delaware placed communities at 7.58 times average risk for environmental burdening. But communities in the highest quartile (fourth) in proportion minority faced from 1.95 to 2.31 times average the risk of being extensively burdened, while communities with the highest proportion of people who had less than a high school diploma faced 2.09 times average risk for being extensively burdened. Only communities at the top of the income distribution faced a significantly reduced risk for burdening: theirs was one-­third of average, while those with the lowest proportion of African Americans faced only 26  percent of the average risk of extensive burdening with environmental hazards.16 I was curious to see how diverse or homogenous the populations in extensively burdened communities in the Philadelphia area might be, so I conducted another study, in which I used the same study area, unit of analysis, census data, and methodology. In this one, I wanted to investigate how the

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racial/ethnic composition of the community went together with its social class level and location within the metropolitan area to increase the risk for extensive burdening (or protect against it). This study tested for “thresholds” of racial/ethnic diversity (above which, risk for burdening is increased) and social class status (below which, risk for burdening is increased). No threshold for percentage black was discovered, but there was a difference in risk between predominantly white communities and substantially white ones (with populations only 0–­2.26 percent black). Predominantly white communities faced an average risk for extensive burdening, while the risk for substantially white communities was only 12 percent of average. Urban communities faced 7.68 times average risk, while disadvantaged communities faced 4.68 times average risk (thus, the threshold effect was found: the poorest communities faced significantly higher risk, while those with slightly higher incomes did not). Overall, racially diverse, disadvantaged communities faced the highest risk.17 Making sense of the research above is not an easy task: results are complicated by differences in statistical methods, hazards, time periods, study areas, and units of analysis. It is not at all clear from the spatial statistical research which groups of people have suffered a disparate impact from industrial hazards in Philadelphia. There are conflicting findings with regard to proximity to TRI facilities: one researcher (Mennis) found more minorities and poor people near them, while another (Downey) found fewer. In Philadelphia, Hispanics were the group exposed to the highest levels of toxic industrial air pollutants, while African Americans were exposed to higher than average levels and whites were exposed to lower than average levels. African Americans and manufacturing workers lived near the most toxic industrial facilities in Philadelphia (but this was not consistent across other counties in the Philadelphia area). Although location near the Delaware River was the biggest risk factor for extensive burdening with fourteen different types of environmental hazards, location in the city, poverty, and a diverse racial/ethnic makeup (rather than a predominantly black one) all placed a community at higher risk for extensive hazard burdening. Only those communities with the highest household incomes and the lowest proportions of African Americans and Hispanics faced lower than average risk (mainly because such communities tended to be located farther from the Delaware River and the city).

Philadelphia and the Rust Belt Theory of Environmental Inequality Formation In the United States, environmental inequalities are rooted in segregation and the racialization of labor. Race-­based exploitation of different groups of

A “Rust Belt” Theory of Environmental Inequality  •  163

workers (and racial preference for certain types of workers) determines who will be employed in a polluting industry. This in turn shapes the predominant race and social class location of those who live near manufacturing plants in that industry.18 But this was not the case in Philadelphia with regard to waste disposal facilities: before 1970, these tended to be located in parts of the city either racially diverse and sparsely populated (as was Southwest Philadelphia), or occupied by people lower in social status (immigrants, African Americans, and poorer people, as in South Philadelphia). After 1970, waste disposal facilities were placed in areas with industrial zoning, which consolidated hazards in industrial places. Today’s incinerator or landfill is located in yesterday’s heavy industrial district; thus, the labor patterns of the past influence the locations of even these facilities. Overall, it makes sense to say that because it is a Rust Belt city, environmental inequality in Philadelphia exhibits both environmental racism and environmental classism. Table 2 (in chapter 1) shows that, compared with all communities in the Philadelphia area in 2010, extensively burdened communities have more African American and Hispanic residents, lower median household incomes, and lower median home values. But Falls Township in Bucks County (84 percent non-­Hispanic white as of 2010) had the highest number of hazardous sites or facilities, and the highest number of hazard points out of all thirty-­three extensively burdened communities. Eleven of the thirty-­three extensively burdened communities are predominantly white. The burdening of these communities cannot be explained as a simple case of racial/ethnic discrimination. Instead, it occurred because African Americans were kept out of manufacturing jobs and the neighborhoods surrounding manufacturing plants. In Falls Township, this occurred in the 1950s; in the Philadelphia neighborhoods of Bridesburg, Port Richmond, and Kensington, it occurred more than a century earlier. As is common in other cities in the Rust Belt region, European immigrants were preferred over African Americans for jobs in manufacturing, and they needed to live close to their workplace. One thing these immigrants had in common with African Americans is their relatively low incomes, which made their lives markedly different from those of the middle-­class and wealthy native-­born whites. Both economic segregation and racial segregation created the situation in which working-­class whites were the group living in proximity to industry. This means that, in this Rust Belt setting, environmental inequalities originated through social class inequality. When whites abandoned industrial neighborhoods, African Americans and Hispanics moved in. This occurred in North Philadelphia during the 1950s, when African Americans came to Philadelphia during the Second Great Migration. It also occurred in the 1980s in Camden and the Kensington neighbor­hood in Philadelphia. As industrial plants moved outward to the

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(white) suburbs, or simply shut down, whites moved, leaving behind neighborhoods zoned for industrial activity. Some of these neighborhoods became waste magnets: places that, due to their history of industrial activity and industrial zoning, seemed appropriate places to put unwanted waste disposal facilities. Their changed racial/ethnic composition added negative racialization to their existing industrial stigma, making community revitalization more difficult and increasing the pressure to process other people’s garbage. But each of the thirty-­three extensively burdened communities in the Philadelphia area was once a predominantly white center of manufacturing. This means that the people living with these environmental burdens are struggling with the legacy of social class inequality, as much as the legacy of racial injustice. All of this is hardly unique to Philadelphia, and is likely to have occurred in Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and other Rust Belt cities. The histories of Chicago and Gary, Indiana, discussed in chapter 2, and the spatial statistical studies discussed above suggest that, like Philadelphia, the largest cities in the Midwest and Northeast may share patterns of environmental inequality based on both environmental racism and environmental classism. But in the smaller Rust Belt cities, the pattern is different: in Baltimore, there is clear and consistent evidence that whites with lower incomes and lower educational attainments are the group disproportionately closer to environmental hazards, and thus are exposed to higher levels of air pollution from industry than Hispanics or African Americans. Race was not a significant predictor of the location of polluting industry in Baltimore in 1960; instead, low incomes and educational attainments were. Industry was mostly located in the urban core; neighborhoods around the steel industry were predominantly white.19 Similar patterns were found in Buffalo and Pittsburgh.20 In the Rust Belt, environmental inequalities originated in predominantly white working-­class communities because, before the 1960s, industrialization there was well advanced and concerns about pollution were subordinate to concerns about making a living. This is quite different from the situation in other regions such as the Southwest, where proximity to the Mexican border brought large Latino populations eager to work, even under the unhealthy conditions they found in polluting industry. It is also quite different from the situation in the Southeast, where a legacy of slavery undermined the rights of African Americans throughout most of the industrial age. To investigate these differences, I will discuss some factors that I argue shape environmental inequality in all U.S. cities.

A “Rust Belt” Theory of Environmental Inequality  •  165

Factors That Shaped Environmental Inequality Formation in the Rust Belt and Elsewhere In chapter 3, I listed ten factors from historical environmental justice research that have been shown to be most important in shaping the process of environmental inequality formation (see chapter 3). The ways in which the first six factors contributed to the formation of environmental inequality in Philadelphia before 1950 were discussed in chapter 3. In chapters 4, 5, and 6, I discussed the last four factors that were evident in changing conditions after 1950, including the suburbanization of people and industry, changes in waste-­disposal facilities following the new environmental laws, and deindustrialization. Below, I discuss in a more specific way each of the factors listed in chapter 3, and lay out some ideas about how generalizable or city-­specific each factor might be.

Factors in the Process of Environmental Inequality Formation 1a.

1b.

1c.

Onset of industrial development The time in history when polluting industry was established is important, for many reasons. Attitudes toward people of certain races and ethnicities, waste disposal practices, the development and segregation of housing, and many other conditions related to environmental inequality have changed to varying degrees since the time when industrialization began. These changes can obscure the reasons for the original placement of people and industry; that original placement should be understood within its historical context. In Philadelphia, this occurred early: by 1820, many industries were already well established there. Transportation and power-­generating technologies as determinants of the location of industry The type of transportation and power-­generating technologies available at the earliest point of industrialization can shape the distribution and density of polluting industry thereafter. For example, in Philadelphia around 1820, textile mills were located near waterfalls or rivers in order to harness water power. The shipping of raw materials in (and finished goods out) was accomplished by water more easily and with lower cost; thus, factories were located close to shipping canals and rivers. Later, these water routes were used to ship coal to Philadelphia’s mechanized factories and foundries. Modes of shipping and power generation were quite different in late-­industrializing cities, which resulted in different reasons for the location of industry in those cities. Industrial mix (blend of skilled and unskilled labor) The type of industries and degree of industrial specialization influence the degree of environmental inequality because they determine

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1d.

2a.

2b.

which racial/ethnic groups will predominate in that industry in that city (and why). Some industries require highly skilled workers (e.g., chemicals and petroleum refining), while others demand a large labor force that can be unskilled (e.g., steel, textiles, etc.). Industries that demand unskilled labor tend to open up opportunities for poor, rural migrants to industrial areas (e.g., Irish immigrants, southern blacks, immigrants from Mexico). In industries demanding high skill levels, wages were higher and larger proportions of industrial workers were unionized. Philadelphia’s industrial economy was varied and diverse, but included many specialty industries where goods were produced from relatively small factories using skilled labor. The industrial mix changed during wartime industrial booms, drawing in more unskilled laborers from outside the area. Wages, working conditions for manufacturing workers Wages for manufacturing workers and the proportion of the manufacturing workforce represented by a union varied widely across the United States. Before the deindustrialization of the 1970s, some Rust Belt cities ranked fairly high in wages and unionization (while many areas in the Southeast and Southwest tended to rank low on both). These factors will, to a large degree, determine who works in the local polluting industry (and thus also who lives near polluting industry). By the 1960s, Philadelphia’s wages ranked slightly below the U.S. median, but workers ranked high in union representation.21 Set-­aside of clean (or beautiful) areas for the wealthy Although this has not been addressed much by environmental justice researchers, it may be an important factor in environmental inequalities everywhere. In Philadelphia, social class inequalities were expressed spatially through the creation of Fairmount Park, which reserved for the affluent undeveloped forest areas in and around the wealthy Chestnut Hill area of the city (in the northwest part of Philadelphia), and blocked the addition of more industrial plants along the Schuylkill River. Economic inequalities were also expressed through the creation of an elite group of suburban towns along the Main Line to the west of the city around 1875. Both developments have contributed to a marked east-­west social class divide in Philadelphia, in which industrial activity is designated to be in the eastern part of the city (bordering the Delaware River), and industry is much less evident in the western part of the city (west of the Schuylkill River). Economic segregation in residential areas Residential economic segregation is characteristic of all U.S. metropolitan areas. Economic segregation is maintained through restrictions on lot size, on multifamily housing, or simply through the cost of

A “Rust Belt” Theory of Environmental Inequality  •  167

3a.

3b.

housing. This form of segregation exists together with “between-­group” racial/ethnic segregation, and often takes the form of “within-­ group” segregation (segregating white low-­income populations from white high-­income populations, for example). Interestingly, while racial/ethnic segregation has been decreasing since 1970, economic segregation has been increasing.22 In addition to land uses that directly benefit the wealthy, economic segregation is another method through which the wealthy are able to separate themselves from industry and industrial wastes. Predominant racial/ethnic minority groups The size of the local (or regional) minority group population is determined by two intersecting factors: geographic location and economic conditions (such as employment). Thus, it is related to the group’s status as exploited laborers. In the Southeast, the labor of African Americans was exploited first through slavery, and then through the sharecropping system. Until 1900, few African Americans lived outside the Southeast, and the region lacked industry. But in the parts of the Southwest that border Mexico (California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas), Mexicans and Mexican Americans were the exploited population, and Latinos vastly outnumber African Americans. In the Rust Belt, burgeoning manufacturing industries could staff factories with millions of white European immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, and other parts of Europe. Some of these immigrants brought skills and training from their countries of origin to the manufacturing workforce; but whether skilled or unskilled, these white immigrants were preferred over African Americans in the factories of Philadelphia. However, before the 1950s, such people were viewed as ethnic and religious outsiders who, despite their white skin, were not considered truly “white.” When the flow of immigrant labor was cut off by World War I, factory jobs were filled by African Americans from the Southeast. Few Latinos lived in Philadelphia until after 1950, when Puerto Ricans migrated to the Northeast. Since the 1920s African Americans continued to flow into industrial cities in the North, and are today a larger minority group population than Latinos in Philadelphia. Changes in the predominance of racial/ethnic groups over time are driven by the economic fate of the area, the attractiveness of the place compared with options elsewhere, changing attitudes about race/ethnicity, and many other factors. Racialized labor patterns The racialization of labor is perhaps the most important determinant of proximity to urban hazards. In general, the group seen as the

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3c.

“appropriate” laborers in polluting industry will be the group with the highest proximity to industrial hazards. In Philadelphia, these were white European immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, and other parts of Europe. But in other Rust Belt cities (such as Pittsburgh), the demand for labor may have been too great to make such preferences practical, and thus there were larger numbers of African Americans among the industrial workforce there. Where white privilege created a mostly white, mostly immigrant workforce, whites were the (original) group living in proximity to industrial hazards. In the Southwest, where the Mexican border was close and European immigrants and African Americans were relatively few, it was Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants who worked in dirty industries such as brick making and primary metals. In places where labor-­intensive industries developed after immigration law changed in 1965 (such as California’s microchip manufacturing industry in Silicon Valley), corporations employed large numbers of recent immigrants from Asia and Mexico. This led to the disproportionate proximity of Latinos and Asians to environmental hazards. Racial/ethnic segregation in residential areas In U.S. cities, residential racial/ethnic segregation varies widely by region, as does the relationship of racialized labor with residential segregation. Wide variations in population density, the past proximity of slaves and servants to those they served, and the development of ethnic enclaves all further complicate regional patterns of residential segregation. Between-­group segregation of whites from African Americans is highest, while segregation of whites from Latinos and Asians is lower.23 “Northern” race relations (no Jim Crow laws to keep the races apart, and industrial free labor rather than agricultural slave labor economies) characterized Rust Belt cities, where the separation of whites from African Americans was accomplished through residential segregation. As a result, Northeastern and Midwestern cities tend to be highest in segregation.24 Some Rust Belt cities (such as Chicago) were also characterized by ethnic enclaves, where European immigrant groups settled near others who came from the same country. But in Philadelphia, European immigrants tended to specialize in certain industries and occupations, and this led to the development of industrial clusters dominated by one ethnicity (such as the Polish neighborhoods of Port Richmond). Cities in the Southeast tend to rank lower in residential segregation than cities in the Rust Belt because slavery required the races to live in close proximity. However, later in history after the development of hazardous industries such as petrochemicals in the Southeast, residential

A “Rust Belt” Theory of Environmental Inequality  •  169

4a.

segregation sometimes involved the separation of whites from hazardous industry, which was located in black neighborhoods.25 Southwest cities grew exponentially after 1950, when advances in air conditioning made high temperatures more bearable.26 Cities in this region tended to have much smaller African American populations than Latino populations, and patterns of racial/ethnic segregation vary widely between California cities, where populations are more diverse and include Asian residents, and those with mostly Latino and white residents (such as those in Arizona and New Mexico). Degrees of racial/ethnic segregation change over time, as do the racial/ethnic composition of specific places. Racism and ethnic antagonisms were one reason for the outflow of people of one race or ethnicity and the inflow of people of another race or ethnicity that has taken place in U.S. metropolitan areas. But the quality of schools and the placement of school district boundaries, the accessibility of employment, gentrification patterns, the actions of mortgage funders and realtors, and local political decisions have all been shown to play roles in changing the ethnic composition of neighborhoods.27 Much variation exists among cities (and regions) in all these factors, and some cities have changed much more since 1970 than others. These differences add complexity to the task of understanding whether those in proximity to the environmental hazards of the present have always lived near such hazards, or have replaced a different group that once lived near the environmental hazards of the past.28 Onset of large-­scale suburbanization In the last sixty-­five years, the large-­scale suburbanization has become an increasingly important factor shaping environmental inequalities. For all U.S. cities, the boom in suburban housing in the 1950s was stimulated by the building of highways and government-­funded mortgage programs. Federal policy ensured that new suburban housing presented whites with a wider array of choices than African Americans; thus in all regions suburbanization tended to increase both economic and racial/ ethnic segregation. But suburbs are not all alike; even within one metropolitan area, they were (and are) differentiated by social class as well as racial/ethnic composition. In the Philadelphia area, the history of suburbanization as a factor in environmental inequality is complex. Before the Civil War, much of Philadelphia’s heavy industry was situated in industrial suburbs (such as Kensington, Port Richmond, and Northern Liberties) located just outside the borders of Philadelphia. These were incorporated into the city in 1854. Over the next century, predominantly white industrial “suburbs of manufacturing” such as Camden and Chester were built close to

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4b.

4c.

Philadelphia, along the Delaware River. Their working-­class residents were almost entirely dependent upon manufacturing plants for employment. But the number of factories outside the city was dwarfed by the number in Philadelphia: until 1950, the bulk of the metropolitan area’s manufacturing activity occurred within the city’s borders. After 1950, heavy industry began to move out into some of Philadelphia’s substantially white suburbs. African American suburbs also existed as early as 1915. Some (such as Ambler) were manufacturing towns, while in others residents were agricultural laborers or domestic servants.29 These suburbs all occupied a very different position in social class hierarchies than did the middle-­class and affluent suburbs along the Main Line, and later, in the Pennsylvania counties outside Philadelphia. Gentrification Unlike other factors discussed above, the relationship between gentrification and environmental inequalities may be a city-­specific one that cannot be generalized to the regional level. In some cities (such as New York and San Francisco), gentrification is driven by the extremely high cost of housing, which makes redevelopment very profitable. In other cities (such as Portland, Oregon) gentrification may be stimulated by an urban growth boundary, which prevents developers from exercising the cheaper option of developing undeveloped land farther out in the suburbs. This increases the profitability of redeveloping land formerly occupied by polluting manufacturers. Gentrification often involves the creation of housing for middle-­class and affluent whites; in this way, gentrification can extend the risk of environmental hazards to more privileged groups.30 In Philadelphia—­perhaps due to the relatively low cost of housing, the availability of suburban land, and the fact that large portions of the city are suffering from extreme poverty and decay and are thus seen as undesirable locations for redevelopment—­ gentrification has not been as widespread as in other cities, and has occurred in only limited areas. Industrial waterfront redevelopment In Philadelphia (as in many other cities), “heavy industry” clustered along a major waterway, the Delaware River. And as in many other cities, large parcels of industrial land in Philadelphia are contaminated and dotted with dilapidated abandoned factories. Many cities with similar outmoded waterfronts have finished or are currently working on significant redevelopment of their waterfronts. Although this redevelopment often involves the building of high-­end residential complexes for the wealthy, in the industrial towns along the Delaware River it also involves the redevelopment of transportation corridors serving

A “Rust Belt” Theory of Environmental Inequality  •  171

industrial needs into those serving the needs of tourist attractions such as casinos, stadiums, and aquariums. These redevelopments can involve remediation of contaminated parcels of land and rezoning from industrial to commercial land-­use designations—­developments that extensively burdened waterfront communities would welcome. But if redevelopment constitutes “exclusionary” land uses geared toward the needs of tourists, the wealthy, and other outsiders, improvements in conditions in poor, environmentally burdened industrial communities along the waterfront will be negligible.31 The direction and impact of such redevelopment projects is largely dependent upon the politics of redevelopment, which tend to be more city-­specific than regional in nature. 5. Onset of zoning, planning Like gentrification and waterfront redevelopment, planning and zoning are city-­specific rather than regional. In some cities (e.g., New York), zoning and planning began early in history; this was not the case in Philadelphia, where zoning began in 1930 and city planning did not take place until the 1960s. Some cities (such as Houston) were notorious for their lack of zoning, and the placement of hazardous facilities in or near residential areas.32 Zoning and planning practices are important for understanding the designation of some areas for environmentally hazardous land uses. 6. Onset of deindustrialization, and its effects Compared with other U.S. regions, the Rust Belt suffered an early and steep decline in manufacturing employment, and experienced more severe economic effects from deindustrialization. These economic effects drive other processes (such as the move-­out of one racial/ethnic group and the move-­in of another, the courting of polluting waste disposal technologies to the city, etc.). The timing of deindustrialization in relation to the passage of the new environmental laws from 1970 to 1985 is a crucial factor in determining whether waste disposal land uses will cluster in deindustrialized areas, as is the history of who lived in these areas prior to 1970 or after 1985. 7. Onset of federal laws governing manufacturing and waste disposal practices Although all U.S. cities are affected by the passage of these laws from 1970 to 1985, there are regional and city-­specific differences in the major industries affected, state and local laws governing the division of labor in responding to federal laws, and the relationship of these laws to deindustrialization. In the Greater Philadelphia area, substandard landfills were closed, waste disposal regulations went into effect, and

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each county in the Philadelphia area sought new sites of waste disposal. All of the new waste disposal sites were built in areas that had formerly been used for manufacturing or other heavy industry. But the disappearance of industry from the area transformed some industrial towns and neighborhoods from lower middle-­class, predominantly white industrial areas into very poor, high-­minority areas. When a disproportionate number of waste disposal facilities were built in such areas, waste disposal land uses were clustered together with the remaining polluting industry. 8. Development of new waste disposal technologies and practices By the end of the 1980s, thousands of substandard dumps were closed and cleaned up or transformed into Superfund sites, and the administration of landfills passed from city governments into the hands of federal and state governments. Waste disposal corporations took over landfilling operations, creating a few huge landfills charging higher tipping fees to handle trash for entire counties. In Philadelphia, the “garbage crisis” that developed prompted the promotion of new trash-­to-­steam incinerators. But neighborhood protest increased over ash piles and accumulated trash near the old incinerators that were still in use, prompting a search for waste sinks beyond the city’s borders. Developments involving waste disposal are likely to vary greatly with population density: in low-­density metropolitan areas with abundant tracts of unused land, landfilling may be used, while in high-­density places incineration or export of trash may be more likely to be used. 9a. Public attitudes toward polluting industry, industrial waste, and waste disposal facilities The new environmental laws were ushered in by a swelling of public outrage over the horrific air and water pollution that existed in the 1960s. The rise in environmental consciousness and knowledge meant that the new waste disposal technologies such as hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities, modern landfills, and “waste-­to-­energy” incinerators faced more resistance due to changed public attitudes. Public concerns about exposure to toxic chemicals had increased after 1970, even in the formerly “complicit” industrial communities. Despite regional differences evident in how different states regulate environmental hazards (e.g., California versus Texas), there is virtually no research on regional differences in public attitudes about environmental hazards from industry or waste disposal. Thus, we don’t know how uniform or region-­specific these attitudes may be. 9b. Environmental justice activism Environmental justice activism has had at least two important impacts on the development of environmental inequality. One of these

A “Rust Belt” Theory of Environmental Inequality  •  173

was intentional: the undermining of booms (or “bubbles”) in new waste disposal technologies perceived to be unsafe and unfairly sited (such as incinerators).33 This was demonstrated in the early 1990s, when a coalition of environmental justice groups in and around Philadelphia successfully fought off a huge trash-­to-­steam incinerator proposed for South Philadelphia’s Naval Yard, while at the same time neighborhood activists succeeded in getting Philadelphia’s two remaining incinerators shut down.34 But there was another, unintentional effect from environmental justice activism: increased environmental inequality resulting from flows of waste from more powerful, affluent (urban) places such as Philadelphia and New York to poorer and less powerful communities (such as Camden, New Jersey, and Chester, Pennsylvania). Although city officials in both Chester and Camden sought incinerators, this does not lessen the environmental inequality inherent in the concentration of hazard in both towns. The end of the 1990s saw lawsuits filed alleging that Camden and Chester residents were victims of environmental racism; both attracted national attention, but neither succeeded in alleviating the increase in environmental inequality. The lack of remedy for these communities was demonstrated by the building of infrastructure in Chester to handle rail shipments of New York City’s trash to the incinerator.

Conclusion The proposed Rust Belt theory and the search for the best ways to test it have generated more questions than they have answered. Are patterns of environmental inequality really regional in nature? Or do the largest cities exhibit their own complex patterns of environmental inequality, which differ from those of smaller industrial cities? These differences suggest that Philadelphia, despite being more similar to other Rust Belt cities than to cities outside the region, should be compared with Chicago, while Buffalo should be compared with Gary. Environmental inequality and its causes will continue to interest researchers, as the new hazards caused by climate change and the boom in unconventional gas and oil extraction affect new populations in some places, and accumulate together with older industrial hazards in other places. As more spatial statistical and historical studies of U.S. cities accumulate, theories of environmental inequality formation will be tested and refined. I hope that this book will stimulate more research on labor, social class, the intersectionality of race and class, the role of wealthy elites, deindustrialization, gentrification, and redevelopment as aspects of environmental inequality formation. None

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of these has been adequately studied, and we need a better understanding of them to truly understand environmental inequalities. The improved understanding of environmental injustice that results will allow researchers not only to better understand the social construction of environmental injustice, but also to better help environmentally burdened communities and environmental policy makers.

Appendix Nature of This Study Multiple methodologies (detailed below), were used in this study, which was conducted in two stages. In Stage 1, the research aim was to discover the extent of environmental inequality in the Philadelphia area in 2010 by determining whether some communities were extensively burdened with environmental hazards. Research methods in Stage 1 were geographic and quantitative, and involved the mapping of eleven different types of hazardous sites or facilities onto 2010 census maps. Statistical procedures were conducted to determine whether these sites or facilities were significantly clustered in space, and which social and locational characteristics were risk factors for extensive burdening among the 351 communities. In Stage 2, the research aim was to trace the social, economic, industrial, and environmental history of the most burdened communities in their historical context within the Philadelphia area to discover how extensively burdened communities got that way; to theorize the development of environmental inequality in the Philadelphia area; and to propose a general “Rust Belt” theory of environmental inequality in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest United States.

Rationale for Focusing on the Philadelphia Area The Philadelphia area seemed uniquely suited to a study of environmental inequality because of its constants and its intriguing contradictions. The first contradiction was the fact that environmental inequalities were evident in the disproportionate proximity of industrial hazards to minorities and the poor; 175

176  •  Appendix

yet manufacturing workforces had always been predominantly white, with employment rates for African Americans markedly lower than those of white European immigrants. The second was the two faces of race relations: a long tradition of white liberalism stretching all the way back to Quaker abolitionists, side by side with vicious racism visited on African Americans. As a Rust Belt city, Philadelphia’s environmentally damaging industrialization has been a constant factor throughout its history. Social class inequalities, always stark and obvious in Philadelphia, are another constant. Racial/ethnic inequalities are another constant. Thus, a study of Philadelphia presented an opportunity to better understand the roles of social class inequality, deindustrialization, and changing environmental laws in the formation of environmental inequality (particularly the formation of “environmental classism”), and the transformation of formerly industrial communities into magnets for waste disposal land uses. Understanding these also presented an opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of environmental racism. To a greater degree than many U.S. cities, the Philadelphia area has always exhibited social class differentiation among African Americans as well as whites. Studying the Philadelphia area provided a unique opportunity to understand how the predominant racial/ethnic makeup of communities intersects with their social class status to place them at higher or lower risk for environmental burdening.

Rationale for Methodological Approach: Historical Turning Points Although it was important to understand the overall contours of Philadelphia’s industrial development and waste disposal practices within its social context, it was also important to identify certain historical turning points as periods for more detailed examination. These periods were determined by tracing the social and economic developments most relevant to environmental inequality formation in the Philadelphia area. The most important of these factors include the following: • The widespread suburbanization of industry that began in Philadelphia in the 1950s • “White flight” from Philadelphia to the nearby suburbs beginning in the 1950s • Federal and state environmental laws governing pollution and waste disposal, first enacted in the early 1970s • Sharp increase in public concern over industrial pollution and chemical wastes, which began with the news coverage of the Love Canal disaster in the late 1970s–­early 1980s • The disappearance of manufacturing jobs that began in the mid-­1970s

Appendix  •  177

• The “garbage crisis” of the mid-­1980s, and the push to site new landfills and incinerators The developments above indicate that both 1950 and 1970 were important turning points. The year 1950 marked the apex of industrialization (and industrial employment) in Philadelphia; just a few years afterward marked the beginning of the suburbanization of industry and people. To enable comparison across time, the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area in 2010 was defined as it was in 1950: Philadelphia plus seven surrounding counties (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties in Pennsylvania; and Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River).

Rationale for Scope and Scale of the Study The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) is a methodological problem widely recognized among spatial researchers. Statistical relationships between spatially aggregated data will differ at different scales (“scale effects”), and at different scopes (“aggregation effects” or “scope effects”) so that different choices of scale or scope lead to differing study outcomes.1 Although the results of spatial studies are unavoidably biased by these methodological choices, there is no generally accepted or standard scope or scale for environmental justice studies, which means that the choice of both scope and scale are driven by the researcher’s aims. If the researcher seeks to discover who lives close enough to a polluting facility to be reasonably defined as being “exposed” to its toxic air emissions (and thus at risk for health problems from such exposure), then the smallest possible unit of analysis—­a one-­mile radius or smaller—­is generally accepted as the most defensible and methodologically appropriate, because concentrations of pollutants are probably more dilute further away from their source.2 But if the goal is instead to explain the development of contemporary environmental inequalities by examining the area’s history, it makes sense to choose a larger scale, and seek a unit of analysis with boundaries that are both socially and legally meaningful. Measuring environmental burdening in terms of towns and parts of the city allows a tracing of historical processes, including industrial specialization, racial exclusion, and social class segregation. Using politically meaningful communities to measure hazard burdening also allowed for an understanding of how federal, state, and local environmental laws and regulations have changed the pattern of environmental inequality. Overall, these laws have made crucial improvements to environmental conditions, which are now much better than they were in the past. But in some cases the new practices that came about because of these laws have exacerbated environmental inequalities. In the Philadelphia area this has meant changes in

178  •  Appendix

the spatial scale at which environmental laws governing waste disposal were administered. In the late 1970s (in New Jersey) and early 1980s (in Pennsylvania), state environmental regulators began to require each county to devise and file its own plan for waste disposal. Thus, for waste disposal decisions (such as whether to incinerate or landfill garbage), this meant that decision-­making authority was “scaled down” from the state level to the county level. In the case of dumps and landfills, such authority was instead “scaled up” from the borough, city, or township level to the county level. This was an important change from the past, when every town had a town dump. By the late 1970s, many of these substandard dumps were closed, decreasing landfill space and driving up the cost of waste disposal. The new regulations thus triggered a “garbage crisis” in the mid-­1980s, which resulted in a push to site new landfills and incinerators. The low cost of land and predominant industrial zoning in the city’s old industrial neighborhoods and the industrial suburbs close to the Delaware River made these areas attractive places to site waste disposal facilities, creating a concentration of both old, abandoned industrial sites and wastes, and new waste and waste disposal facilities in the same areas. The siting of waste disposal facilities in deindustrialized waterfront communities exacerbated existing environmental and social inequalities between these communities and the newer suburbs farther away from the city. In order to understand these dynamics, it is necessary to observe these changes at the municipal level. To provide rich historical detail, the scope of the study had to be limited to just one metropolitan area. Limiting the study area to the city itself would have foreclosed a holistic understanding of the entire area, including its suburbs. Some of these suburbs are now among the extensively burdened communities in the area, making it vitally important to include Philadelphia’s suburbs in the study.

Methodology: Mapping Communities and Environmental Hazards in 2010 1. Study Area, Unit of Analysis, and Census Data

The study area is the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area as it existed in 1950 (which facilitates historical analysis and comparison with 1950). This includes: Philadelphia (which since 1854 has been both Philadelphia City and Philadelphia County); Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River; and Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River. In recent decades, Salem County, New Jersey, has been included in the “official” definition of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area, but it was not considered part of it in 1950 or before.

Appendix  •  179

The unit of analysis is the community: outside of Philadelphia, this consists of each borough, city, or town; inside the city, each of twelve Planning Analysis Areas. Although the Philadelphia City Planning Commission redrew the boundaries of these areas into eighteen planning districts and began using these in 2011, only twelve Planning Analysis Areas existed in 1950; therefore, I use the old spatial definition in order to increase the comparability of the data from 1950 to 2010.3 The size difference between suburban municipalities and Planning Analysis Areas is a potential source of bias, which would undermine the validity of the analysis. The municipalities inside the study area but outside Philadelphia ranged in size from 0.07 square miles to 100.1 square miles (with a median of 6.78 square miles). Philadelphia’s 384 census tracts averaged one-­fourth of a square mile in area, making them much too small to be comparable with municipalities outside Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s neighborhoods had strong identities as places, but were problematic as the unit of analysis because their boundaries were fiercely contested. There is no agreement on the actual number of neighborhoods that exist in Philadelphia, which ranges from the 70 shown on a popular map sold in tourist locations, to the City’s official count of 200, to historians’ count of 395.4 To add to the confusion, the boundaries and place-­names of these neighborhoods have changed and shifted over time; and neighborhood boundaries do not correspond well to census tract boundaries. Worst of all, like census tracts, neighbor­hoods were too small in area to be comparable to suburban municipalities, since they ranged from 0.004 square miles to 14.26 square miles (with a median of 0.53 square miles).5 Although Philadelphia’s Planning Analysis Areas did not have as strong an identity as neighborhoods, spatially they were better candidates for the unit of analysis than neighborhoods. They ranged in size from 2.2 square miles to 26.67 square miles with a median of 10.02 square miles, making them more comparable in size to the towns surrounding Philadelphia than any of the other possible units of analysis. City planners created them by aggregating Philadelphia census tracts together into twelve places, so they were very easy to create and tie together with census data. They were also politically meaningful, since the Philadelphia City Planning Commission uses Planning Analysis Areas, not neighborhoods, as the basis for planning, redevelopment, and land-­use decisions. Thus, all 384 Philadelphia census tracts for 2010 were aggregated into each of the twelve Planning Analysis Areas. Of all 342 municipalities outside of Philadelphia in the eight-­county area, 166 (49 percent)

180  •  Appendix

contained only one census tract as of 2010. For those containing more than one census tract, a municipalities shapefile for 2012 was used as a guide to spatially aggregate the census tracts. Data from the census tracts contained within the borders of multiple census-­tract municipalities were added together.6 2. Definitions and Boundaries for Neighborhoods Studied Environmentally hazardous facilities or sites were mapped onto a 2010 census map of the Philadelphia municipal area. Each data point fell within the boundaries of either a suburban municipality or one of Philadelphia’s Planning Analysis Areas. But given that the city’s history is conceptually organized around neighborhoods, it was still important to define neighborhood boundaries. Neighborhood boundaries are always contested in Philadelphia; there is often no general agreement between residents as to where the boundaries lie. For the sake of consistency, whenever I referred to any of the smaller neighborhoods within Planning Analysis Areas, I used the City of Philadelphia’s official boundaries. For example, the Port Richmond portion of the Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond Planning Analysis Area is made up of four neighborhoods that city officials call Port Richmond I, Port Richmond II, Richmond I, and Richmond II, and together these contain eight Philadelphia census tracts: 178, 179, 180.1, 180.2, 188, 378, 379 and 382.8. 3. Sources of Data for Hazardous Facilities or Sites Included in the Analysis As adapted from Daniel R. Faber and Eric J. Krieg’s method for determining cumulative burdening with environmental hazards, eleven different types of hazards were mapped onto 2010 census maps (see table 16).7 4. Description of Environmental Hazards Used in the Analysis Superfund Sites. In 1981, the EPA established the Superfund program to enable and fund the cleanup of sites contaminated with abandoned hazardous waste before the parties who dumped the waste were identified. EPA ranks the sites in terms of the degree of hazard to the public health, and the most hazardous of these are listed on the National Priority List (NPL) to be cleaned first. EPA provides the public with lists of all known Superfund sites. Although the list of sites is constantly being updated as sites are discovered, listed, cleaned up, and deleted or archived, each active Superfund site is linked to a database. The database contains the date when the site was discovered, and the date it was proposed, listed, or deleted from the NPL. Thus, it was possible to determine which sites were known, active, and not yet deleted in 2010.

Appendix  •  181

Power Plants. All U.S. plants generating electric power are listed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and made available to the public online (see table 16). Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) Facilities. One well-­established method for defining “polluting industry” is the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), which was established in 1986 with the passage of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-­to-­Know Act (EPCRA). The TRI is a national database created from annual self-­reports from factories, power plants, bulk storage terminals for chemicals and petroleum, and hazardous waste handlers. Each year since 1987, facilities have had to report to EPA their emissions to air, water, or land (and the amount of waste taken offsite) if they meet the following criteria: they are not in an “exempt” industrial sector (as defined by NAICS code); they employ ten or more full-­time employees; and they manufacture, process, or store a chemical defined as hazardous by EPA in excess of the applicable threshold level (usually 10,000 lbs.) during the course of a year. Although electric power plants and hazardous waste-­handling facilities have been included in the TRI data after 1995, only factories and bulk terminals have been listed as TRI facilities to avoid double-­counting the same facility. Although military sites are also included in the TRI, these have not been not included due to the difficulty of characterizing them and comparing them with private industrial facilities through history. Commercial Hazardous Waste Treatment, Storage and Disposal Facilities (TSDFs). Information on these facilities as of 2010 is easily available online through the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Departments of Environmental Protection. Incinerators. In terms of their history in the Philadelphia area, incinerators were perhaps the most difficult hazard for which to obtain data. Official lists of incinerators from decades past are nonexistent, but Streets Department maps from the 1920s and reports from the 1960s, combined with the controversy surrounding virtually all incinerators, made it possible to track the appearance and disappearance of Philadelphia incinerators through time (see chapters 3, 4, and 5). The last two of Philadelphia’s old-­style incinerators were the Northwest Incinerator in the Manayunk neighborhood and the Northeast Incinerator in the Kensington neighborhood; public pressure had forced the shutdown of both by 1988. The new style of incinerator was the “waste-­to-­energy” plant of the 1980s and 1990s, which generated electric power by burning municipal garbage. Despite the popularity of these facilities with investors, the prospect of their siting caused a public uproar everywhere they were proposed. Thus, it was possible to begin with the 2010 list

182  •  Appendix

Table 16

Data Sources for Environmental Hazards Environmental hazards in 2010

Active and proposed National Priority List (NPL) Superfund sitesa Active non-­NPL Superfund sitesa Electric power plantsb Facility listed on Toxic Release Inventory (TRI)c Commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilityd, e Incineratorsf, g Construction and demolition landfillsh, i Industrial waste landfillsj, k Municipal landfillsl, m Large sewage treatment plant or sludge management facilityn Trash transfer stationso, p

Points per facility or site

25 5 10 5 5 20 3 5 5 5 5

a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2, “New Jersey Superfund Sites,” last modified January 31, 2011, accessed June 12, 2012, http://​www​.epa​.gov/​region02/​cleanup/​sites/​njtoc​_name​.htm; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 3, “Pennsylvania Superfund Sites,” last modified June 11, 2012, accessed June 13, 2012, http://​www​.epa​.gov/​reg3hwmd/​super/​pa​.htm; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Deleted National Priority List Sites by State, New Jersey,” last modified March 2, 2012, accessed June 10, 2012, http://​www​.epa​.gov/​superfund/​sites/​query/​queryhtm/​npldel​.htm​#NJ; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Deleted National Priority List Sites by State, Pennsylvania,” last modified March 2, 2012, accessed June 10, 2012, http://​www​.epa​.gov/​superfund/​sites/​query/​queryhtm/​npldel​.htm​#PA. b U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Form EIA-­923,” accessed March 20, 2012, http://​www​.eia​ .gov/​electricity/​data/​eia923/​index​.html. c U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Toxic Release Inventory “Release Reports,” last modified April 20, 2012, accessed April 30, 2012, http://​iaspub​.epa​.gov/​triexplorer/​tri​_release​.facility. d New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, “Authorized New Jersey Hazardous Waste Facilities, November 2010,” last modified November 23, 2010, accessed March 15, 2012, http://​www​.state​ .nj​.us/​dep/​dshw/​hwtf/​anjhwf​.htm. e Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, “List of Commercial Hazardous Waste TSDFs,” last modified 2012, accessed March 15, 2012, http://​www​.portal​.state​.pa​.us/​portal/​server​.pt​ ?open​=5​ 14​&o​ bjID​=​589612​&​mode​=​2. f New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, “Authorized New Jersey Incinerators,” last modified March 7, 2011, accessed March 15, 2012, http://​www​.state​.nj​.us/​dep/​dshw/​rrtp/​ njaincin​.htm. g Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, “List of Commercial Hazardous Waste TSDFs,” last modified 2012, accessed March 15, 2012, http://​www​.portal​.state​.pa​.us/​portal/​server​.pt​ ?open​=5​ 14​&o​ bjID​=​589612​&​mode​=​2. h New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, “NJDEP Approved Operating Commercial Sanitary Landfills,” last modified 2011, accessed March 15, 2012, http://​www​.state​.nj​.us/​dep/​dshw/​lrm/​ aocslf​.htm. i Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, “Municipal Landfills and Resource Recovery Facilities,” last modified 2012, accessed March 15, 2012, http://​www​.portal​.state​.pa​.us/​portal/​server​.pt​ ?open​=5​ 14​&o​ bjID​=​589660​&​mode​=​2. j Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, “List of Commercial Hazardous Waste TSDFs,” last modified 2012, accessed March 15, 2012, http://​www​.portal​.state​.pa​.us/​portal/​server​.pt​ ?open​=5​ 14​&o​ bjID​=​589612​&​mode​=​2. k New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, “NJDEP Approved Operating Commercial Sanitary Landfills,” last modified 2011, accessed March 15, 2012, http://www.state.nj.us/dep/dshw/lrnm/aocslf.htm.

Appendix  •  183

of incinerators available from the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Departments of Environmental Protection, and discover from articles written in the Pennsylvania Inquirer when these and other incinerators began operation or were decommissioned.8 Construction and Demolition, Industrial, and Municipal Landfills. The locations of landfills in 2010 were available from the state agencies. Industrial landfills were listed separately from Superfund sites (which were abandoned and not currently maintained) and from TSDFs (which handled mostly liquid industrial wastes). Industrial landfills contained mostly dry industrial wastes (such as waste metal), and thus were assigned 5 hazard points (the same as a municipal landfill). Sewage Treatment and Sludge Management Facilities. For most of the plants serving the largest number of people, plant capacity (in million gallons per day) was listed. The plants with capacity larger than 70 percent of others were defined as “large” plants. Trash Transfer Stations. 2010 locations were obtained from online data provided by the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Departments of Environmental Protection. Not all facilities or sites could be geocoded. For about 10 percent, there was no address information; others were too large to conform to one point on the map (for example, some huge landfills span more than one township). But even facilities with no street address had at least a town location. Thus, it was possible to calculate how many of each type of facility were located in each township in 2010. (About 98 percent of Philadelphia facilities had street addresses; the few facilities that could not be assigned to a Planning Analysis Area could not be included in the analysis.) 5. Study Limitations Associated with These Data Faber and Krieg’s method of assigning points to each type of hazardous facility was based on data from Massachusetts, which were l New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, “NJDEP Approved Operating Commercial Sanitary Landfills,” last modified 2011, accessed March 15, 2012, http://​www​.state​.nj​.us/​dep/​dshw/​lrm/​aocslf​.htm. m Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, “Municipal Landfills and Resource Recovery Facilities,” last modified 2012, accessed March 15, 2012, http://​www​.portal​.state​.pa​.us/​portal/​server​.pt​?open​=​514​&​objID​=​589660​&​mode​=​2. n U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1957 Inventory of Municipal and Industrial Waste Facilities, Vol. 2, Region II (Washington, DC, 1957). o New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, “Transfer Stations/Intermodal Container/ Material Recovery Stations,” last modified January 6, 2012, accessed July 15, 2012, http://​www​.nj​.gov/​ dep/​dshw/​hwtf/​tsicmrfd​.htm. p Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, “Municipal Landfills and Resource Recovery Facilities,” last modified 2012, accessed July 15, 2012, http://​www​.portal​.state​.pa​.us/​portal/​server​.pt​ ?open​=5​ 14​&o​ bjID​=​589660​&​mode​=​2.

184  •  Appendix

sufficiently well researched to more accurately characterize the threat to human health from each facility. No such work has been done for the New Jersey or Pennsylvania data in this study, which calls into question how accurate the number symbolizing the hazardousness of each type of facility may be. Nor does this method capture the entire universe of environmental hazards and environmental inequality. Besides pollutants from motor vehicle exhaust, some communities near the airport may be exposed to jet engine exhaust.9 Others near shipping docks on the Delaware may also be exposed to marine vehicle exhaust.10 I have not included federal facilities, such as military bases, although these are often extremely hazardous neighbors. But the decisions about where to locate such facilities rest entirely with the federal government, and their connection with the economic and social history of Philadelphia is tenuous, and in many cases, difficult to discover. In addition, the location and use of these facilities has changed much more since the 1950s than have industrial factories, making comparison across time difficult. Also left out are the small-­quantity generators of pollution: auto body shops, wrecking yards, dry cleaners, etc., although these can be significant sources of pollution to those living closest to them. Finally, although the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area includes agricultural areas (especially in Burlington County and other areas in southern New Jersey), I have excluded any agricultural hazards such as pesticide application. In effect, I have chosen to sacrifice precise measures of proximity to hazards, the full spectrum of hazards, and even the crudest measure of human exposure in order to understand the larger spatial, social, and historical processes that shaped environmental inequality formation in the Philadelphia area. 6. Measures of Environmental Burdening Following Faber and Krieg, I calculated four measures of environmental burdening.11 Two were measures of extensive burdening, which Faber and Krieg defined as the total number of hazard points in each township or Planning Analysis Area. But to ensure that what was being measured was the concentration of multiple hazards in certain communities (in addition to the concentration of the most hazardous facilities), I included a second measure of extensive burdening: the number of facilities or sites in each community. I also calculated two measures of intensive burdening (the first defined by Faber and Krieg as total hazard points per square mile; the second, number of sites or facilities per square mile). However, due to the tiny size of some suburban boroughs (many smaller than one square

Appendix  •  185

mile), the measures of intensive burdening were not good measures of environmental inequality. Some places were defined as intensively burdened simply because they contained one hazardous site or facility in a very small area; thus, only the measures of extensive burdening are reported here. A community was defined as extensively burdened only if it was in the 90th percentile for both total hazard points and number of hazardous sites (see table 17). Another measure of distributional inequality is the spatial clustering of environmental hazards. A statistical test for spatial clustering is the Getis-­Ord Hotspot Analysis, which generates p-values. P-values measure the probability of a nonrandom spatial distribution: more than 1.65 standard deviations above the mean indicate that facilities or sites are spatially clustered; p-values more than 1.65 standard deviations below the mean indicate that they are spatially dispersed. The Hotspot Analysis showed that the environmental hazards shown in table 1 were significantly spatially clustered. Clustering was strongest in Philadelphia, some communities in Montgomery and Bucks Counties adjacent to Philadelphia, and the New Jersey communities bordering Philadelphia along the Delaware River (see map 16). 7. Deriving Cutpoints for Racial/Ethnic Composition, 2010

MAP 16   Getis-­Ord Hotspot Analysis showing number of environmental hazards per community, 2010.

Bensalem Township, PA (Lower middle class, Substantially diverse) Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond, PA* (Lower middle class, Substantially diverse) Bristol Township, PA (Disadvantaged, Substantially diverse) Burlington Township, NJ (Middle class, Substantially diverse) Camden City, NJ (Disadvantaged, High minority) Chester City, PA (Disadvantaged, High minority)

Community name, social class, and racial/ethnic composition categories

40 155 110 40 100 70

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Borders Delaware River Total hazard points

10

17

7

14

25

7

Total number hazards

Communities in the 90th Percentile for Environmental Burdening, by Hazard Points, Number of Hazards, and Community Characteristics

Table 17

$28,698

$27,215

$77,229

$57,692

$32,654

$57,786

15.67

4.90

71.37

77.31

50.28

72.09%

72.16

44.32

10.33

9.94

12.67

7.02%

Median household Percentage white, Percentage black, income 2010 2010

(continued)

9.02

47.04

5.87

7.40

31.77

8.43%

Percentage Hispanic, 2010

Darby Township, PA (Disadvantaged, Predominantly black) East Whiteland Township, PA (Upper middle class, Substantially diverse) Falls Township, PA (Lower middle class, Predominantly white) Far Northeast, PA* (Disadvantaged, Substantially diverse) Franklin Township, NJ (Lower middle class, Substantially diverse) Greenwich Township, NJ (Lower middle class, Predominantly white) Hilltown Township, PA (Upper middle class, Predominantly white) Honey Brook Township, PA (Lower middle class, Predominantly white) Lansdale Borough, PA (Disadvantaged, Substantially diverse)

65 65 165 55 110 50 45 40 60

No No Yes Yes No Yes No No No

4

4

5

6

6

11

25

5

5

$53,727

$73,355

$85,864

$63,817

$73,042

$52,376

$67,949

$89,745

$50,720

73.60

95.41

91.18

91.53

85.64

74.44

84.38

77.05

57.03

5.72

.93

1.86

3.96

6.91

10.26

5.29

3.05

38.28

(continued)

4.95

1.70

2.77

2.35

4.49

6.20

4.27

6.87

2.04

Limerick Township, PA (Middle class, Predominantly white) Logan Township, NJ (Middle class, Substantially diverse) Lower North Philadelphia, PA* (Lower middle class, High minority) Marcus Hook Borough, PA (Disadvantaged, Substantially diverse) Montgomery Township, PA (Affluent, Predominantly white) Near Northeast Philadelphia, PA* (Disadvantaged, High minority)

Community name, social class, and racial/ethnic composition categories

35 70 65 65 50 90

No Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Borders Delaware River Total hazard points

13

6

8

13

6

6

Total number hazards

$39,793

$86,601

$33,571

$31,068

$87,209

$77,600

47.90

75.16

80.68

27.15

79.16

90.29

25.28

4.57

12.81

54.55

12.21

3.28

Median household Percentage white, Percentage black, income 2010 2010

Communities in the 90th Percentile for Environmental Burdening, by Hazard Points, Number of Hazards, and Community Characteristics (continued)

Table 17

(continued)

16.27

2.22

2.96

12.77

3.97

1.76

Percentage Hispanic, 2010

Pennsauken Township, NJ (Disadvantaged, High minority) Pitman Borough, NJ (Middle class, Predominantly white) Plymouth Township, PA (Upper middle class, Predominantly white) Pottstown Borough, PA (Disadvantaged, Substantially diverse) South Philadelphia, PA* (Disadvantaged, High minority) Southwest Philadelphia, PA* (Disadvantaged, Predominantly black) Upper Merion Township, PA (Upper middle class, Predominantly white) Upper North Philadelphia, PA* (Disadvantaged, High minority)

53 40 80 45 105 95 150 55

Yes No No No Yes Yes No No

11

10

15

18

8

12

4

11

$21,666

$85,519

$33,807

$39,868

$41,892

$68,149

$67,736

$56,800

3.67

73.82

7.13

50.29

68.72

81.68

94.38

38.02

51.58

5.32

82.99

26.84

18.53

6.92

1.11

25.04

(continued)

42.18

3.91

2.63

7.83

7.98

2.60

2.46

26.91

65 60 95 40

No No Yes Yes

Borders Delaware River Total hazard points

*Planning analysis area within the City of Philadelphia.

Warminster Township, PA (Middle class, Substantially diverse) West Caln Township, PA (Middle class, Predominantly white) West Deptford Township, NJ (Middle class, Predominantly white) Westville Borough, NJ (Disadvantaged, Substantially diverse)

Community name, social class, and racial/ethnic composition categories

4

14

4

9

Total number hazards

$49,854

$69,046

$75,973

$59,043

86.45

87.99

91.74

86.07

4.64

5.65

3.72

2.78

Median household Percentage white, Percentage black, income 2010 2010

Communities in the 90th Percentile for Environmental Burdening, by Hazard Points, Number of Hazards, and Community Characteristics (continued)

Table 17

6.02

3.21

2.26

7.54

Percentage Hispanic, 2010

Appendix  •  191

The racial/ethnic groups that were the focus of the study were non-­ Hispanic whites, African Americans, and Hispanics, because these are the three groups shown by most environmental justice studies to be disproportionately close to urban industrial hazards.12 In 2010, the population of Greater Philadelphia was 78.47  percent non-­Hispanic white, 10.32 percent African American, and 5.74 percent Hispanic. The population of the City of Philadelphia was 39.21 percent non-­Hispanic white, 40.52 percent African American, and 12.18 percent Hispanic. Asians were left out of the analysis because they share a high socioeconomic status with non-­Hispanic whites, instead of sharing the disadvantage of other first-­and second-­generation immigrant groups (such as Hispanics); their social mobility in the United States has even called into question their status as a “minority group.”13 They also make up a smaller proportion of Philadelphia’s population than is true for other major cities such as New York or Chicago: as of 2010, Asians and Pacific Islanders were only 5.15 percent of the population of Greater Philadelphia and 6.3 percent of the population of the City of Philadelphia. Native Americans were also left out of the analysis because for them, environmental inequality is mostly a rural phenomenon.14 In addition, they made up only 0.27 percent of the population of Greater Philadelphia and 0.5 percent of the City of Philadelphia. Following Richard A. Smith, a comparative approach was used to create cutpoints for characterizing racial/ethnic composition.15 The formula for calculating levels of integration is provided in table 18. For the eight-­county Philadelphia area in 2010, mean percentage black was 10.32 percent, and mean percentage Hispanic was 5.74 percent. Plugging

Table 18

Formula for Measuring Racial Integration with Comparative Approach Level of integration

Substantially white Minimally integrated-­white Moderately integrated-­white Substantially integrated Moderately integrated-­black Minimally integrated-­black Substantially black

Percentage minority lower limit

Percentage minority upper limit

0% X 2X 3X 5X 5X + Y 5X + 2Y

X 2X 3X 5X 5X + Y 5X + 2Y 100%

SOURCE: Richard A. Smith, “Discovering Stable Racial Integration,” Journal of Urban Affairs 20, no. 1

(1998): 1–­25. NOTE: Definition of X and Y: X = Percent of population black/4, Y = (100% –­5X)/3

192  •  Appendix

the figure for percentage black into the formula yielded the following cutpoints for Philadelphia area communities (detailed in table 19). Although Smith focused only on the degree to which blacks were integrated with whites, it was important to differentiate between different types of predominantly minority communities because environmental justice studies show that in some areas Hispanics may suffer more from environmental inequalities than African Americans, and vice versa.16 The same procedure outlined above was followed to calculate categories symbolizing the degree to which Hispanics were integrated. But when the reference group was Hispanics, it was evident that the scale would have to be modified because in the Philadelphia area, Hispanics are a much lower proportion of the population (5.74  percent) compared with African Americans (10.38 percent), and because communities with high proportions of Hispanics varied greatly. Some also had high proportions of African Americans; in others there were almost equal distributions of African Americans, Hispanics, and whites; and others, despite the disproportionate number of Hispanics, fit the definition of “predominantly white” communities. These distinctions held social meaning and were important in understanding race/ethnicity in the patterning of environmental inequality in the Philadelphia area. Thus, the following mutually exclusive categories were created (see table 3, chapter 1). 8. Deriving Cutpoints for Social Class Status, 2010 Creating categories to capture the social class status of places is problematic because when that is done, class may be “reified” (presented as a “thing” rather than a relationship). Categories can also introduce distortions and inaccuracies by homogenizing class differences between people living in one part of town versus another, and through possible miscategorization of places if cutpoints are set too low or too high (the same can be said of racial/ethnic categories, too). Table 19

Cutpoints for Racial/Ethnic Composition Categories Level of integration

Substantially white Minimally integrated-­white (predominantly white) Moderately integrated-­white (predominantly white) Substantially integrated Moderately integrated-­black (predominantly black) Minimally integrated-­black (predominantly black) Substantially black

Percentage black lower limit

0.00% 2.59 5.17 7.75 13.00 31.62 70.97

Percentage black upper limit

2.58% 5.16 7.74 12.99 31.61 70.96 100.00

Appendix  •  193

However, class is relational in nature, and has meaning only in relation to the class status of other individuals and places. Thus, it was important to be able to understand how places ranked in the social class hierarchy, and how differences between places are created, maintained, and produced through social class inequality.17 It was also important to understand the intersectionality of environmental inequality—­how racial/ethnic composition and social class status might go together (or not) with environmental burdening. There are many ways of classifying the social class status of places. But for this study, I used four characteristics of the residents of each community captured by census data: median household income; median home value; educational attainment (measured by the proportion of residents over twenty-­five years old with less than a high school diploma, and the proportion with a bachelor’s degree or more); and occupation (measured by the proportion in management, business, science, and the arts occupations, and the proportion in service occupations). These two occupational categories were chosen because management occupations were strongly and positively correlated with median household income (0.719) and median home value (0.709), while service occupations were strongly and negatively correlated with median household income (–­0.659) and median home value (–­0.607). Thus, these two occupations were chosen as the two most telling of the high or low social class status of most people in the community. Each community was given a number of points ranging from 1 (for disadvantaged) to 5 (for affluent), indicating their position on each of the six social class variables. The first cutpoints were derived according to percentiles at either extreme: disadvantaged communities were defined as those where median household income, median home value, percentage of adults with bachelor’s degrees or higher, and percentage in management occupations fell at or below the 20th percentile; and adults with less than a high school diploma and percentage in service occupations fell at or above the 80th percentile. Affluent communities were defined as those where median income, home value, percentage of adults with bachelor’s degrees or higher, and percentage in management occupations fell at or above the 80th percentile, and adults with less than a high school diploma and percentage in service occupations fell at or below the 20th percentile. Once the cutpoints for disadvantaged and affluent communities were derived, the interval encompassing the three middle-­class categories was (for median household income) $54,072–­$94,894. The midpoint between the upper limit for disadvantaged ($54,071) and the 50th percentile ($70,565) was $62,319; thus the interval for lower middle-­class was $54,072–­62,318. Taking

194  •  Appendix

the midpoint between the 50th percentile and the lower limit for affluent ($94,984) yielded an interval for upper middle-­class of $82,776–­ $94,984. These intervals defined the interval for middle-­class, which was $62,319–­$82,775, encompassing the 50th percentile for all communities ($70,565). The same procedure was followed to derive the intervals for each of the variables (see table 4, chapter 1). If a community was given a value of 1 on all six variables, the community was designated disadvantaged relative to all other communities, and a community receiving a value of 5 on all six variables was designated affluent. But relatively few communities had values that fell neatly and consistently into the same category; many exhibited class statuses that were mixed or showed polarization (for example, both a high percentage of high school dropouts and a high percentage of college graduates). This problem was solved by summing all values, and letting the total determine the class category (see table 20). Descriptive statistics for communities in each category are shown in tables 21, 22, 23, and 24.

Table 20

Cutpoints for Social Class Category Social class category

Sum of values for all six variables

Disadvantaged Lower middle class Middle class Upper middle class Affluent

6–­10 11–­15 16–­20 21–­25 26–­30

Table 21

Average Racial/Ethnic Composition by Racial/Ethnic Composition Category, 2010

All communities High-­minority communities Predominantly black communities Predominantly Hispanic communities Substantially diverse communities Predominantly white communities Substantially white communities

Percentage white

Percentage black

Percentage Hispanic

78.60% 37.80 35.58 52.63 76.89 89.55 94.51

10.32% 36.60 54.60 3.76 9.90 2.80 1.09

5.74% 20.39 3.50 41.48 7.00 2.64 0.93

Appendix  •  195

Table 22

Average Median Household Income and Median Home Value by Racial/Ethnic Composition Category, 2010

All communities High-­minority communities Predominantly black communities Predominantly Hispanic communities Substantially diverse communities Predominantly white communities Substantially white communities

Average median household income

Average median home value

$74,942 $53,921 $49,868 $81,561 $66,147 $85,662 $83,792

$283,542 $184,530 $147,111 $277,588 $243,565 $332,383 $353,100

Table 23

Average Economic, Educational, and Occupational Characteristics by Social Class Category, 2010 All Lower middle Upper middle communities Disadvantaged class Middle class class

Median household income Median home values Percentage with less than high school diploma Percentage with B.A. degree or more Percentage in management occupation Percentage in service occupation

$72,622

$85,910

Affluent

$74,942

$48,589

$59,478

$109,217

$283,542

$156,489

$218,897 $276,291 $333,665 $436,378

7.13%

13.88%

9.14%

6.38%

4.31%

2.02%

37.56%

17.29%

25.86%

34.32%

47.87%

63.51%

46.60%

25.65%

33.51%

39.55%

48.00%

56.77%

14.24%

21.35%

16.45%

13.29%

11.34%

8.84%

9. Calculating Community Risk for Extensive Environmental Burdening

To calculate each community’s risk for extensive environmental burdening, I employed the epidemiological method used by Benjamin J. Apelberg, Timothy J. Buckley, and Ronald H. White, and by Stephen H. Linder, Dritana Marko, and Ken Sexton to calculate risk for exposure to air pollutants.18 I used this method to calculate risk for extensive burdening in two papers on environmental inequality in the Philadelphia area in 2000.19

196  •  Appendix

Table 24

Average Racial/Ethnic Composition by Social Class Category, 2010 All Lower middle-­ Upper middle-­ communities Disadvantaged class Middle-­class class Affluent

Percentage white Percentage black Percentage Hispanic

78.60% 10.32% 5.74%

59.28% 23.38% 11.25%

73.39% 15.20% 6.88%

85.77% 5.44% 4.27%

84.79% 5.44% 4.34%

88.14% 3.04% 2.36%

To calculate confidence intervals for relative risk, I used a calculator in which the researcher places the number of outcomes per group characterstic in a two-­by-­two table (in medical applications, this would involve treatment/no treatment; better/no better).20 For this study, a dummy variable was created to identify each reference group (for example, high-­minority communities = 1), and their burdening status (extensively burdened = 1). Seven of the 33 extensively burdened communities were high-­minority and 26 were not; 20 of the unburdened communities were high-­minority communities, and 298 were not. This yielded a relative risk for high-­minority communities of 3.23. Average risk is 1.0; therefore, high-­minority communities faced more than three times the average risk for extensive burdening. However, relative risk is only significant if the confidence interval does not span 1.0. For high-­ minority communities, the 95 percent confidence interval was 1.55–­6.75 (positive and significant). In table 25, the top row and first column show risk ratios and confidence intervals for single attributes (such as bordering the Delaware River or being a high-­minority community), while the other rows and columns show risk ratios and confidence intervals for combined attributes (such as being both disadvantaged and predominantly white; see table 25). For example, the risk ratio for high-­minority communities that border the Delaware is 8.44, eight times average. The confidence interval ranges from 4.70 to 15.19; since the interval does not contain 1.0, we can be 95 percent sure that this group of communities faces a risk from 4–­15 times average.

Mapping Community Conditions and Environmental Hazards in 1950 Geographic and statistical census data for 1950 were obtained from the National Historical Geographic Information System database.21 Census maps (at the census tract level) and census data were downloaded. As was done for 2010 data, census tract data were aggregated up to the municipality level (for

Substantially diverse, lower middle

Predominately Hispanic, lower middle

Predominately non-­Hispanic black, lower middle

High minority, lower middle

Substantially white, disadvantaged

Predominately white, disadvantaged

Predominately Hispanic, disadvantaged Substantially diverse, disadvantaged

Predominately non-­Hispanic black, disadvantaged

High minority, disadvantaged

4.69 (2.03–­10.81)* 6.40

6.9 (3.12–­15.25)* 8.60 . . . 1.00 . . .

. . .

8.65 (4.47–­16.75)* 10.00 10.91 (7.84–­15.17)* 15.00 . . . 6.29 (3.35–­11.80)* 4.67 3.41 (1.25–­9.33)* 3.00

Borders Delaware

Urban

11.23 (8.02–­15.71)* 18.00

7.46 (3.13–­17.77)* 11.67 . . . 4.00 . . .

. . .

. . .

10.91 (7.84–­15.17)* 13.00 10.91 (7.84–­15.17)* 15.00 . . . . . .

Risk Ratios and 95% Confidence Intervals (in Parentheses) Measuring Risk for Extensive Burdening (Mean Number of Hazards Shown in Italics)

Table 25

.80 (0.20–­3.17) 1.58

. . . 0.00 2.70 (.48–­15.24) 3.00 2.16 (.36–­12.84) 2.00 . . .

4.91 (1.58–­15.27)* 6.40 . . . 0.86 . . . 2.70 (0.48–­15.24) 3.50 . . . 2.33

Inner-­ring

. . . 0.50 0.41 (0.06–­2.85) 0.72 (continued)

. . . 0.00 . . . 0.80 . . .

. . . 5.44 (1.31–­22.60)* 4.00 . . . 1.00

. . .

. . .

Outer-­ring

. . .

Predominately Hispanic, middle

. . . . . . . . .

Predominately white, middle

High minority, upper middle

Predominately non-­Hispanic black, upper middle Predominately Hispanic, upper middle

Substantially white, middle

10.91 (7.84–­15.17)* 7.00 . . . 4.00 . . .

Substantially diverse, middle

. . .

5.58 (1.98–­15.73)* 10.50 . . . 0.00 . . .

Predominately non-­Hispanic black, middle

High minority, middle

Substantially white, lower middle

Predominately white, lower middle

Borders Delaware

. . . . . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

11.23 (8.02–­15.71)* 11.00 . . . 4.00 . . .

. . .

. . .

Urban

Risk Ratios and 95% Confidence Intervals (in Parentheses) Measuring Risk for Extensive Burdening (Mean Number of Hazards Shown in Italics) (continued)

Table 25

. . . 1.00 . . . . . . 0.00

2.70 (0.48–­15.24) 3.75 . . . 1.20 . . .

. . . 0.67 . . .

1.44 (0.38–­5.46) 3.27 . . . 0.00 . . .

Inner-­ring

(continued)

. . . .00 1.67 (0.45–­6.25) 2.00 1.35 (0.35–­5.14) 1.19 . . . 1.00 . . . 0.00 . . . . . .

.52 (0.07–­3.58) 1.15 . . . 0.50 . . . 0.00 . . .

Outer-­ring

. . . . . . . . . . . . 2.00 . . . 1.50 . . .

Predominately white, upper middle

High minority, affluent

Predominately non-­Hispanic black, affluent

Predominately Hispanic, affluent

Substantially diverse, affluent . . . 1.00 . . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . . 5.00 . . .

. . .

. . . 1.50 0.52 (0.07–­3.58) 1.80 . . . 0.33

. . . 0.00 . . .

. . . 0.33 1.79 (0.29–­11.05) 3.33 . . . 0.00 . . .

. . . 1.00 0.61 (0.09–­4.21) 1.24 0.17 (0.02–­1.20) 0.82 . . . 0.25

. . . 2.00 . . .

1.82 (0.49–­6.27) 2.08 0.96 (0.25–­3.76) 1.73 . . .

NOTE: If no Risk Ratio is given, no communities in this category were among those extensively burdened; if no mean number of hazards is shown, no communities in this category were found. *p < .05

Substantially white, affluent

Predominately white, affluent

Substantially white, upper middle

. . . 6.50 . . . 2.00 . . .

Substantially diverse, upper middle

200  •  Appendix

boroughs, cities, and townships in the counties surrounding Philadelphia), and aggregated up to the Planning Analysis Area for Philadelphia. Historical material on the location of Philadelphia’s licensed dumps and trash incinerators before 1970 was obtained from the Philadelphia City Archives Streets Department Files, and Public Health Department, Air Pollution Division files for 1952–­1970. The location of city dumps and incinerators in the 1920s was taken from two maps created by the Streets Department, one from 1924 and one from 1929.22 An undated list of dumps was found in a file listing court cases, fines, and actions against Philadelphia dump operators during the 1950s and 1960s.23 It appears to include only private dumps and not those operated by the City of Philadelphia, and thus there was no material to check it against to determine its completeness. But it was still useful as one of the few existing records of Philadelphia’s waste disposal practices before the environmental reforms of the 1970s. Interestingly, a letter from the Public Health Department was found in the same file. The letter states that, as of 1956, the department did not have a list of all the licensed dumps in the city, despite having requested the information from the Licenses and Inspection Department (whose job it was to issue licenses for dumps).24 Incinerator locations were gleaned from 1929 Streets Department maps, and also from a report detailing the Streets Department’s activities from 1963 to 1967 that provides information as to how many incinerators were operating and the date they were built.25

Historical Material on the Location of Philadelphia Area Factories Data for New Jersey and Pennsylvania manufacturers were extracted from statewide directories.26 Although the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) did not exist in 1950, almost all of the same polluting industries that now must report to the TRI existed in the Philadelphia area. The data extracted from the two directories included all manufacturing establishments within the study area that had more than ten employees and that did not fit the modern-­day TRI definition of an exempt NAICS code (e.g., a factory sewing girls’ dresses from purchased cloth).27 Although both directories separated plant location from office location, listed the number of employees, and provided a detailed description of the business, these data were less than perfect. At least 35 percent of plants in the counties outside Philadelphia lacked useable street addresses, and thus could not be geocoded (although all could be assigned to a town); luckily, street addresses were listed for manufacturing plants in Philadelphia and heavily industrialized suburban towns including Camden, New Jersey, and Chester, Pennsylvania.

Appendix  •  201

Extracted data yielded a database including the name, address, description of the product, NAICS code (from SIC codes as listed in 1950), and industry category for 2,941 manufacturing plants. Philadelphia factories were geocoded and assigned to a Planning Analysis Area. The number of factories in each industry was summed. Factories outside Philadelphia largely lacked street addresses (only the town was listed); thus, the number of plants in each industry in each municipality was summed. To determine whether factories in noxious industries were spatially clustered in 1950, pollution-­intensive industries were identified. The six industries determined to be pollution-­intensive were: chemicals, fabricated metals, paper products, petroleum refining, plastics, and primary metals.28 The number of plants in each pollution-­intensive industry within each community was determined. A Getis-­Ord Hotspot Analysis was performed, which revealed that pollution-­intensive industries were in fact spatially clustered in Philadelphia in 1950; at that point, few pollution-­intensive plants had moved outward to suburban communities (see map 11, chapter 4).

Notes Introduction 1 Alexander v. Sandoval, 532 U.S. 275 (2001). For a recap of the impact of Alexander v.

Sandoval on environmental justice plaintiffs, see Lisa S. Cole, “Alexander v. Sandoval: Why a Supreme Court Case about Driver’s Licenses Matters to Environmental Justice Advocates,” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 30, no. 1 (2002): 191–­242. 2 For the details of Chester’s legal battles, see Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 34–­53; Robert Bahar, George McCollough, David Pearson, and Glen Muschio, Laid to Waste: A Chester Neighborhood Fights for Its Future (University of California Extension Center for Media and Independent Learning, 1996). For the details of Camden’s legal battles, see Olga Pomar, “Toxic Racism on a New Jersey Waterfront,” in The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, ed. Robert D. Bullard (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005), 125–­142. For commentary on the legal impact of the Sandoval decision, see John Arthur Laufer, “Alexander v. Sandoval and Its Implications for Disparate Impact Regimes,” Columbia Law Review 102 (2002): 1613; Kyle W. LaLonde, “Who Wants to Be an Environmental Justice Advocate? Options for Bringing an Environmental Justice Complaint in the Wake of Alexander v. Sandoval,” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 31, no. 1 (2004): 27–­60; Derek Black, “Picking Up the Pieces after Alexander v. Sandoval: Resurrecting a Private Cause of Action for Disparate Impact,” North Carolina Law Review 81 (2002–­2003): 356. 3 Interstate Commission on the Delaware River Basin, “The Delaware River Basin Physical Facts” (Philadelphia: INCODEL, 1940). 4 U.S. Census Bureau, American FactFinder, American Community Survey Five-­Year Estimates, 2006–­2010 (generated by Diane Sicotte using American FactFinder), http://​factfinder​.census​.gov/​faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​searchresults​.xhtml​?refresh​=​t (February 13, 2012). 5 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, 2012, http://​www​ .fbi​.gov/​about​-­­­­us/​cjis/​ucr/​crime​-­­­­in​-­­­­the​-u­­­­ ​.s/​2012/​crime​-­­­­in​-­­­­the​-­­­­u​.s.​-­­­­2012/​tables/​ 16tabledatadecpdf ( June 3, 2014). 203

204  •  Notes to Pages 4–11

6 Laura McCrystal, “Chester Democrats Fighting among Themselves,” Philadelphia

Inquirer, February 13, 2015, B1.

7 U.S. Census Bureau, American FactFinder, American Community Survey Five-­Year

Estimates, 2006–­2010.

8 Pennsylvania Department of Health Bureau of Health Statistics and Research,

Pennsylvania Vital Statistics, 2011 (Harrisburg, 2013), 164 and 176.

9 Morgan Kelly, History of Chester (CRQCL Webpage), quoted in Luke W. Cole

and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 48.

10 “Sarah Wilson” in discussion with the author, Chester, PA, May 14, 2014. 11 Carole Burnett in discussion with the author, Chester, PA, October 29, 2013. 12 Eric Ledell Smith, “The 1917 Race Riot in Chester, Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania His-

tory 75, no. 2 (2008): 171–­196.

13 Twelfth Industrial Directory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg:

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, 1950).

14 Personal communication with Doug Lisk. 15 John M. McLarnon, “‘Old Scratchhead’ Revisited: George Raymond and Civil

Rights in Chester, Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 69, no. 3 (2002): 297–­341.

16 “Sarah Wilson” in discussion with the author, Chester, PA, May 14, 2014. 17 Dominic Sama, “Chester Cab Firm Plagued by 20 Holdups in Last Month,” Phila-

delphia Inquirer, April 6, 1982, B1; Rich Heidorn Jr., “‘Reefer Drive’—­in Chester City, Housing Project Known as a Place Where Drugs Are Easy to Buy,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 11, 1982, B1; Marc Kaufman, “And in Chester, It’s Even Worse than in Phila.,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 6, 1983, B1; Roy H. Campbell, “Drug Trade Takes Toll on Chester’s Youth,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 1987, B1; Mary Jane Fine, “In Its War on Drugs, Chester May Raze HUD Project,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 8, 1987, B1. 18 Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press, 1993), 161–­184. 19 Carole Burnett in discussion with the author, Chester, PA, October 29, 2013. 20 Christopher Mele, “Neoliberalism, Race, and the Redefining of Urban Redevelopment,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 2 (2014): 603. 21 “Sarah Wilson” in discussion with the author, Chester, PA, May 14, 2014. 22 Alan J. Heavens, “Town by Town: Port Richmond Is Getting Younger,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 23, 2013. 23 Philadelphia City Planning Commission, The Political and Community Service Boundaries of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, June 2004), 57; U.S. Census, American Community Survey, 2006–­2010, American Community Survey Five-­Year Estimates, 2006–­2010 (Washington, DC). 24 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Envirofacts,” Philadelphia Coke, accessed June 7, 2014, http://​oaspub​.epa​.gov/​enviro/​multisys2​_v2​.get​_list​?facility​_uin​=​ 110000701839. 25 U.S. Census, American Community Survey, 2006–­2010, American Community Survey Five-­Year Estimates, 2006–­2010 (Washington, DC). 26 Michael Saier in discussion with the author, Port Richmond, Philadelphia, April 29, 2014. 27 Jacqueline ( Jackie) McGady-­Saier, e-mail message to author, March 7, 2013. 28 Michael Saier in discussion with the author, Port Richmond, Philadelphia, April 29, 2014. 29 Ibid. 30 Bob Bolin, Eric Matranga, Edward J. Hackett, Edward K. Sadalla, K. David

Notes to Pages 11–17  •  205

Pijawka, Debbie Brewer, and Diane Sicotte, “Environmental Equity in a Sunbelt City: The Spatial Distribution of Toxic Hazards in Phoenix, Arizona,” Environmental Hazards 2 (2000): 11–­24; Bob Bolin, Amy Nelson, Edward J. Hackett, K. David Pijawka, C. Scott Smith, Diane Sicotte, Edward K. Sadalla, Eric Matranga, and Maureen O’Donnell, “The Ecology of Technological Risk in a Sunbelt City,” Environment and Planning 1, no. 34 (2002): 317–­339. 31 On Los Angeles, see Rachel Morello-­Frosch, Manuel Pastor, and James Sadd, “Environmental Justice and Southern California’s ‘Riskscape’: The Distribution of Air Toxic Exposures and Health Risks among Diverse Communities,” Urban Affairs Review 36, no. 4 (2001): 551–­578; Laura Pulido, Steve Sidawi, and Robert O. Vos, “An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Los Angeles,” Urban Geography 17 (1996): 419–­439; and Laura Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 12–­40. On Silicon Valley, see Andrew Szasz and Michael Meuser, “Unintended, Inexorable: The Production of Environmental Inequalities in Santa Clara County, California,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 602–­632. On Seattle, Phil Brown, Desiree Ciambrone and Lori Hunter, “Does ‘Green’ Mask Grey? Environmental Equity Issues at the Metropolitan Level,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 34 (1997): 141–­158. On Portland, Ellen Stroud, “Troubled Waters in Ecotopia,” Radical History Review 74 (1999): 65–­95. 32 David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness (New York: Perseus Books, 2005); Theodore Hershberg, Stephanie W. Greenberg, Alan N. Burstein, William L. Yancey, and Eugene P. Ericksen, “A Tale of Three Cities: Blacks, Immigrants, and Opportunity in Philadelphia, 1850–­1880, 1930, 1970,” in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the 19th Century, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 461–­485. 33 Diane Sicotte, “Don’t Waste Us: Environmental Justice through Community Participation in Urban Planning,” Environmental Justice 3, no. 1 (2010): 7–­11. 34 Diane Sicotte and Samantha Swanson, “Whose Risk in Philadelphia? Proximity to Unequally Hazardous Industrial Facilities,” Social Science Quarterly 88, no. 2 (2007): 515–­534. 35 Diane Sicotte, “Some More Polluted than Others: Unequal Cumulative Industrial Hazard Burdens in the Philadelphia MSA, USA,” Local Environment 15, no. 8 (2010): 761–­774; Diane Sicotte, “Diversity and Intersectionality among Environmentally Burdened Communities in the Philadelphia MSA, USA,” Urban Studies 51, no. 9 (2014): 1850–­1870. 36 Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism.” 37 Sicotte, “Some More Polluted Than Others.” 38 David N. Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation: Toward a Theory of Environmental Injustice,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 581–­601.

Chapter 1  Measuring Environmental Inequalities 1 Lisa Sun-­Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow, The Slums of Aspen (New York: NYU

Press, 2011), 4.

2 Philadelphia City Planning Commission, “The Political and Community Ser-

vice Boundaries of Philadelphia,” accessed June 14, 2012, http://​www​.phila​.gov/​ CityPlanning/​resources/​Publications/​Political​_boundaries​.pdf.

206  •  Notes to Pages 17–22

3 U.S. Census Bureau, American FactFinder, American Community Survey Five-­Year

Estimates, 2006–­2010 (generated by Diane Sicotte using American FactFinder), http://​factfinder​.census​.gov/​faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​searchresults​.xhtml​?refresh​=​t (February 13, 2012). 4 Ryan Holifield, “Defining Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism,” Urban Geography 22, no. 1 (2001): 78–­90; Gordon Walker, Environmental Justice: Concepts, Evidence, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012), 12–­13. 5 Kristin Shrader-­Frechette, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 24, 27–­28, 95–­96, 135–­162. 6 Daniel Faber and Eric J. Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, Supplement 2 (2002): 277–­288. 7 The process of defining health effects from exposure to complex mixtures of toxic substances is extremely challenging; but see Ken Sexton and Dale Hattis, “Assessing Cumulative Health Risks from Exposure to Environmental Mixtures—­Three Fundamental Questions,” Environmental Health Perspectives 115, no. 5 (2007): 825–­832. See also Ilona Silins and Johan Hogberg, “Combined Toxic Exposures and Human Health: Biomarkers of Exposure and Effect,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 8, no. 3 (2011): 629–­647. 8 Michael Greenberg, Karen Lowrie, Laura Solitare, and Latoya Duncan, “Brownfields, TOADS, and the Struggle for Neighborhood Redevelopment: A Case Study of the State of New Jersey,” Urban Affairs Review 35, no. 5 (2000): 717–­733; Marie Howland, “The Role of Contamination in Central City Industrial Decline,” Economic Development Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2004): 207–­219; Terry J. Rephann, “The Economic Impacts of LULUs,” Environment and Planning C, Government and Policy 18, no. 4 (2000): 393–­407; Steven Farber, “Undesirable Facilities and Property Values: A Summary of Empirical Studies,” Ecological Economics 24, no. 1 (1998): 1–­14. 9 Paul Mohai and Bunyan Bryant, “Environmental Racism: Reviewing the Evidence,” in Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse, ed. Bunyan Bryant and Paul Mohai (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 163–­176; Andrew Szasz and Michael Meuser, “Environmental Inequalities: Literature Review and Proposals for New Directions in Research and Theory,” Current Sociology 45, no. 3 (1997): 99–­120; Robert J. Brulle and David N. Pellow, “Environmental Justice: Human Health and Environmental Inequalities,” Annual Review of Public Health 27 (2006): 103–­124; Liam Downey, “US Metropolitan-­Area Variation in Environmental Inequality Outcomes,” Urban Studies, 44, nos. 5–­6 (2007): 953–­977; Paul Mohai, David Pellow, and J. Timmons Roberts, “Environmental Justice,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 34 (2009): 405–­430. 10 Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth (New York: Routledge, 2006); Meizhu Lui, Barbara Robles, Betsy Leondar-­Wright, Rose Brewer, and Rebecca Adamson, The Color of Wealth: The Story behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide (New York: United for a Fair Economy, 2006); Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Linxin Hao, Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010). 11 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–­1299.

Notes to Pages 22–30  •  207 12 Cynthia Levine-­Rasky, “Intersectionality Theory Applied to Whiteness and

Middle-­Classness,” Social Identities 17, no. 2 (2011): 239–­253.

13 For foundational work on the social differentiation of space, see David Harvey,

The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 117–­ 124; John Logan, “Growth, Politics, and the Stratification of Places,” American Journal of Sociology 84, no. 2 (1978): 404–­416. For recent work that investigates the turn toward relational geography and the use of the intersectional paradigm in health research, see Steven Cummins, Sarah Curtis, Ana V. Diez-­Roux, and Sally Macintyre, “Understanding and Representing ‘Place’ in Health Research: A Relational Approach,” Social Science & Medicine 65, no. 9 (2007): 1825–­1838. 14 Eric J. Krieg, “A Socio-­Historic Interpretation of Toxic Waste Sites,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 54, no. 1 (1995): 1–­14; Phil Brown, Desiree Ciambrone, and Lori Hunter, “Does ‘Green’ Mask Grey? Environmental Issues at the Metropolitan Level,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, 34 (1997): 141–­158; Faber and Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards”; Eric J. Krieg and Daniel Faber, “Not So Black and White: Environmental Justice and Cumulative Impact Assessments,” Environmental Impact Assessment Review 24, no. 7 (2004): 667–­694; Aniruddha Banerjee and Barry D. Solomon, “Environmental Equity in Michigan,” Pennsylvania Geographer 40, no. 2 (2002); 82–­100; Robin Saha and Paul Mohai, “Historical Context and Hazardous Waste Facility Siting: Understanding Temporal Patterns in Michigan,” Social Problems 52, no. 4 (2005): 618–­648; Jeremy Mennis and Lisa Jordan, “The Distribution of Environmental Equity: Exploring Spatial Nonstationarity in Multivariate Models of Air Toxic Releases,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 2 (2005): 249–­ 268; Jeremy Mennis, “Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Environmentally Hazardous Facility Location in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Geographer 40, no. 2 (2002): 113–­124; Benjamin J. Apelberg, Timothy J. Buckley, and Ronald H. White, “Socioeconomic and Racial Disparities in Cancer Risk from Air Toxins in Maryland,” Environmental Health Perspectives 113, no. 6 (2005): 693–­699; Liam Downey, “Environmental Inequality in Metropolitan America in 2000,” Sociological Spectrum 26, no. 1 (2006): 21–­41; Ronald D. Fricker and Nicholas W. Hengartner, “Environmental Equity and the Distribution of Toxic Release Inventory and Other Environmentally Undesirable Sites in Metropolitan New York City,” Environmental and Ecological Statistics 8, no. 1 (1998): 33–­52; Juliana Maantay, “Asthma and Air Pollution in the Bronx: Methodological and Data Considerations in Using GIS for Environmental Justice and Health Research,” Health & Place 13, no. 1 (2007): 32–­56; Diane Sicotte and Samantha Swanson, “Whose Risk in Philadelphia? Proximity to Unequally Hazardous Industrial Facilities,” Social Science Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2007): 515–­534. 15 Charles Hirschman, Richard Alba, and Reynolds Farley, “The Meaning and Measurement of Race in the U.S. Census: Glimpses into the Future,” Demography 37, no. 3 (2000): 381–­393. 16 David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness (New York: Perseus, 2005); Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–­1954 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). 17 David Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation: Toward a Theory of Environmental Injustice,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 581–­601. 18 For arguments about the importance of incorporating historicity into environmental justice research, see Eric J. Krieg, “The Two Faces of Toxic Waste: Trends in the

208  •  Notes to Pages 31–33

Spread of Environmental Hazards,” Sociological Forum 13, no. 1 (1998): 3–­19; Szasz and Michael Meuser, “Environmental Inequalities”; Adam S. Weinberg, “The Environmental Justice Debate: A Commentary on Methodological Issues and Practical Concerns,” Sociological Forum 13, no. 1 (1998): 25–­32. For an example of spatial factors underlying industrialization, see Michael Storper and Richard Walker, The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology, and Industrial Growth (New York: Blackwell, 1989).

Chapter 2  Theorizing Urban Environmental Inequality 1 Andrew Szasz and Michael Meuser, “Environmental Inequalities: Literature Review

and Proposals for New Directions in Research and Theory,” Current Sociology 45, no. 3 (1997): 99–­120. 2 “PA Environmental Justice Areas,” last modified 2015, accessed June 30, 2015, http://​ www​.portal​.state​.pa​.us/​portal/​server​.pt/​community/​pa​_environmental​_justice​ _areas/​20991. 3 Diane Sicotte, “Some More Polluted than Others: Unequal Cumulative Industrial Hazard Burdens in the Philadelphia MSA, USA,” Local Environment 15, no. 8 (2010): 761–­774; Diane Sicotte, “Diversity and Intersectionality among Environmentally Burdened Communities in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area, USA,” Urban Studies 51, no. 9 (2014): 1850–­1870. 4 Qingmin Meng, “Spatial Analysis of Environment and Population at Risk of Natural Gas Fracking in the State of Pennsylvania, USA,” Science of the Total Environment 515 (2015): 198–­206. 5 Ryan Holifield, “Defining Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism,” Urban Geography 22, no. 1 (2001): 78–­90. 6 Kristin Shrader-­Frechette, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 24, 27–­28, 95–­96, 135–­162. 7 Marianne Lavalle and Marcia Coyle, “Unequal Protection: The Racial Divide in Environmental Law,” National Law Journal, Sept. 21, 1992, S1–­S12; Jeremy Mennis, “The Distribution and Enforcement of Air Polluting Facilities in New Jersey,” The Professional Geographer 57, no. 3 (2005): 411–­422. 8 Bob Bolin, “Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Disaster Vulnerability,” in Handbook of Disaster Research, ed. Havidan Rodriguez, E. L. Quarantelli, and R. R. Dynes (New York: Springer, 2007), 113–­129; Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres, “Transportation Matters: Stranded on the Side of the Road before and after Disasters Strike,” in Race, Place and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina, ed. Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009), 63–­85; Piers Blaikie, Terry Cannon, Ian Davis, and Ben Wisner, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 79–­112. 9 To get a sense of how broad the range of issues really is, see Robert Benford, “The Half-­Life of the Environmental Justice Frame: Innovation, Diffusion, and Stagnation,” in Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement, ed. David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 37–­54. For material that presents the issues mentioned above as environmental justice issues, see Jennifer Clapp, Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Al Gedicks, “Resource Wars against Native Peoples,” in The

Notes to Pages 33–34  •  209

Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution, ed. Robert D. Bullard (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005), 168–­187; Theo Colborn, Carol Kwiatkowski, Kim Schultz, and Mary Bachran, “Natural Gas Operations from a Public Health Perspective,” Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 7, no. 5 (2011): 1039–­1056; Jonathan A. Paltz, Diarmid Campbell-­Lendrum, Tracey Holloway, and Jonathan A. Foley, “Impact of Regional Climate Change on Human Health,” Nature 438 (Nov. 17, 2005): 310–­317; David Naguib Pellow, Resisting Global Toxics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Riccardo Petrella, The Water Manifesto: Arguments for a World Water Contract (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Ellen K. Silbergeld, Michael Gordon, and Lynn D. Kelly, “Diamond Shamrock,” in Toxic Circles, ed. Helen E. Sheehan and Richard P. Wedeen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 55–­80. 10 Gordon Walker, Environmental Justice: Concepts, Evidence, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012). 11 Shrader-­Frechette, Environmental Justice, 24. 12 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 13 David Schlosberg, “Reconceiving Environmental Justice: Global Movements and Political Theories,” Environmental Politics 13, no. 3 (2004): 517–­540; David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 13–­16. 14 For good literature reviews that delve into the more technical aspects of measuring proximity to hazards, see Brett M. Baden, Douglas S. Noonan, and Rama Mohaga R. Turaga, “Scales of Justice: Is There a Geographic Bias in Environmental Equity Analysis?” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 50, no. 2 (2007), 163–­185; Jayajit Chakraborty, Juliana Maantay, and Jean D. Brender, “Disproportionate Proximity to Environmental Health Hazards: Methods, Models, and Measurement,” American Journal of Public Health 101, Supplement 1 (2011), S27–­S36; Liam Downey, “Environmental Racial Inequality in Detroit,” Social Forces 85, no. 2 (2006): 771–­796; Eric J. Krieg, “The Two Faces of Toxic Waste: Trends in the Spread of Environmental Hazards,” Sociological Forum 13, no. 1 (1998): 3–­20; Paul Mohai, “The Demographics of Dumping Revisited: Examining the Impact of Alternate Methodologies in Environmental Justice Research,” Virginia Environmental Law Journal 13 (1995): 615–­653; and Paul Mohai and Robin Saha, “Reassessing Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in Environmental Justice Research,” Demography 43, no. 2 (2006): 383–­399. 15 For a good review of environmental justice research, see Paul Mohai, David Pellow, and J. Timmons Roberts, “Environmental Justice,” Annual Review of Environmental Resources 34 (2009): 405–­430. 16 Studies in which researchers discovered that people of color were disproportionately burdened with environmental hazards include (but are not limited to) Benjamin J. Apelberg, Timothy J. Buckley, and Ronald H. White, “Socioeconomic and Racial Disparities in Cancer Risk from Air Toxics in Maryland,” Environmental Health Perspectives 113, no. 6 (2005): 693–­699; Michael T. Ash and T. Robert Fetter, “Who Lives on the Wrong Side of the Environmental Tracks? Evidence from the EPA’s Risk-­Screening Environmental Indicators Model,” Social Science Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2004): 441–­462; Bob Bolin, Eric Matranga, Edward Hackett, Edward Sadalla, P. David Pijawka, Debbie Brewer, and Diane Sicotte, “Environmental Equity in a Sunbelt City: The Spatial Distribution of Toxic Hazards in Phoenix,

210  •  Notes to Page 34

Arizona,” Global Environmental Change B: Environmental Hazards 2, no. 1 (2000): 11–­24; Bob Bolin, Amy Nelson, Edward J. Hackett, K. David Pijawka, C. Scott Smith, Diane Sicotte, Edward K. Sadalla, Eric Matranga, and Maureen O’Donnell, “The Ecology of Technological Risk in a Sunbelt City,” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 317–­339; Liam Downey, “Environmental Racial Inequality in Detroit,” Social Forces 85, no. 2 (2006): 771–­796; Michael Gelobter, “Toward a Model of Environmental Discrimination,” in Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse, ed. Bunyan Bryant and Paul Mohai (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 64–­81; Eric J. Krieg, “A Socio-­Historical Interpretation of Toxic Waste Sites: The Case of Greater Boston,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 54, no. 1 (1995): 1–­14; Jeremy Mennis, “Using Geographic Systems to Create and Analyze Statistical Surfaces of Population and Risk for Environmental Justice Analysis,” Social Science Quarterly 85, no. 1 (2002): 281–­297; Jeremy Mennis, “The Distribution and Enforcement of Air Polluting Facilities in New Jersey,” The Professional Geographer 57, no. 3 (2005): 411–­422; Paul Mohai and Bunyan Bryant, “Environmental Racism: Reviewing the Evidence,” in Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse, ed. Bunyan Bryant and Paul Mohai (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 163–­176; Rachel A. Morello-­Frosch, “Discrimination and the Political Economy of Environmental Inequality,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 20 (2002): 477–­496; Rachel Morello-­ Frosch and Bill Jesdale, “Separate and Unequal: Residential Segregation and Air Quality in the Metropolitan U.S.,” Environmental Health Perspectives 113 (2006): 386–­393; Rachel Morello-­Frosch, Manuel Pastor Jr., Carlos Porras, and James Sadd, “Environmental Justice and Regional Equity in Southern California: Implications for Future Research,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, Supplement 2 (2002): 149–­154; Manuel Pastor Jr., Rachel Morello-­Frosch, and James L. Sadd, “The Air Is Always Cleaner on the Other Side: Race, Space, and Ambient Air Toxics Exposures in California,” Journal of Urban Affairs 27, no. 2 (2005): 127–­148; Laura Pulido, Steve Sidawi, and Robert O. Vos, “An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Los Angeles,” Urban Geography 17, no. 5 (1996): 419–­439; Laura Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 12–­40; Evan J. Rinquist, “Assessing Evidence of Environmental Inequities: A Meta-­ Analysis,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 24 (2005): 223–­247; Robin Saha and Paul Mohai, “Historical Context and Hazardous Waste Facility Siting: Understanding Temporal Patterns in Michigan,” Social Problems 52, no. 4 (2005): 618–­648; Diane Sicotte and Samantha Swanson, “Whose Risk in Philadelphia? Proximity to Unequally Hazardous Industrial Facilities,” Social Science Quarterly 88, no. 2 (2007): 515–­534; Ellen Stroud, “Troubled Waters in Ecotopia: Environmental Racism in Portland, Oregon,” Radical History Review 74, no. 1 (1999): 65–­95; Andrew Szasz and Michael Meuser, “Unintended, Inexorable: The Production of Environmental Inequalities in Santa Clara County, California,” American Behavioral Science 43, no. 4 (2000): 602–­632. 17 Other studies in which people of color were not found to be disproportionately burdened with hazards (or whites were found to be the burdened group) include Douglas Anderton, Andy B. Anderson, John Michael Oakes, and Michael R. Fraser, “Environmental Equity: The Demographics of Dumping,” Demography 31, no. 2 (1994): 229–­248; Christopher G. Boone, “An Assessment and Explanation of Environmental Inequality in Baltimore,” Urban Geography 23, no. 6 (2002):

Note to Page 34  •  211

581–­595; Susan L. Cutter, Danika Holm, and Lloyd Clark, “The Role of Geographic Scale in Monitoring Environmental Justice,” Risk Analysis 16, no. 4 (1996): 517–­526; Susan L. Cutter and William D. Solecki, “Setting Environmental Justice in Space and Place: Acute and Chronic Airborne Toxic Releases in the Southeastern United States,” Urban Geography 17, no. 5 (1996): 380–­399; Liam Downey, “The Unintended Significance of Race: Environmental Racial Inequality in Detroit,” Social Forces 83, no. 3 (2005): 971–­1008; Eric J. Krieg, “Race and Environmental Justice in Buffalo, NY: A Zip Code and Historical Analysis of Ecological Hazards,” Society and Natural Resources 18, no. 3 (2005): 199–­213; John Michael Oakes, Douglas Anderton, and Andy B. Anderson, “A Longitudinal Analysis of Environmental Equity in Communities with Hazardous Waste Facilities,” Social Science Research 25, no. 2 (1996): 125–­148; and George E. Touche and George O. Rogers, “Environmental Equity and Electric Power Generation: Disparate Community Outcomes within Texas?” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 48, no. 6 (2005): 891–­915. 18 Phil Brown, Desiree Ciambrone, and Lori Hunter, “Does ‘Green’ Mask Grey? Environmental Equity Issues at the Metropolitan Level,” Contemporary Sociology 34, no. 2 (1997): 141–­158; Eric J. Krieg, “The Two Faces of Toxic Waste: Trends in the Spread of Environmental Hazards,” Sociological Forum 13, no. 1 (1998): 3–­20; Sicotte and Swanson, “Whose Risk in Philadelphia?” 19 Brett M. Baden and Don L. Coursey, “The Locality of Waste Sites within the City of Chicago: A Demographic, Social, and Economic Analysis,” Resource and Energy Economics 24, no. 1 (2002): 53–­93; J. Tom Boer, Manuel Pastor Jr., James L. Sadd, and Lori D. Snyder, “Is There Environmental Racism? The Demographics of Hazardous Waste in Los Angeles County,” Social Science Quarterly 78, no. 4 (1997): 793–­810; Vicki Been and Francis Gupta, “Coming to the Nuisance or Going to the Barrios—­A Longitudinal Analysis of Environmental Justice Claims,” Ecology Law Quarterly 24 (1997): 1–­56; Ronald D. Fricker and Nicolas W. Hengartner, “Environmental Equity and the Distribution of Toxic Release Inventory and Other Environmentally Undesirable Sites in Metropolitan New York City,” Environmental and Ecological Statistics 8, no. 1 (2001): 33–­52; Andrew Szasz and Michael Meuser, “Unintended, Inexorable,” 602–­632. 20 David W. Allen, “Social Class, Race, and Toxic Releases in American Counties, 1995,” Social Science Journal 38, no. 1 (2001): 13–­25; Apelberg, Buckley, and White, “Socioeconomic and Racial Disparities in Cancer Risk”; Ash and Fetter, “Who Lives on the Wrong Side of the Environmental Tracks?”; Bolin et al., “Environmental Equity in a Sunbelt City”; James T. Hamilton, “Testing for Environmental Racism: Prejudice, Profits, Political Power?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 14, no. 1 (1995): 107–­132; Jeremy L. Mennis and Lisa Jordan, “The Distribution of Environmental Equity: Exploring Spatial Nonstationarity in Multivariate Models of Air Toxic Releases,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 2 (2005): 249–­268; Sicotte and Swanson, “Whose Risk in Philadelphia?”; Sicotte, “Some More Polluted Than Others”; Touche and Rogers, “Environmental Equity and Electric Power Generation.” 21 Abhijit Banerjee and Barry D. Solomon, “Environmental Equity in Michigan,” Pennsylvania Geographer 40, no. 2 (2002): 82–­100. 22 Rachel Morello-­Frosch, Manuel Pastor Jr., Carlos Porras, and James Sadd, “Environmental Justice and Regional Inequality in Southern California: Implications for Future Research.” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, Supplement 2 (2002):

212  •  Notes to Pages 34–36

149–­154; James L. Sadd, Manuel Pastor Jr., J. Thomas Boer, and Lori D. Snyder, “Every Breath You Take . . . the Demographics of Toxic Air Releases in Southern California,” Economic Development Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1999): 107–­123; Szasz and Meuser, “Unintended, Inexorable.” 23 Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–­1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 6–­7. 24 Anderton et al., “Environmental Equity: The Demographics of Dumping”; Been and Gupta, “Coming to the Nuisance or Going to the Barrios”; Boer, Pastor, Sadd, and Snyder, “Is There Environmental Racism?”; Cutter, Holm, and Clark, “The Role of Geographic Scale in Monitoring Environmental Justice”; Sicotte and Swanson, “Whose Risk in Philadelphia?” 25 Sicotte and Swanson, “Whose Risk in Philadelphia?”; Sicotte, “Some More Polluted Than Others.” 26 David N. Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation: Toward a Theory of Environmental Injustice,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 581–­601. 27 Paul Mohai, David Pellow, and J. Timmons Roberts, “Environmental Justice,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 34 (2009): 405–­430. 28 For example, the “treadmill of destruction” explanation for Native American proximity to hazards due to the placement of nuclear waste and military weapons installations near Indian reservations; see Gregory Hooks and Chad L. Smith, “The Treadmill of Destruction: National Sacrifice Areas and Native Americans,” American Sociological Review 69, no. 4 (2000): 558–­575. 29 Christopher G. Boone and Ali Modarres, “Creating a Toxic Neighborhood in Los Angeles County: A Historical Examination of Environmental Inequity,” Urban Affairs Review 35, no. 2 (1999): 163–­187; David N. Pellow and Lisa Sun-­Hee Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-­Tech Global Economy (New York: NYU Press, 2002), 90–­91. 30 Pellow and Park, “The Silicon Valley of Dreams,” 88–­89. 31 Boone, “An Assessment and Explanation of Environmental Inequality in Baltimore”; Krieg, “Race and Environmental Justice in Buffalo, NY,” 199–­213. 32 Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–­1954 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005); K. Aminashaun Ducre, “Racialized Spaces and the Emergence of Environmental Injustice,” in Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice, ed. Sylvia Hood Washington, Paul C. Rosier, and Heather Goodall (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), 109–­126; Bob Bolin, Sara Grineski, and Tim Collins, “The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Phoenix, Arizona,” Human Ecology Review 12, no. 2 (2005): 156–­168. 33 Washington, Packing Them In, 18–­35; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 2007), 133–­156. 34 This has occurred in Camden, New Jersey: see Howard Gillette Jr., “The Wages of Disinvestment,” in Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, ed. Jefferson Cowie (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 139–­158; in Chester, Pennsylvania: see Christopher Mele, “Casinos, Prisons, Incinerators, and Other Fragments of Neoliberal Urban Development,” Social Science History 35, no. 3 (2011): 423–­452; and in East Los Angeles: see Mary Pardo, “Mexican American Women Grassroots Community Activists: ‘Mothers of East Los Angeles,’” Frontiers 11, no. 1 (1990): 1–­7.

Notes to Pages 36–40  •  213 35 Saccoby M. Wilson, “An Ecologic Framework to Study and Address Environmental

Justice and Community Health Issues,” Environmental Justice 2, no. 1 (2009): 15–­23.

36 Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism.” 37 Vicki Been, “Locally Undesirable Land Uses in Minority Neighborhoods: Dispro-

portionate Siting or Market Dynamics,” Yale Law Review 103 (1994): 1383.

38 Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the

Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 60–­63.

39 Dorceta E. Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution

and Residential Mobility (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 69–­278.

40 David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographi-

cal Development (New York: Verso Press, 2006), 71–­116.

41 Neil Smith, Paul Caris, and Elvin Wyly, “The ‘Camden Syndrome’ and the Menace

of Suburban Decline: Residential Disinvestment and its Discontents in Camden County, New Jersey,” Urban Affairs Review 36, no. 4 (2001): 497–­531. 42 Mele, “Casinos, Prisons, Incinerators”; Christopher Mele, “Contemporary Urban Development and Compounded Exclusion,” in Race, Space and Exclusion: Segregation and Beyond in Metropolitan America, ed. Robert M. Adelman and Christopher Mele (New York: Routledge, 2015), 75–­89. 43 Michael Greenberg, Dona Schneider, Karen Lowrie, and Ann Dey, “The Theory of Neighourhood Decline Due to Pariah Land Uses: Regaining Control of the Downward Cycle,” Local Environment 13, no. 1 (2008): 15–­26; Robin Saha and Paul Mohai, “Historical Context and Hazardous Waste Facility Siting: Understanding Temporal Patterns in Michigan,” Social Problems 52, no. 4 (2005): 618–­648. 44 Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1985), 34–­37. 45 Ibid., 107–­108. 46 David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 359. 47 Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism,” 12–­40. 48 John R. Logan, “Growth, Politics, and the Stratification of Places,” American Journal of Sociology 84, no. 2 (1978): 404–­416. 49 David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 186. 50 Ibid., 109–­124. 51 Logan, “Growth, Politics and the Stratification of Places.” 52 Gordon Walker, “Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of Environmental Justice,” Antipode 41, no. 4 (2009): 614–­636. 53 Harvey, The Urban Experience, 109–­24; Smith, Caris, and Wyly, “The ‘Camden Syndrome’”; Mele, “Casinos, Prisons, Incinerators.” 54 Lisa Sun-­Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow, The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 4. 55 Liam Downey, “The Unintended Significance of Race: Environmental Inequality in Detroit,” Social Forces 83, no. 3 (2005): 971–­1008; Robert J. Brulle and David Pellow, “The Future of EJ Movements,” in Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement, ed. David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 239–­300. 56 Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright, “Environmentalism and the Politics of Equity: Emergent Trends in the Black Community,” Mid-­American Review of Sociology 12 (1987): 21–­37; Cole and Foster, From the Ground Up; Hamilton, “Testing for Environmental Racism.”

214  •  Notes to Pages 40–44

57 Cerrell Associates, Political Difficulties Facing Waste-­to-­Energy Conversion Plant Sit-

ing, report prepared for California Waste Management Board (Los Angeles, 1984).

58 William M. Bowen and Michael V. Wells, “The Politics and Reality of Environ-

mental Justice: A History and Considerations for Public Administrators and Policy Makers,” Public Administration Review 62, no. 6 (2002): 688–­698. 59 Szasz and Meuser, “Environmental Inequalities”; Adam S. Weinberg, “The Environmental Justice Debate: A Commentary about Methodological Issues and Practical Concerns,” Sociological Forum 13, no. 1 (1998): 25–­32; David N. Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation: Toward a Theory of Environmental Injustice,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 581–­601; Pamela R. Davidson, “Risky Business? Relying on Empirical Studies to Assess Environmental Justice,” in Our Backyard: A Quest for Environmental Justice, ed. Gerald R. Visgilio and Diana M. Whitelaw (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 83–­103. 60 The lack of connection between the environmental justice and disaster literatures is discussed in Bob Bolin, “Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Disaster Vulnerability,” in Handbook of Disaster Research, ed. Havidan Rodriquez and Russell R. Dynes (New York: Springer, 2007), 113–­129; the lack of connection between the environmental justice literature and the literature on urban inequalities is discussed in Lisa Schweitzer and Max Stephenson, “Right Answers, Wrong Questions: Environmental Justice as Urban Research,” Urban Studies 44, no. 2 (2007): 319–­337. 61 Susan L. Cutter, Danika Holm, and Lloyd Clark, “The Role of Geographic Scale in Monitoring Environmental Justice,” Risk Analysis 6, no. 4 (1996): 517–­526. 62 A more extensive version of this point was made by Robert W. Williams in “Getting to the Heart of Environmental Injustice: Social Science and its Boundaries,” Theory & Science 16, no. 1 (2005). 63 This point has been made by: Szasz and Meuser, “Environmental Inequalities”; Weinberg, “The Environmental Justice Debate”; Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation”; Williams, “Getting to the Heart of Environmental Justice”; and Krieg, “Race and Environmental Justice in Buffalo, NY.” 64 Schweitzer and Stephenson, “Right Answers, Wrong Questions.” 65 Ibid. 66 Park and Pellow, The Slums of Aspen. 67 Henry Wai-­Chung Yeung, “Rethinking Relational Economic Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 1 (2005): 37–­51. 68 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–­1299. 69 William Julius Wilson, “The Declining Significance of Race,” Society 15, no. 2 (1978): 56–­62; Melvin Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth (New York: Routledge, 2006); Meizhu Lui, Barbara Robles, Betsy-­Leondar-­Wright, Rose Brewer, and Rebecca Adamson, eds., The Color of Wealth: The Story behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide (New York: New Press, 2006). 70 For a critique of the “race or class” question, see Laura Pulido, “A Critical Review of the Methodology of Environmental Racism Research,” Antipode 28, no. 2 (1996): 142–­159; see also Liam Downey, “Environmental Injustice: Is Race or Income a Better Predictor?” Social Science Quarterly 79, no. 4 (1998): 766–­778. 71 For a critique of the “victim” view of the residents of environmentally burdened communities, see Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation.” 72 Williams goes further in his critique of the research, characterizing these research

Notes to Pages 44–48  •  215

issues as artifacts of positivist social science in general. See Williams, “Getting to the Heart of Environmental Injustice.” 73 Pulido, Sidawi, and Vos, “An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Los Angeles”; Boone and Modarres, “Creating a Toxic Neighborhood in Los Angeles County.” 74 Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism.” 75 Pellow and Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams; Szasz and Meuser, “Unintended, Inexorable.” 76 Diane Sicotte, “Dealing in Toxins on the Wrong Side of the Tracks: Lessons from a Hazardous Waste Controversy in Phoenix,” Social Science Quarterly 89, no. 5 (2008): 1136–­1152; Bolin, Grineski, and Collins, “The Geography of Despair.” 77 Ellen Stroud, “Troubled Waters in Ecotopia: Environmental Racism in Portland, Oregon,” Radical History Review 74 (1999): 65–­95. 78 James R. Elliott and Scott Frickel, “The Historical Nature of Cities: A Study of Urbanization and Hazardous Waste Accumulation,” American Sociological Review 78, no. 4 (2013): 521–­543. 79 Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1994), 97–­112. 80 Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 78–­79, 106–­107. 81 Steve Lerner, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 82 Donald Tomaskovic-­Devey and Vincent J. Roscigno, “Uneven Development and Local Inequality in the U.S. South: The Role of Outside Investment, Landed Elites, and Racial Dynamics,” Sociological Forum 12, no. 4 (1997): 565–­597. 83 Although he does not provide historical case studies of these cities, race-­based environmental inequalities in Houston and West Dallas, Texas are discussed in Bullard, Dumping in Dixie, 40–­63. 84 Joseph Schilling and Jonathan Logan, “Greening the Rust Belt,” Journal of the American Planning Association 74, no. 4 (2008): 451–­466; see also Matthew E. Kahn, “The Silver Lining of Rustbelt Manufacturing Decline,” Journal of Urban Economics 46 (1999): 360–­376. 85 Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–­1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 86 Robert A. Catlin, Racial Politics and Urban Planning: Gary, Indiana 1980–­1989 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), 17–­28. 87 Catlin, Racial Politics and Urban Planning, 33–­41. 88 Hurley, Environmental Inequalities, 15, 23. 89 Raymond A. Mohl and Neil Betten, Steel City: Urban and Ethnic Patterns in Gary, Indiana, 1906–­1950 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 48–­90. 90 Catlin, Racial Politics and Urban Planning. 91 Mohl and Betten, Steel City. 92 Catlin, Racial Politics and Urban Planning. 93 Hurley, Environmental Inequalities. 94 Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 66–­67. 95 Ibid. 96 Pellow, Garbage Wars, 34–­36. 97 Pacyga, Chicago, 61–­62.

216  •  Notes to Pages 48–53

98 Louise Carroll Wade, Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in

the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 130–­141.

99 Washington, Packing Them In. 100 Ibid. 101 Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto 1890–­1920 (Chicago: 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

115

116 117 118

119 120 121 122

University of Chicago Press, 1967), 7–­12, 152–­153, 154–­168. Ibid. Pacyga, Chicago, 224–­225. Ibid., 282, 284. Otis Dudley Duncan and Beverly Duncan, The Negro Population of Chicago: A Study of Residential Succession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 69. Pellow, Garbage Wars, 33–­34; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–­1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Pellow, Garbage Wars, 68. Ibid. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago 1940–­ 1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52. Pacyga, Chicago, 290–­291, 298–­299. Pellow, Garbage Wars, 29–­30. Pacyga, Chicago, 316–­320, 366. David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2006). Some spatial statistical studies focusing on northeastern metropolitan areas have provided evidence suggestive of a “Rust Belt” pattern of environmental inequality in which whites lived nearer to TRI facilities in Baltimore (see Boone, “An Assessment and Explanation of Environmental Inequality in Baltimore”). Two other Boston studies found a pattern of disproportionate low-­income and black proximity to hazards, but with racial/ethnic diversity among the extensively burdened communities. See Daniel Faber and Eric J. Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, Supplement 2 (2002): 277–­288; and Eric J. Krieg and Daniel Faber, “Not So Black and White: Environmental Justice and Cumulative Impact Assessments,” Environmental Impact Assessment Review 24, no. 7 (2004): 667–­694. But see Diane Sicotte, “Diversity and Intersectionality among Environmentally Burdened Communities in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area, USA,” Urban Studies 59, no. 9 (2014): 1850–­1870. Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 222–­230. Paul Farmer, Women, Poverty and AIDS: Sex, Drugs, and Structural Violence (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1996). Some of the geographers whose work is vital to an understanding of environmental inequality formation include David Harvey, Laura Pulido, Christopher Boone, Gordon Walker, Ryan Holifield, Craig E. Colten, Richard Walker, and Michael Storper. Harvey, The Urban Experience, 125–­148. Wendell E. Pritchett, “The ‘Public Menace’ of Urban Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Imminent Domain,” Yale Law & Policy Review (2003): 1–­52. Pulido, Sidawi, and Vos, “An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Los Angeles.” Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia,” in The Peoples of

Notes to Pages 53–56  •  217

123 124 125 126 127

128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

136 137 138 139 140

141

Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-­Class Life, 1790–­1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 111–­134. Peter Binzen, Whitetown, U.S.A. (New York: Vintage Books, 1971). Williams, “Getting to the Heart of Environmental Injustice.” Cynthia Levine-­Rasky, “Intersectionality Theory Applied to Whiteness and Middle-­Classness,” Social Identities 17, no. 2 (2011): 239–­253. Park and Pellow, The Slums of Aspen. David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 3 (1990): 418–­434; Pulido, Sidawi, and Vos, “An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Los Angeles”; Henry Wai-­Chung Yeung, “Rethinking Relational Economic Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 1 (2005): 37–­51. Harvey, “Between Space and Time.” Laura Pulido, “A Critical Review of the Methodology of Environmental Racism Research,” Antipode 28, no. 2 (1996): 142–­159. Bolin, Grineski, and Collins, “The Geography of Despair”; Sicotte, “Dealing in Toxins.” Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation.” Pellow, Garbage Wars. Lerner, Diamond. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55–­76. Valerie Gunter and Steve Kroll-­Smith, Volatile Places: A Sociology of Communities and Environmental Controversies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2007), 39–­65. Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation.” Marvin V. Melosi, Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy and the Environment (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). Andrew Szasz, Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Saha and Mohai, “Historical Context and Hazardous Waste Facility Siting.” David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle, “Power, Justice, and the Environment: Toward a Critical Environmental Justice Studies,” in Power, Justice and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement, ed. David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 1–­19; but see also Martin V. Melosi, “The Viability of Incineration as a Disposal Option: The Evolution of a Niche Technology, 1885–­1995,” Public Works Management, and Policy 1, no. 1 (1996): 31–­42; and Michael M. Lounsbury, Marc Ventresca, and Paul M. Hirsch, “Social Movements, Field Frames, and Industry Emergence: A Cultural-­ Political Perspective on U.S. Recycling,” Socio-­Economic Review 1, no. 1 (2003): 71–­104. Some of the historians whose work is vital to understanding environmental inequality include Andrew Hurley, Martin V. Melosi, Joel A. Tarr, and William Cronon.

Chapter 3  The Rise of Industrial Philadelphia 1 David Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation Through Urbanization,” Perspecta 26 (1990):

251–­272; regarding “growth coalitions,” see John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch,

218  •  Notes to Pages 56–60

Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 20–­21; John Hull Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Diane Sicotte, “Don’t Waste Us: Environmental Justice through Community Participation in Urban Planning,” Environmental Justice 3, no. 1 (2010): 7–­11. 2 Stephanie W. Greenberg, “Industrialization in Philadelphia: The Relationship between Industrial Location and Residential Patterns, 1880–­1930” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1977). 3 Although they did not use the term “layering” to describe the process, other researchers have examined the changing use of industrial land (or the spread of industrial wastes onto formerly residential land) throughout the history of a city or metropolitan region. See Eric J. Krieg, “A Socio-­Historical Interpretation of Toxic Waste Sites: The Case of Greater Boston,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 54, no. 1 (1995): 1–­14; Eric J. Krieg, “The Two Faces of Toxic Waste: Trends in the Spread of Environmental Hazards,” Sociological Forum 13, no. 1 (1998): 3–­20; Liam Downey, “The Unintended Significance of Race: Environmental Inequality in Detroit,” Social Forces 83, no. 3 (2005): 971–­1008; Liam Downey, “Using Geographic Information Systems to Reconceptualize Spatial Relationships and Ecological Context,” American Journal of Sociology 112 (2006): 567–­612; Scott Frickel and James R. Elliott, “Tracking Industrial Land Use Conversions,” Organization & Environment 21, no. 2 (2008): 128–­147; James R. Elliott and Scott Frickel, “The Historical Nature of Cities: A Study of Urbanization and Hazardous Waste Accumulation,” American Sociological Review 78, no. 4 (2013): 521–­543. 4 Daniel McGrath, “Urban Industrial Land Redevelopment and Contamination Risk,” Journal of Urban Economics 47, no. 3 (2000): 414–­442. 5 Elliott and Frickel, “The Historical Nature of Cities”; Krieg, “The Two Faces of Toxic Waste.” 6 Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–­1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 4. 7 Sam Bass Warner Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 2, 11. 8 Nancy Kleniewski and Alexander Thomas, Cities, Change, and Conflict (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2011), 72–­77. 9 Edgar P. Richardson, “The Athens of America: 1800–­1825,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­ Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 208–­257. 10 Warner, The Private City, 11. 11 Richardson, “The Athens of America,” 218, 234. 12 Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle 1825–­1841,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 258–­ 306, 276. 13 Richardson, “The Athens of America,” 208–­257. 14 Ibid., 238–­239. 15 Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 154–­155; Richardson, “The Athens of America,” 234. 16 Craig E. Colten, “Historical Hazards: The Geography of Relict Industrial Wastes,” The Professional Geographer 42, no. 2 (1990): 143–­156. 17 Edwin B. Bonner, “Village into Town, 1701–­1746,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 33–­67, 59.

Notes to Pages 61–65  •  219 18 Richardson, “The Athens of America,” 226–­230. 19 Bonner, “Village into Town, 1701–­1746,” 59. 20 Richardson, “The Athens of America,” 208; Warner, The Private City, 11. 21 John K. Alexander, “Poverty, Fear, and Continuity: An Analysis of the Poor in Late

Eighteenth-­Century Philadelphia,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-­Class Life, 1790–­1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 13–­36, 13. 22 Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle 1825–­1841.” 23 Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990), 50, 85, 184–­189. 24 Philip Scranton, Figured Tapestry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 25 John Henry Hepp IV, The Middle-­Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–­1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 14–­15. 26 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 2007), 29–­36, 50–­54. 27 Cynthia J. Shelton, The Mills of Manayunk (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 54–­75. 28 Bruce Laurie, “Fire Companies and Gangs in Southwark: The 1840s,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-­Class Life, 1790–­1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 71–­87. 29 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 133. 30 Susan E. Klepp, “Seasoning and Society: Racial Differences in Mortality in Eighteenth Century Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1994): 473–­506. 31 For an account of the race riot that emphasizes the economic motivations of the rioters, see Laurie, “Fire Companies and Gangs in Southwark,” 62–­65. 32 For a recap of racist ideas in the European countries of origin and in early-­nineteenth-­century America, see also Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 19–­36. 33 Alexander, “Poverty, Fear and Continuity,” 13–­36, 31n30. 34 David R. Contosta, Suburb in the City: Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 1850–­1990 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), 29. 35 Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 10–­11. 36 Alexander, “Poverty, Fear, and Continuity,” 31n30. 37 Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 10–­11. 38 Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-­Class Life, 1790–­1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 111–­133; Mary M. Schweitzer, “The Spatial Organization of Federalist Philadelphia, 1790,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, no. 1 (1993): 31–­57, 46–­48. 39 Richard G. Miller, “The Federal City: 1783–­1800,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 155–­207, 180–­188. 40 Alexander, “Poverty, Fear, and Continuity,” 18. 41 Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia,” 114–­115; Dennis J. Clark, “The Philadelphia Irish: Persistent Presence,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-­Class Life, 1790–­1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 135–­154. 42 Joseph Oberman and Stephen Kozakowski, “History of Development in the

220  •  Notes to Pages 65–68

Delaware Valley Region,” Year 2000 Report Number One for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (September 1976). 43 Elizabeth M. Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis 1841–­1854,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 307–­362, 322–­323. 44 Philip Scranton and Walter Licht, Work Sights: Industrial Philadelphia, 1890–­1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 56. 45 Lloyd M. Abernethy, “Progressivism 1905–­1919,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982), 524–­565, 532–­533. 46 Dorothy Gondos Beers, “The Centennial City 1865–­1876,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­ Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 417–­470. 47 Abernethy, “Progressivism 1905–­1919,” 546. 48 Scranton and Licht, Work Sights, 3. 49 Stephanie W. Greenberg, “Industrialization in Philadelphia: The Relationship between Industrial Location and Residential Patterns, 1880–­1930” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1977). 50 Maxwell Whiteman, “Philadelphia’s Jewish Neighborhoods,” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-­Class Life, 1790–­1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 231–­254. 51 Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis 1841–­1854”; George J. Holmes, Philadelphia’s River Wards (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishers, 2003). 52 Daniel M. Berman, “Why Work Kills: A Brief History of Occupational Safety and Health in the United States,” International Journal of Health Services 7, no. 1 (1977): 63–­87. 53 Michael P. McCarthy, “The Philadelphia Consolidation of 1854: A Reappraisal,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 110, no. 4 (1986): 531–­548. 54 Beers, “The Centennial City 1865–­1876,” 420–­421. 55 Stephanie W. Greenberg, “Industrial Location and Ethnic Residential Patterns in an Industrializing City: Philadelphia, 1880,” in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the 19th Century, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 204–­229. 56 Susan M. Drobis, “Occupation and Residential Differentiation: A Historical Application of Cluster Analysis,” Historical Methods Newsletter 9 (1976): 114–­134. 57 The term “satellite cities” was coined by Graham Taylor to describe small, industrial cities located outside the boundaries of a larger city. See Graham R. Taylor, Satellite Cities (New York: Appleton & Co., 1915). See also Leo F. Schnore, “Satellites and Suburbs,” Social Forces 36, no. 2 (1957): 121–­129. 58 Nancy M. Heinzen, The Perfect Square: A History of Rittenhouse Square (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 40. 59 Drobis, “Occupation and Residential Differentiation.” 60 Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies, “The Iron Age 1876–­1905,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 471–­523, 477; Margaret Sammartino Marsh, “Suburbanization and the Search for Community: Residential Decentralization in Philadelphia, 1880–­1900,” Pennsylvania History 44, no. 2 (1977): 99–­116; Drobis, “Occupation and Residential Differentiation.” 61 Russell F. Weigley, “The Border City in Civil War 1854–­1865,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 307–­362,

Notes to Pages 68–72  •  221

376; see also Fairmount Park, “History,” n.d., accessed March 13, 2012, http://​www​ .fairmountpark​.org/​HistoryPart1​.asp. 62 Elizabeth Milroy, “‘Pro Bono Publico’: Ecology, History, and the Creation of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System,” in Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds, ed. Brian C. Black and Michael J. Chiarappa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 35–­54. 63 Michal McMahon, “Makeshift Technology: Water and Politics in 19th-­Century Philadelphia,” Environmental Review 12, no. 4 (1988): 20–­37. 64 Edwin Iwanicki, “The Village Falls of Schuylkill,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 91, no. 3 (1967): 326–­341. 65 McMahon, “Makeshift Technology.” 66 David Contosta, “Suburban Quasi-­Government in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116, no. 3 (1992): 259–­293. 67 Milroy, “Pro Bono Publico.” 68 Contosta, “Suburban Quasi-­Government in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia,” 265–­266. 69 Alex Brownlow, “Inherited Fragmentations and Narratives of Environmental Control in Enterpreneurial Philadelphia,” in In the Nature of Cities, ed. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw (New York: Routledge, 2006), 199–­215. 70 Philip Scranton, “Conceptualizing Pennsylvania’s Industrializations, 1850–­1950,” Pennsylvania History 61, no. 1 (1994): 6–­17. 71 Theodore Hershberg, Dale Light Jr., Harold E. Cox, and Richard R. Greenfield, “The ‘Journey-­to-­Work’: An Empirical Investigation of Work, Residence, and Transportation, Philadelphia, 1850 and 1880,” in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the 19th Century, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 128–­173. 72 Beers, “The Centennial City 1865–­1876,” 429. 73 Greenberg, “Industrialization in Philadelphia,” 211. 74 Ibid., 161, 183–­184. 75 Joe William Trotter, “African-­Americans and the Industrial Revolution,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 1 (2000): 19–­23. 76 Greenberg, “Industrialization in Philadelphia,” 211. 77 Mary Harris Jones, The Autobiography of Mother Jones (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1925). 78 Berman, “Why Work Kills.” 79 In states such as New Jersey, employees can sue employers; but in Pennsylvania, lawsuits against employers are prohibited. See Berman, “Why Work Kills.” 80 Abernethy, “Progressivism 1905–­1919,” 548. 81 Berman, “Why Work Kills.” 82 This was very different from the situation elsewhere in Pennsylvania, where mine disasters and steel accidents sparked bitter strikes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 83 Philip Scranton, “Large Firms and Industrial Restructuring: The Philadelphia Region, 1900–­1980,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116, no. 4 (1992): 419–­465. 84 Arthur P. Dudden, “The City Embraces ‘Normalcy’ 1919–­1929,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 566–­600. 85 Scranton, “Large Firms and Industrial Restructuring.” 86 Dorceta E. Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 154.

222  •  Notes to Pages 72–76

87 Caroline Golab, “The Immigrant and the City: Poles, Italians, and Jews in Phila-

delphia, 1870–­1920” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-­Class Life, 1790–­1940, ed. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 203–­230. 88 Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–­1954 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). 89 Karen Brodkin, “How Did Jews Become White Folks?” in Off White: Readings on Power, Privilege, and Resistance, 2nd ed., ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda Powell Pruitt, and April Burns (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17–­34. 90 Washington, Packing Them In. 91 Golab, “The Immigrant and the City,” 213–­220. 92 Caroline Golab, Immigrant Destinations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), 117. 93 Richard A. Varbero, “Philadelphia’s South Italians in the 1920s” in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-­Class Life, 1790–­1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 255–­275. 94 James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 12–­16. 95 Dorceta Taylor, The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600–­1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 472. 96 Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age 1876–­1905,” 492–­493. 97 John F. Bauman, “Black Slums/Black Projects: The New Deal and Negro Housing in Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania History 41, no. 3 (1984): 311–­338. 98 James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 11–­12. 99 Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African-­American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 20–­21, 24–­25. 100 Armstrong Association of Philadelphia, A Study of Living Conditions among Colored People in Suburban Towns Surrounding Philadelphia (1915). 101 Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 18. 102 David Montgomery, Bloodless Victories: The Rise and Fall of the Open Shop in the Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1890–­1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 264–­270. 103 Gladys L. Palmer, Philadelphia Workers in the Changing Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), 35. 104 Howard Gillette Jr., Camden after the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-­Industrial City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 18–­19; Joseph Oberman and Stephen Kozakowski, “History of Development in the Delaware Valley Region,” report prepared for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, September 1976, 54–­55. 105 Margaret B. Tinkcom, “Depression and War 1929–­1946,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­ Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 601–­648. 106 Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided, 57–­63. 107 Countryman, Up South, 29. 108 Amy E. Hillier, “Redlining and the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation,” Journal of Urban History 29, no. 4 (2003): 394–­420; Amy E. Hillier, “Residential Security

Notes to Pages 76–79  •  223

109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

121 122

123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

137

Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Homeowners Loan Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia,” Social Science History 29, no. 2 (2005): 207–­233. Scranton and Licht, Work Sights, 245. Gillette, Camden after the Fall, 22. Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-­Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New York: New Press, 1999), 33–­34. For a discussion of state laws governing the disposal of industrial waste that existed before the passage of the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969, see Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner, The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industry Waste before EPA (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 69–­95. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 42. Geffen, “Industrial Development and Social Crisis, 1841–­1854,” 317. Weigley, “The Border City in Civil War 1854–­1865,” 373. Michal McMahon, “Makeshift Technology: Water and Politics in 19th-­Century Philadelphia,” Environmental Review 12, no. 4 (1988): 20–­37, 30–­33. Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age 1876–­1905,” 496. McMahon, “Makeshift Technology,” 31. Arthur Holst, “The Philadelphia Water Department and the Burden of History,” Public Works Management and Policy 11, no. 3 (2007): 233–­238, 235. Gerald J. Kaufman Jr., “The Delaware River Revival: Four Centuries of Historic Water Quality Change from Henry Hudson to Benjamin Franklin to JFK,” Pennsylvania History 77, no. 4 (2010): 432–­465. Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996), 10–­11. City of Philadelphia Water Department, “Supplement to 1956 Annual Report, Preliminary Draft,” November 12, 1957, Annual Reports Collection, Temple University Urban Archives, Philadelphia. Melosi, The Sanitary City, 139–­141. Holst, “The Philadelphia Water Department and the Burden of History,” 233–­238; Burt and Davies, “The Iron Age,” 496. City of Philadelphia Water Department, “Supplement to 1956 Annual Report.” Melosi, The Sanitary City, 147. Kauffman, “The Delaware River Revival,” 440. Ibid., 441–­442. Tinkcom, “Depression and War 1929–­1946,” 619. Colten and Skinner, The Road to Love Canal, 11. R. C. Albert, “The Historical Context of Water Quality Management for the Delaware Estuary,” Estuaries 11, no. 2 (1988): 99–­107. Francis Ryan, ASCME’s Philadelphia Story: Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 11. Abernethy, “Progressivism 1905–­1919,” 563–­564. Ryan, ASCME’s Philadelphia Story, 25–­27. Ibid., 19. Charles A. Howland, Staff Engineer, Bureau of Municipal Research of Philadelphia, “Street Cleaning and Refuse Collection and Disposal in Nine Cities of the United States,” September 1942, Urban Collection, Temple University Urban Archives, Philadelphia, 60–­61, 77. Ryan, ASCME’s Philadelphia Story, 18.

224  •  Notes to Pages 79–86

138 Melosi, The Sanitary City, 199–­200. 139 Howland, “Street Cleaning and Refuse Collection and Disposal in Nine Cities of

the United States,” 60–­61.

140 Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb, War On Waste: Can America Win its Battle

with Garbage? (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1989), 16.

141 Bureau of Street Cleaning, Streets Department, “Annual Report, 1924,” Streets

Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia; Bureau of Street Cleaning, Streets Department, “Annual Report, 1929,” Streets Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia. 1 42 The phrase “environmental inequality formation” was coined by David Pellow, in “Environmental Inequality Formation: Toward a Theory of Environmental Injustice,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 581–­601.

Chapter 4  Environmental Inequality from 1950 to 1969 1 Philip Scranton, “Large Firms and Industrial Restructuring: The Philadelphia

Region, 1900–­1980.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116, no. 4 (1992): 419–­465. 2 But see John Michael Oakes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Andy B. Anderson, “A Longitudinal Analysis of Environmental Equity in Communities with Hazardous Waste Facilities,” Social Science Research 25 (1996): 125–­148; Manuel Pastor, Jim Sadd, and John Hipp, “Which Came First? Toxic Facilities, Minority Move-­in, and Environmental Justice,” Journal of Urban Affairs 23 (2001): 1–­21; Robin Saha and Paul Mohai, “Historical Context and Hazardous Waste Facility Siting: Understanding Temporal Patterns in Michigan,” Social Problems 52, no. 4 (2005): 618–­648; Andrew Szasz and Michael Meuser, “Unintended, Inexorable: The Production of Environmental Inequalities in Santa Clara County, California,” American Behavioral Scientist 43 (2000): 602–­632. 3 Howard Winant, “Behind Blue Eyes: Whiteness and Contemporary U.S. Racial Politics,” in Off White: Readings on Power, Privilege, and Resistance, 2nd ed., ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda Powell Pruitt, and April Burns (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3–­16. 4 Karen Brodkin, “How Did Jews Become White Folks?” in Off White: Readings on Power, Privilege, and Resistance, 2nd ed., ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda Powell Pruitt, and April Burns (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17–­34, 23–­29. 5 Chamber of Commerce of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Facts Edition of 1950, 68 (Temple University Urban Archives, Philadelphia). 6 Carmen Teresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 152. 7 Carolyn Adams, David Bartelt, David Elesh, Ira Goldstein, Nancy Kleniewski, and William Yancey, Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 22–­23, 73–­85. 8 Ibid., 22–­23, 73–­85. 9 Chamber of Commerce, Philadelphia Facts Edition of 1950. 10 Conrad Weiler, Philadelphia: Neighborhood, Authority and the Urban Crisis (New York: Praeger, 1974), 20. 11 Joseph S. Clark and Dennis J. Clark, “Rally and Relapse 1946–­1968,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 649–­703, 669–­670.

Notes to Pages 86–96  •  225 12 Walter Licht, Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840–­1950 (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 250.

13 James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly

Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

14 City of Philadelphia, Fair Employment Practice Commission, Annual Report 1950

to Mayor and City Council. Philadelphia City Archives.

15 Matthew J. Countryman, Up South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2006), 1–­2.

16 Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in

Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 115.

17 Countryman, Up South, 53–­56. 18 McKee, The Problem of Jobs, 115. 19 New Jersey Industrial Directory (Union City, NJ: Hudson Dispatch, 1949); Twelfth

Industrial Directory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, 1950). 20 Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic System: Version 2.0 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011), accessed April 4, 2012, https://​data2​ .nhgis​.org/​main. 21 Hemamala Hettinge, Paul Martin, Manjula Singh, and David Wheeler, “The Industrial Pollution Projection System,” World Bank Policy Research Department, Policy Research Paper 1431 (1995). 22 Kirk R. Petshek, The Challenge of Urban Reform: Policies and Programs in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), quoted in Guian A. McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 25. 23 Stephanie W. Greenberg, “Industrialization in Philadelphia: The Relationship between Industrial Location and Residential Patterns, 1880–­1930” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1977), 62–­63. 24 Carmen Theresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 184. 25 Margaret B. Tinkcom, “Depression and War 1929–­1946,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 601–­648, 647. 26 Chamber of Commerce of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Facts Edition of 1950, 68–­69 (Temple University Urban Archives). 27 Robert A. Beauregard, “Trajectories of Neighborhood Change: The Case of Gentrification,” Environment and Planning A 22 (1990): 855–­874; Weiler, Philadelphia: Neighborhood, Authority, and the Urban Crisis. 28 Carolyn T. Adams, “Industrial Suburbs: Environmental Liabilities or Assets?” in Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds, ed. Brian C. Black and Michael Chiarappa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 117–­135, 120–­121. 29 Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic System: Version 2.0 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011), accessed April 4, 2012, https://​data2​ .nhgis​.org/​main. 30 “Falls Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania,” Wikipedia, last modified July 29, 2014, accessed September 24, 2014, http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​Falls​_Township,​ _Bucks​_County,​_Pennsylvania. 31 Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Perseus Books, 2000), 176.

226  •  Notes to Pages 96–98

32 Philadelphia Department of Public Health, Division of Environmental Health,

“Annual Report: Air Pollution Control Section, 1959” (Annual Reports Collection, Temple University Urban Archives, Philadelphia). 33 “National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS),” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, last modified November 8, 2011, accessed March 13, 2012, http://​www​ .epa​.gov/​air/​criteria​.htm. 34 Philadelphia Department of Public Health, Division of Environmental Health, “Annual Report: Air Pollution Control Section, 1959” (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 35 Peter Binzen, Whitetown, U.S.A. (New York: Random House, 1970), 99. 36 “Supplement to 1956 Annual Report,” City of Philadelphia Water Department (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 37 “Supplement to 1956 Annual Report,” City of Philadelphia Water Department. 38 U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1957 Inventory of Municipal and Industrial Waste Facilities, Volume 2, Region II—­Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania (Washington, DC, 1957). 39 Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America From Colonial Times to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 261–­275. 40 City of Philadelphia, Department of Public Health, “Regulations Governing Private Dumps and Landfills,” November 20, 1957 (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 41 List of Licensed Dumps (n.d.) (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 42 Letter to P. W. Purdom, Director of Philadelphia Public Health Department, and Raymond Smith, Air Pollution Control Section of Philadelphia Public Health Department, Re: Positive Location of Licensed Dump Areas, July 25, 1956 (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 43 Philadelphia Department of Public Health, Division of Air Pollution Control and Environmental Sanitation, “Statistical and Investigational Information Relative to Open Burning in Philadelphia,” September 20, 1955 (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3135, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 44 Magistrate Court Cases, 1957: Air Pollution Control Section (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3134, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 45 City of Philadelphia, Streets Department, “Solid Waste Management Plan, 1970” (Streets Department, Streets Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 46 Melosi, The Sanitary City, 196–­199, 275–­278. 47 Bureau of Street Cleaning, Streets Department, “Annual Report, 1932,” (Streets Department, Streets Reports, Box A-3614, Folder 84.14e, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia); City of Philadelphia, Streets Department, “Department of Streets Progress Report, 1963–­1967” (Streets Department, Streets Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia); City of

Notes to Pages 99–105  •  227

Philadelphia, Streets Department, “Solid Waste Management Plan, 1970” (Streets Department, Streets Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 48 Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 91–­92. 49 Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Zoning Remapping in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2000). 50 Paul K. Asabeare and Forrest E. Huffman, “Hierarchial Zoning, Incompatible Uses, and Price Discounts,” Real Estate Economics 25, no. 3 (1997): 439–­451. 51 Martin V. Melosi, “Environmental Crisis in the City: The Relationship between Industrialization and Urban Pollution,” in Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–­1930, ed. Martin V. Melosi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 3–­31. 52 Author’s interview with Mike Saier, August 24, 2013. 53 Joseph S. Clark Jr. and Dennis J. Clark, “Rally and Relapse 1946–­1968,” in Philadelphia: A 300-­Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 649–­704, 649. 54 Peter Hendee Brown, America’s Waterfront Revival: Port Authorities and Urban Redevelopment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 78–­85. 55 Clark and Clark, “Rally and Relapse,” 669. 56 Nancy Kleniewski, “Triage and Urban Planning: A Case Study of Philadelphia,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10 (1986): 563–­579. 57 Diane Sicotte, “Don’t Waste Us: Environmental Justice through Community Participation in Urban Planning,” Environmental Justice 3, no. 1 (2010): 7–­11. See also Guian McKee, “Liberal Ends through Illiberal Means: Race, Urban Renewal, and Community in the Eastwick Section of Philadelphia, 1949–­1990,” Journal of Urban History 27, no. 5 (2001): 547–­583. 58 B. J. Eichinger, “The Taking of Eastwick” (Master’s thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1997). 59 Kleniewski, “Triage and Urban Planning.” 60 Clark and Clark, “Rally and Relapse,” 701. 61 Peter O. Muller, Kenneth C. Meyer, and Roman A. Cybriwsky, Metropolitan Philadelphia: A Study of Conflicts and Social Cleavages (Cambridge, MA: J. B. Lippincott, 1976), 35, 38. 62 Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic System: Version 2.0 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011), accessed April 4, 2012, https://​data2​ .nhgis​.org/​main. 63 William W. Cutler III, “The Persistent Dualism: Centralization and Decentralization in Philadelphia, 1854–­1975,” in The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800–­1975, ed. William W. Cutler III and Howard Gillette Jr. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 249–­284, 266–­269. 64 David Rusk, “Little Boxes”—­Limited Horizons: A Study of Fragmented Local Governance in Pennsylvania: Its Scope, Consequences, and Reforms (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, December 2003). 65 Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-­Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New York: New Press, 1999), 12–­40. 66 Howard Gillette, Camden after the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-­Industrial City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 17–­38. 67 Ibid., 43. 68 Letter from Charles H. Groom, President, Dearnley Park Civic and Athletic

228  •  Notes to Pages 105–112

Association, to Department of Public Health Commissioner’s Office, March 24, 1966 (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 69 Memorandum to R. E. Doyle, Deputy Streets Commissioner, City of Philadelphia, from Walter E. Jackson, Chief, Air Pollution Control Section, September 28, 1966 (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 70 City of Philadelphia, Streets Department, “Solid Waste Management Plan, 1970” (Streets Department, Streets Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia).

Chapter 5  Environmental Burdening after 1970 1 Sylvia N. Tesh, “Miasma and ‘Social Factors’ in Disease Causality: Lessons from the

Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 20, no. 4 (1995): 1001–­1024. 2 Peter Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times (London: Routledge, 1987). 3 Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester (London: Routledge, 2013), 71. 4 Cynthia J. Shelton, The Mills of Manayunk (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 54–­75. 5 Angela Gugliotta, “The Smoky City between the Wars,” in Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution, ed. E. Melanie DuPuis (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 100–­118. 6 Peter Binzen, Whitetown USA (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 82. 7 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Taylor, 2002). 8 Tim Cooper, “Recycling Modernity: Waste and Environmental History,” History Compass 8, no. 9 (2010): 1114–­1125. 9 Charles W. Mills, “Black Trash,” in Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Injustice, ed. Laura Westra and Bill E. Lawson (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 73–­94, 84–­89. 10 Andrew Szasz, Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 11 Craig E. Colten and Peter N. Skinner, The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industrial Waste before EPA (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 72; Marvin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 166. 12 See Roderick F. Nash, American Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1989); Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–­1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Robert J. Brulle, Agency, Democracy and Nature: The U.S. Environmental Movement from a Critical Theory Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 13 Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb, War on Waste: Can America Win Its Battle with Garbage? (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1989), 64–­67. 14 Michael E. Kraft, Environmental Policy and Politics (New York: Pearson, 2010). 15 Edward J. Walsh, Rex Warland, and D. Clayton Smith, Don’t Burn It Here:

Notes to Pages 112–114  •  229

Grassroots Challenges to Incinerators (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 140–­141. 16 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Solid Waste, Municipal Solid Waste in the United States 2009: Facts and Figures, December 2010 (EPA530-­R-­10-­012). 17 George Anastasia, “All That Trash Wouldn’t Go to Waste Under City’s Energy Conversion Plan,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 18, 1982. 18 Mark Bowden, “City to Use Waste for Steam Energy,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 17, 1982. 19 Rodger C. Field, “Risk and Justice: Capitalist Production and the Environment,” Capital, Nature, Socialism (1997): 18, 2, 69–­94. 20 Blumberg and Gottlieb, War on Waste; Michael Lounsbury, Marc Ventresca, and Paul M. Hirsch, “Social Movements, Field Frames, and Industry Emergence: A Cultural-­Political Perspective on U.S. Recycling,” Socio-­Economic Review 1 (2003): 71–­104. 21 Letter from Charles H. Groom, President, Dearnley Park Civic and Athletic Association, to Department of Public Health Commissioner’s Office, March 24, 1966 (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia); Roger Cohn, “Rep. Rock Asks for Probe of Incinerator,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 3, 1981. 22 Mark Jaffe, “Environmentalists Cheer Plan to Close Incinerators,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 25, 1988. 23 Howard Manly, “Safely Examining the Pros and Cons of Burning,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 25, 1985. 24 Walsh, Warland, and Smith, Don’t Burn It Here, 4–­6. 25 Lounsbury, Ventresca, and Hirsch, “Social Movements, Field Frames, and Industry Emergence.” 26 Field, “Risk and Justice.” 27 Walsh, Warland, and Smith, Don’t Burn It Here, 4–­6. 28 Incinerator ash is so toxic that in some states (such as Massachusetts) it is classified as hazardous waste and can only be disposed of at sites specially designated for hazardous wastes. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, it is considered solid waste, and is dumped in municipal landfills. For a discussion on ash toxicity and disposal issues, see U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Facing America’s Trash: What Next for Municipal Solid Waste? (Washington, DC, 1989), OTA-­0-­424. 29 For an excellent and detailed account of the factors leading to the defeat of the Navy Yard Incinerator, see Walsh, Warland, and Smith, Don’t Burn It Here, 163–­178; see also Mark Jaffe, “Opposition to Trash Plan Is Voiced,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 18, 1984; and Beth Gillin, “Getting Steamed over Trash Plant Proposal for South Philadelphia Is Last Straw for Girard Estate,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 6, 1984. 30 Mark Atlas, “Safe and Sorry: Risk, Environmental Equity, and Hazardous Waste Facilities,” Risk Analysis 21, no. 5 (2001): 939–­954. 31 Rodolfo Mata, “Hazardous Waste Facilities and Environmental Equity: A Proposed Siting Model,” Virginia Environmental Law Journal 13 (1993): 375–­468. 32 Szasz, Ecopopulism. 33 Richard F. Anderson, “Public Participation in Hazardous Waste Facility Location Decisions,” Journal of Planning Literature 1, no. 2 (1986): 145–­161. 34 These early studies include: U.S. General Accounting Office, Siting of Hazardous

230  •  Notes to Pages 114–121

Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities (Washington, DC, 1983, RCED-­83–­168); and United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-­Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (1987). 35 Vicki Been, “Locally Undesirable Land Uses in Minority Neighborhoods: Disproportionate Siting or Market Dynamics,” Yale Law Journal 103 (1994): 1383–­1422; Vicki Been and Francis Gupta, “Coming to the Nuisance or Going to the Barrios? A Longitudinal Analysis of Environmental Justice Claims,” Ecology Law Quarterly 24 (1997): 1–­56; James T. Hamilton, “Testing for Environmental Racism: Prejudice, Profits, Political Power?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 14, no. 1 (1995): 107–­132; Andrew Hurley, “Fiasco at Wagner Electric: Environmental Justice and Urban Geography in St. Louis,” Environmental History 2 (1997): 460–­481; Manuel Pastor Jr., Jim Sadd, and John Hipp, “Which Came First? Toxic Facilities, Minority Move-­in, and Environmental Justice,” Journal of Urban Affairs 23 (2001): 1–­21; but see also John Michael Oakes, Douglas L. Anderton, and Andy B. Anderson, “A Longitudinal Analysis of Environmental Equity in Communities with Hazardous Waste Facilities,” Social Science Research 23 (1996): 125–­148. 36 Robin Saha and Paul Mohai, “Historical Context and Hazardous Waste Facility Siting: Understanding Temporal Patterns in Michigan,” Social Problems 52, no. 4 (2005): 618–­648. 37 Carolyn Adams, David Bartelt, David Elesh, Ira Goldstein, Nancy Kleniewski, and William Yancey, Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 31–­33. 38 Gladys L. Palmer, Philadelphia Workers in a Changing Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), 21, 28, 45. 39 Carmen Teresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 152. 40 Guian A. McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 115. 41 U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns, 1951, 1959, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2006, 2009. 42 Philip Scranton, “Large Firms and Industrial Restructuring: The Philadelphia Region, 1900–­1980,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116, no. 4 (1992): 419–­465. 43 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 44 Philadelphia City Planning Commission, “Survey of Industry, 1975” (Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.) 45 The exception to this rule was the petroleum and coal industry, with the highest wages of all. In 1975, just 12 percent of its manufacturing workers were suburban residents. Philadelphia City Planning Commission, “Survey of Industry, 1975,” 42. 46 Theodore M. Crone, “Where Have All the Factory Jobs Gone—­and Why?” Business Review (May/June 1997): 1–­16, 2. 47 Carolyn Adams, “The Meds and Eds in Urban Economic Development,” Journal of Urban Affairs 25, no. 5 (2003): 571–­588. 48 Adams et al., Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict, 43. 49 Adams, “The Meds and Eds.”

Notes to Pages 121–126  •  231 50 Regarding Chicago, see Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, and Wacquant, Urban

Outcasts; regarding Detroit, see Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 146–­150. 51 Adams et al., Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict, 50–­53. 52 Blumberg and Gottlieb, War on Waste, 39–­52. 53 Francis Ryan, AFSCME’s Philadelphia Story: Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 54 Robert E. Park, Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology (New York: Free Press, 1952). 55 Nancy Kleniewski and Alex Thomas, Cities, Change, and Conflict, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010), 23–­32; John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 4–­10. 56 Peter O. Muller, Kenneth C. Meyer, and Roman A. Cybriwsky, Philadelphia: A Study of Conflicts and Social Cleavages (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1976), 14. 57 Although many Puerto Ricans who had come to the United States in the 1950s had settled in Camden by 1960, the census questionnaire did not yet include the question of whether or not the respondent was Hispanic; thus, there is no accurate record of how many Hispanics were counted among Camden’s white population in 1960. 58 David L. Kirp, John P. Dwyer, and Larry A. Rosenthal, Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 29. 59 Howard Gillette, Camden after the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-­Industrial City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 17–­38, 42. 60 Julia Cass and Dwight Cunningham, “How Rampant Arson Is Burning Out Camden’s Hopes,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 27, 1981, A1; Julia Cass, “‘Mothers’ Day’—­Welfare: Crucial Cycle in Camden,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1981, B1; Julia Cass, “Elderly in South Camden Decry Rising Crime,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 15, 1981, B7; Timothy Dwyer, “Love Child—­Teen Births Near Epidemic, but Help in Camden Is Scarce,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 16, 1982, B1; Andrew Maykuth, “Camden Is Burning out of Control,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 2, 1982, B1; Timothy Dwyer, “Camden County Murder Toll Up in ’82,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 3, 1983, B6; Andrew Maykuth, Susan FitzGerald, Fen Montaigne, and H. G. Bissinger, “Camden Lives for ‘Check Day,’” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 3, 1983, B1; Eric Harrison, “Neglect Leads to Ouster for S. Camden Tenants,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 19, 1983, B1. 61 Jan Pogue, “Deep Down among the Down and Out in Chester City,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 24, 1982, A1; Dominic Sama, “Chester Cab Firm Plagued by 20 Holdups in Last Month,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 6, 1982, B1; Suzanne Gordon, “Battling an Unfavorable Diagnosis—­Chester Group Seeks to Upgrade City’s Health Care,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 7, 1982, B5; Rich Heidorn Jr., “‘Reefer Drive’—­in Chester City, Housing Project Known as a Place Where Drugs Are Easy to Buy,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 11, 1982, B1; Marc Kaufman, “And in Chester, It’s Even Worse than in Phila.,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 6, 1983, B1; Roy H. Campbell, “Drug Trade Takes Toll on Chester’s Youth,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 1987, B1; Howard Goodman, “Chester May Accept County Bailout,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 14, 1987, B1; Mary Jane Fine, “In Its War on Drugs, Chester May Raze HUD Project,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 8, 1987, B1.

232  •  Notes to Pages 126–128

62 For an extensive discussion of how both structural racism and ongoing racial/ethnic

discrimination constitute barriers to the residential mobility of minority people, see Dorceta E. Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York: NYU Press, 2014); see also Susan Clampet-­ Lundquist, “Finding and Keeping Affordable Housing: Analyzing the Experiences of Single-­Mother Families in North Philadelphia,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 30, no. 4 (2003): 123–­140. 63 Mary J. Fischer and Douglas S. Massey, “The Ecology of Racial Discrimination,” City & Community 3, no. 3 (2004): 221–­241. 64 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963). 65 Bruce G. Link and Jo Phelan, “Conceptualizing Stigma,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 363–­385. 66 Robin Gregory, James Flynn, and Paul Slovic, “Technological Stigma,” American Scientist 83 (1995): 220–­223. 67 This definition is from Michael R. Edelstein, Contaminated Communities: The Social and Psychological Impacts of Residential Toxic Exposure (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988). 68 Beverly H. Cuthbertson and Joanne M. Nigg, “Technological Disaster and the Nontherapeutic Community: A Question of True Victimization,” Environment and Behavior 19, no. 4 (1987): 105–­124. 69 Andrew Maykuth, “Dump’s Toxic Effect on Property Values,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 1, 1988. 70 Although this work refers to “geographies of sacrifice” connected with military activities and nuclear waste disposal in the West, the concept applies as well to Camden’s, Chester’s, and Philadelphia’s other environmentally burdened communities. See Valerie L. Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998), 143. 71 See Michael Greenberg, Dona Schneider, Karen Lowrie, and Ann Dey, “The Theory of Neighourhood Decline Due to Pariah Land Uses: Regaining Control of the Downward Cycle,” Local Environment 13, no. 1 (2008): 15–­26; see also Michael Greenberg and Dona Schneider, Environmentally Devastated Neighborhoods: Perceptions, Policies, and Realities (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 79–­108, 166–­185. 72 Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press, 1993), 161–­184. 73 For an excellent treatment of the consequences of “negative racialization,” see Laura Pulido, Steve Sidawi, and Robert O. Vos, “An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Los Angeles,” Urban Geography 17, no. 5 (1996): 419–­439. 74 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2012), 124–­126; Dwight Ott, Nancy Phillips, and John Way Jennings, “State Takes Police Role in Camden,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 13, 1998, A01; Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 35–­65; Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Neighborhood Stigma and the Perception of Disorder,” Focus 24, no. 1 (2003): 7–­11. 75 See Sampson and Raudenbush, “Neighborhood Stigma”; see also Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager, “Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime,” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 1 (2001): 717–­767.

Notes to Pages 129–135  •  233 76 Robert R. Higgins, “Race, Pollution, and the Mastery of Nature,” Environmental

Ethics 16, no. 3 (1994): 251–­264.

77 K. Animashaun Ducre, “Racialized Spaces and the Emergence of Environmental

Injustice,” in Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice, ed. Sylvia Hood Washington, Paul C. Rosier, and Heather Goodall (New York: Lexington Books, 2006), 109–­124. 78 Chester now has a “Fare and Square” grocery store, which opened in 2013. See Dan Hardy, “Philabundance to Open a Grocery Store in Chester,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 25, 2012. 79 Camden now has a PriceRite store, which opened in October 2014. See Julia Terruso, “Camden Gets a Supermarket,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 16, 2014. 80 Mills, “Black Trash,” 73–­94. 81 David N. Pellow, Adam Weinberg, and Allan Schnaiberg, “The Environmental Justice Movement: Equitable Allocation of the Costs and Benefits of Environmental Management Outcomes,” Social Justice Research 14, no. 4 (2002): 423–­439. 82 Richardson Dilworth, The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 83 Gillette, Camden after the Fall, 97–­98, 109. 84 Donna St. George, “A Tangle of Trash Plans for Chester,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 24, 1988, D02. 85 Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 197; Walsh and Warland, Don’t Burn It Here, 71–­101. 86 Terence Samuel, “Chester OKs a County Trash Plant,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 1988, B05. 87 The phrase “waste magnet” was first used in Barry G. Rabe, Beyond NIMBY: Hazardous Waste Siting in Canada and the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994). 88 Cole and Foster, From the Ground Up, 41. 89 Benjamin Davy, Essential Injustice (New York: Springer/Wien, 1997), 88. 90 Cole and Foster, From the Ground Up, 39. 91 Diane Sicotte, “Don’t Waste Us: Environmental Justice through Community Participation in Urban Planning,” Environmental Justice 3, no. 1 (2010): 7–­11. 92 Karen Masterson, “Cement-­Making Plant Gets Mixed Welcome in Camden,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 22, 2000, B03. 93 Gillette, Camden after the Fall, 171–­175. 94 Cynthia Henry, “Camden Cement Plant Disputes Pollution Report,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 21, 2009, A01. 95 Cole and Foster, From the Ground Up, 42–­47. 96 Dan Hardy, “Plagued Waste Plant to Close, New Owners of Chester’s Thermal Pure Site Had Asked to Restart Treatment of Waste: They Have New Plans,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 15, 1999, B01. 97 Cole and Foster, From the Ground Up, 47–­49. 98 Dawn Fallik and Tina Moore, “State Says No to Plan for Tires as Fuel,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 2002, B01. 99 Hearings before the Majority Policy Committee of the Pennsylvania Senate (March 23, 2010), written testimony of Adam H. Cutler, Director of the Public Health and Environmental Justice Project of the Public Interest Law Center of

234  •  Notes to Pages 135–142

Philadelphia, accessed January 24, 2016, http://​www​.senatorgeneyaw​.com/​files/​ 2013/​07/​cutler​.pdf. 100 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Bureau of Waste Management, Division of Reporting and Fee Collection, “Landfill Waste Receipts in Tons of Waste,” 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004, last updated 2014, accessed March 15, 2015, http://​www​.portal​.state​.pa​ .us/​portal/​server​.pt​?open​=​514​&​objID​=​589667​&​mode​=​2. 1 01 Vince Sullivan, “Covanta and Waste by Rail: Here’s the Plan,” Delaware County Times, August 17, 2014; Laura McCrystal, “Incinerator Expansion Approved,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 14, 2014, B1. 1 02 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, “Landfill Waste Receipts in Tons of Waste.”

Chapter 6  Intersectionality and Environmental Inequality 1 John R. Logan and Mark Schneider, “The Stratification of Metropolitan Suburbs,

1960–­1970,” American Sociological Review 46, no. 2 (1981): 175–­186.

2 David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1989), 186–­187.

3 The concept of “environmental privilege” is discussed in Lisa Sun-­Hee Park and

David Naguib Pellow, The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 3–­4. 4 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 106. 5 Laura Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Redevelopment in Southern California,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 12–­41, 21. 6 Elizabeth Milroy, “‘Pro Bono Publico’: Ecology, History, and the Creation of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System,” in Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds, ed. Brian C. Black and Michael J. Chiarappa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 35–­54. 7 Inga Saffron, “Changing Skyline: Fairmount Park Plan Is Welcome, But It Falls Short,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 14, 2014. 8 Alec Brownlow, “Inherited Fragmentations and Narratives of Environmental Control in Entrepreneurial Philadelphia,” in In the Nature of Cities, ed. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw (New York: Routledge, 2006), 199–­215. 9 The Germantown–­Chestnut Hill Planning Analysis Area includes the Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, and Germantown neighborhoods, which vary a lot in racial/ ethnic composition and socioeconomic status. The entire area averages 30 percent non-­Hispanic white, 62 percent African American, and 3 percent Hispanic, with a median household income of $48,857, and has been designated a Predominantly Black and Lower Middle Class community. But as of 2010 Chestnut Hill was 80 percent white with above-­average income and home values; Mount Airy was 63 percent black and 32 percent white with middle-­class incomes and home values; and Germantown was 77 percent black and 15 percent white and low-­income. 10 Carolyn T. Adams, “Industrial Suburbs: Environmental Liabilities or Assets?” in Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds, ed. Brian C. Black and Michael J. Chiarappa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 117–­135.

Notes to Pages 144–151  •  235 11 Peter Binzen, Whitetown USA (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 195–­196; James

Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 183–­185. 12 David N. Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation: Toward a Theory of Environmental Injustice,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 581–­601. 13 Andrew Hurley, Class, Race and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945–­1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 77–­110. 14 Brian Obach, Labor and the Environmental Movement: The Quest for Common Ground (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 1–­7, 11. 15 Kenneth A. Gould, David N. Pellow, and Allan Schnaiberg, “Interrogating the Treadmill of Production,” Organization & Environment 17, no. 3 (2004): 296–­316. 16 The other two are Greenwich Township, NJ, and Honey Brook Township, PA. (See table 18, appendix.) 17 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1898, reprint 1996). 18 Ibid., 305. 19 Douglas S. Massey, Jonathan Rothwell, and Thurston Domina, “The Changing Bases of Segregation in the United States,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 626 (2009): 74–­90. 20 Mary Patillo, “Black Middle-­Class Neighborhoods,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 305–­327; Patrick Sharkey, “Spatial Segmentation and the Black Middle Class,” American Journal of Sociology 119, no. 4 (2014): 903–­954. 21 Liam Downey and Brian Hawkins, “Race, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States,” Sociological Perspectives 51, no. 4 (2008): 759–­781. 22 Elijah Anderson, “The Emerging Philadelphia African American Class Structure,” American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 568, no. 1 (2000): 54–­77. 23 Philadelphia Department of Public Health, “2015 Community Health Assessment,” accessed January 26, 2016, http://​www​.phila​.gov/​health/​commissioner/​ DataResearch​.html. 24 Margaret Sammartino Marsh, “Suburbanization and the Search for Community: Residential Decentralization in Philadelphia,1880–­1900,” Pennsylvania History 44, no. 2 (1977): 99–­116. 25 Rodger C. Field, “Risk and Justice: Capitalist Production and the Environment,” Capital, Nature, Socialism 18, no. 2 (1997): 69–­94. 26 Thomas Princen, “Distancing Consumption and the Severing of Feedback,” in Confronting Consumption, ed. Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 103–­131. 27 Cole Rosegren, “New York’s Garbage System Faces Mounting Challenges of Cost, Carbon and Equity,” CityLimits​.org (May 18, 2015), accessed January 27, 2016, http://​citylimits​.org/​2015/​05/​18/​new​-y­­­­ orks​-­­­­garbage​-­­­­system​-­­­­faces​-­­­­mounting​ -­­­­challenges​-­­­­of​-­­­­cost​-­­­­carbon​-­­­­and​-­­­­equity/. 28 Arne L. Kalleberg, “Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition,” American Sociological Review 74, no. 1 (2009): 1–­22. 29 Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969). 30 Robert W. Lake and Lisa Disch, “Structural Constraints and Pluralist Contradictions in Hazardous Waste Regulation,” Environment and Planning A 24, no. 5 (1992): 663–­681.

236  •  Notes to Pages 151–154

31 Richard Child Hill, “Separate and Unequal: Governmental Inequality in the

Metropolis,” American Political Science Review 68, no. 4 (1974): 1557–­1568.

32 David Y. Miller, The Regional Governing of Metropolitan America (Boulder, CO:

Westview Press, 2002).

33 Todd Swanstrom, “Pulling Apart: Economic Segregation among Suburbs and Cen-

tral Cities in Major Metropolitan Areas” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, October 2004). 34 Gordon Walker, “Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of Environmental Justice,” in Spaces of Environmental Justice, ed. Ryan Holifield, Michael Porter, and Gordon Walker (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2011), 24–­46, 32–­34. 35 David L. Kirp, John P. Dwyer, and Larry A. Rosenthal, Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 185. 36 The phrase “job blackmail” is Kazis and Grossman’s term; but it was Robert Bullard who first began to apply the concept to cases where a community appeared to welcome destructive or polluting economic activities. See Richard Kazis and Richard L. Grossman, Fear at Work: Job Blackmail, Labor, and the Environment (New York: Pilgrim Press), ix–­x ; Robert D. Bullard and Beverly H. Wright, “Environmentalism and the Politics of Equity: Emerging Trends in the Black Community,” Mid-­American Review of Sociology 12, no. 2 (1987): 21–­37; Robert D. Bullard, “Environmental Blackmail in Minority Communities,” in Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse, ed. Bunyan Bryant and Paul Mohai (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 82–­95. 37 Peter Hendee Brown, America’s Waterfront Revival (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 78–­103. 38 The concept of “growth coalitions” and the implications for urban environmental inequalities when a growth coalition steers redevelopment in a city was discussed in John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 35–­36. 39 Stephen J. McGovern, “Mobilization on the Waterfront: The Ideological/Cultural Roots of Potential Regime Change in Philadelphia,” Urban Affairs Review 44, no. 5 (2009): 663–­694. 40 Howard Gillette, Camden after the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-­Industrial City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 125–­144. 41 Dennis D. Judd, The Tourist City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 35–­53. 42 Claudia Vargas, “Amid Crushing Poverty and Crime, Camden Fights On,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 11, 2013. 43 Peter Eisinger, “The Politics of Bread and Circuses: Building the City for the Visitor Class,” Urban Affairs Review 35, no. 3 (2000): 316–­333. 44 New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Air Quality, “Camden Waterfront South Air Toxics Pilot Project, Final Report” (August 2005), accessed March 1, 2015, www​.nj​.gov/​dep/​ej/​camden/​docs/​finalreport​.pdf. 45 Xiangmay Wu, Zhihua (Tina) Fan, Xianlei Zhu, Kyung Hwa Jung, Pamela Ohman-­Strickland, Clifford P. Weisel, and Paul J. Lioy, “Exposures to Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and Associated Health Risks of Socio-­Economically Disadvantaged Population in a ‘Hot Spot’ in Camden, New Jersey,” Atmospheric Environment 57 (2012): 72–­79. 46 Christopher Mele, “Neoliberalism, Race, and the Redefining of Urban

Notes to Pages 154–158  •  237

Redevelopment,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 2 (2013): 598–­617. 47 Princen, “Distancing.” 48 Inga Saffron, “The Lost Waterfront,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 10, 2002, A01. 49 McGovern, “Mobilization on the Waterfront.” 50 Joel A. Tarr, “Searching for a ‘Sink’ for Industrial Waste: Iron-­Making Fuels and the Environment,” Environmental History Review 18, no. 1 (1994): 9–­34. 51 U.S. EPA, Mid-­Atlantic Corrective Action, “Philadelphia Coke,” last updated April 10, 2013, accessed October 20, 2014, http://​www​.epa​.gov/​reg3wcmd/​ca/​pa/​ webpages/​pad000427906​.html​#reuse. 52 Jared Brey, “New Waterfront Park Coming to Bridesburg,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 2014. 53 Patrick Kerkstra, “Philadelphia + a Pipeline or Two = America’s Next Energy Hub,” Philadelphia Magazine, September 29, 2014. 54 Kathleen Flanagan, “Haunted by an Industrial Future,” Grid Magazine, Philadelphia, February 25, 2015. 55 Steve Lerner, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 60–­61. 56 Robert W. Howarth, “A Bridge to Nowhere: Methane Emissions and the Greenhouse Gas Footprint of Natural Gas,” Energy Science & Engineering 2, no. 2 (2014): 47–­60. 57 Gregory C. Unruh, “Understanding Carbon Lock-­In,” Energy Policy 28, no. 2 (2000): 817–­830.

Chapter 7  A “Rust Belt” Theory of Environmental Inequality 1 David N. Pellow, “Environmental Inequality Formation: Toward a Theory of Envi-

ronmental Injustice,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 581–­601.

2 Dorceta E. Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution,

and Residential Mobility (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 279–­281.

3 Joseph Schilling and Jonathan Logan, “Greening the Rust Belt,” Journal of the

American Planning Association 74, no. 4 (2008): 451–­466; see also Matthew E. Kahn, “The Silver Lining of Rustbelt Manufacturing Decline,” Journal of Urban Economics 46 (1999): 360–­376. 4 Several researchers have criticized environmental justice researchers for ignoring the issue of generalizability, including William Bowen, “An Analytical Review of Environmental Justice Research: What Do We Really Know?” Environmental Management 29, no. 1 (2002): 3–­15, and Douglas S. Noonan, “Evidence of Environmental Justice: A Critical Perspective on the Practice of EJ Research and Lessons for Policy Design,” Social Science Quarterly 89, no. 5 (2008): 1153–­1174. 5 Regional differences in patterns of environmental inequality have been found in both individual quantitative studies such as Liam Downey, “US Metropolitan-­ Area Variation in Environmental Inequality Outcomes,” Urban Studies 44, no. 5/6 (2007): 953–­977; Klara Zwicki, Michael Ash, and James K. Boyce, “Regional Variation in Environmental Inequality: Industrial Air Toxics Exposure in U.S. Cities,” Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Working Paper 342 (February 2014); and Bowen, “An Analytical Review of Environmental Justice Research: What Do We Really Know?”

238  •  Notes to Pages 158–164

6 Waldo Tobler, “A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit

Region,” Economic Geography 46, no. 2 (1970): 234–­240.

7 Stan Openshaw, The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (Norwich, UK: Geo Books,

1983); Rae Zimmerman, “Issues of Classification in Environmental Equity: How We Manage Is How We Measure,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 29 (1993): 633–­669; Juliana Maantay, “Asthma and Air Pollution in the Bronx: Methodological and Data Considerations Using GIS for Environmental Justice and Health Research,” Health & Place 13 (2007): 32–­56. 8 Klara Zwickl, Michael Ash, and James K. Boyce, “Regional Variation in Environmental Inequality: Industrial Air Toxics Exposure in U.S. Cities,” Political Economy Research Institute, Working Paper 342 (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, February 2014). 9 While Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties in southern New Jersey are relatively industrialized compared with some other rural counties (e.g., Sussex County), the areas of most intense industrialization are found in northern New Jersey (e.g., Bergen and Essex Counties). 10 Jeremy Mennis, “Using Geographic Information Systems to Create and Analyze Statistical Surfaces of Population and Risk for Environmental Justice Analysis,” Social Science Quarterly 83, no. 1 (2002): 281–­297. 11 Jeremy Mennis, “Socioeconomic Disadvantage and Environmentally Hazardous Facility Location in Pennsylvania,” The Pennsylvania Geographer 40, no. 2 (2002): 113–­124. 12 Liam Downey, “Environmental Inequality in Metropolitan America in 2000,” Sociological Spectrum 26 (2006): 21–­41. 13 Downey, “US Metropolitan-­Area Variation in Environmental Inequality Outcomes,” 953–­977. 14 Diane Sicotte and Samantha Swanson, “Whose Risk in Philadelphia? Proximity to Unequally Hazardous Industrial Facilities,” Social Science Quarterly 88, no. 2 (2007): 515–­534. 15 Daniel R. Faber and Eric J. Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, Supplement 2 (2002): 277–­288. 16 Diane Sicotte, “Some More Polluted than Others: Unequal Cumulative Industrial Hazard Burdens in the Philadelphia MSA, USA,” Local Environment 15, no. 8 (2010), 761–­774. 17 Diane Sicotte, “Diversity and Intersectionality among Environmentally Burdened Communities in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area, USA,” Urban Studies 51, no. 9 (2014): 1850–­1870. 18 Laura Pulido was among the first environmental justice researchers to write about this as a causal factor in environmental inequality. See Laura Pulido, Steve Sidawi, and Robert O. Vos, “An Archeology of Environmental Racism in Los Angeles,” Urban Geography 17, no. 5 (1996): 419–­439; Laura Pulido, “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 12–­40. 19 Christopher G. Boone, “An Assessment and Explanation of Environmental Inequality in Baltimore,” Urban Geography 23 (2002): 581–­595; Christopher G. Boone, “Improving Resolution of Census Data in Metropolitan Areas Using a Dasymetric Approach: Applications for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study,” Cities and the Environment 1, no. 1 (2008), http://​escholarship​.bc​.edu/​cate/​v011/​iss1/​3/.

Notes to Pages 164–177  •  239 20 On Buffalo, see Eric J. Krieg, “Race and Environmental Justice in Buffalo, NY:

A Zip Code and Historical Analysis of Ecological Hazards,” Society and Natural Resources 18, no. 3 (2005): 199–­213; on Pittsburgh, see Theodore S. Glickman, Dominic Golding, and Robert Hersh, “GIS-­Based Environmental Equity Analysis: A Case Study of TRI Facilities in the Pittsburgh Area,” in Computer Supported Risk Management, ed. Giampiero E. G. Beroggi and William A. Wallace (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 95–­114. 21 Frederick W. Bell, “The Relation of the Region, Industrial Mix, and Production Function to Metropolitan Wage Levels,” Review of Economics and Statistics 43, no. 3 (1967): 368–­374. 22 Paul A. Jargowsky, “Take the Money and Run: Economic Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 6 (1996): 984–­998. 23 John R. Logan, “The Persistence of Segregation in the 21st Century Metropolis,” City & Community 12, no. 2 (2013): 160–­168. 24 Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, “The Dimensions of Racial Segregation,” Social Forces 67 (1988): 281–­315. 25 Steve Lerner, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 24–­28. 26 Michael Konig, “Phoenix in the 1950s: Urban Growth in the ‘Sunbelt,’” Arizona and the West 24, no. 1 (1982): 19–­38. 27 Kevin Fox Gotham, “Beyond Invasion and Succession: School Segregation, Real Estate Blockbusting, and the Political Economy of Neighborhood Racial Transition,” City & Community 1, no. 1 (2002): 83–­111. 28 Barrett A. Lee and Peter B. Wood, “Is Neighborhood Racial Succession Place-­ Specific?” Demography 28, no. 1 (1991): 21–­40. 29 Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African-­American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 20–­21, 24–­25. 30 James R. Elliott and Scott Frickel, “The Historical Nature of Cities: A Study of Urbanization and Hazardous Waste Accumulation,” American Sociological Review 20, no. 10 (2013): 1–­23. 31 Christopher Mele, “Neoliberalism, Race, and the Redefining of Urban Redevelopment,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 2 (2013): 598–­617. 32 Robert D. Bullard, “Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community,” Sociological Inquiry 53, no. 2–­3 (1983): 273–­288. 33 David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle, “Poisoning the Planet: The Struggle for Environmental Justice,” Contexts 6, no. 1 (2007): 37–­41. 34 Diane Sicotte, “Saving Ourselves by Acting Locally: The Historical Progression of Grassroots Environmental Justice Activism in the Philadelphia Area, 1981–­2001,” in Nature’s Entrepôt: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds, ed. Brian Black and Michael J. Chiarappa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 231–­249.

Appendix 1 Stan Openshaw, The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (Norwich, UK: Geo Books,

1983); Rae Zimmerman, “Issues of Classification in Environmental Equity: How

240  •  Notes to Pages 177–191

We Manage Is How We Measure,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 29 (1993): 633–­669; Juliana Maantay, “Asthma and Air Pollution in the Bronx: Methodological and Data Considerations Using GIS for Environmental Justice and Health Research,” Health & Place 13 (2007): 32–­56. 2 Nancy Krieger, Jarvis T. Chen, Pamela D. Waterman, Mah-­Jabeen Soobader, S. V. Subramanian, and Rosa Carson, “Geocoding and Monitoring of US Socioeconomic Inequalities in Mortality and Cancer Incidence: Does the Choice of Area-­ Based Measure and Geographic Level Matter?” American Journal of Epidemiology 156, no. 5 (2002): 471–­482; Nancy Krieger, Jarvis T. Chen, Pamela D. Waterman, David H. Rehkopf, and S. V. Subramanian, “Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Monitoring Socioeconomic Gradients in Health: A Comparison of Area-­Based Socioeconomic Measures—­The Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no. 10 (2003): 1655–­1671. 3 Philadelphia City Planning Commission, “The Political and Community Service Boundaries of Philadelphia,” accessed June 14, 2012, http://​www​.phila​ .gov/​CityPlanning/​resources/​Publications/​Political​_boundaries​.pdf. 4 City of Philadelphia, Department of Records, “Philadelphia Neighborhoods and Place Names,” last modified May 20, 1998, accessed July 24, 2012, http://​www​.phila​ .gov/​phils/​Docs/​otherinfo/​placname​.htm. 5 City​-­­­­Data​.com, “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Neighborhood Map—­Income, House Prices, Occupations, Boundaries,” last modified 2011, accessed June 4, 2013, http://​ www​.city​-­­­­data​.com/​nbmaps/​neigh​-­­­­Philadelphia​-P ­­­­ ennsylvania​.html. 6 U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Tiger/Line Shapefiles for 2010,” accessed February 13, 2012, http://​www​.census​.gov/​geo/​maps​-­­­­data/​data/​tiger​-­­­­line​.html; U.S. Census Bureau, American FactFinder, American Community Survey Five-­Year Estimates, 2006–­2010 (generated by Diane Sicotte using American FactFinder), http://​factfinder​.census​.gov/​ faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​searchresults​.xhtml​?refresh​=​t (February 13, 2012). 7 Daniel R. Faber and Eric J. Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, Supplement 2 (2002): 277–­288. 8 Diane Sicotte, “Saving Ourselves by Acting Locally: The Historical Progression of Grassroots Environmental Justice Activism in the Philadelphia Area, 1981–­2001,” in Nature’s Entrepôt: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds, ed. Brian C. Black and Michael J. Chiarappa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 231–­249. 9 Irene Tesseraux, “Risk Factors of Jet Fuel Combustion Products,” Toxicology Letters 149, no. 1 (2004): 295–­300. 10 Diane Bailey and Gina Solomon, “Pollution Prevention at Ports: Clearing the Air,” Environmental Impact Assessment Review 24, no. 7 (2004): 749–­774; Dinesh Sharma, “Ports in a Storm,” Environmental Health Perspectives 114, no. 4 (2006): A222–­A231. 11 Faber and Krieg, “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards.” 12 Paul Mohai, David Pellow, and J. Timmons Roberts, “Environmental Justice,” Annual Review of Environmental Resources 34 (2009): 405–­430. 13 Arthur Sakamoto, Kimberly A. Goyette, and Chang Hwan Kim, “Socioeconomic Attainments of Asian-­Americans,” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (2009): 255–­276. 14 Gregory Hooks and Chad L. Smith, “The Treadmill of Destruction: National Sacrifice Areas and Native Americans,” American Sociological Review 69, no. 4 (2000): 558–­575.

Notes to Pages 191–200  •  241 15 Richard A. Smith, “Discovering Stable Racial Integration,” Journal of Urban Affairs

20, no. 1 (1998): 1–­25.

16 Brett M. Baden and Don L. Coursey, “The Locality of Waste Sites within the

City of Chicago: A Demographic, Social, and Economic Analysis,” Resource and Energy Economics 24, no. 1 (2002): 53–­93; J. Tom Boer, Manuel Pastor Jr., James L. Sadd, and Lori D. Snyder, “Is There Environmental Racism? The Demographics of Hazardous Waste in Los Angeles County,” Social Science Quarterly 78, no. 4 (1997): 793–­810; Vicki Been and Francis Gupta, “Coming to the Nuisance or Going to the Barrios—­A Longitudinal Analysis of Environmental Justice Claims,” Ecology Law Quarterly 24 (1997): 1–­56; Ronald D. Fricker and Nicolas W. Hengartner, “Environmental Equity and the Distribution of Toxic Release Inventory and Other Environmentally Undesirable Sites in Metropolitan New York City,” Environmental and Ecological Statistics 8, no. 1 (2001): 33–­52; Andrew Szasz and Michael Meuser, “Unintended, Inexorable: The Production of Environmental Inequalities in Santa Clara County, California,” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 602–­632. 17 David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 111. 18 Benjamin J. Apelberg, Timothy J. Buckley, and Ronald H. White, “Socioeconomic and Racial Disparities in Cancer Risk from Air Toxics in Maryland,” Environmental Health Perspectives 113, no. 6 (2005): 693–­699; Stephen H. Linder, Dritana Marko, and Ken Sexton, “Cumulative Cancer Risk from Air Pollution in Houston: Disparities in Risk Burden and Social Disadvantage,” Environmental Science and Technology 42, no. 12 (2008): 4312–­4322. 19 Diane Sicotte, “Some More Polluted Than Others: Unequal Cumulative Industrial Hazard Burdens in the Philadelphia MSA, USA,” Local Environment 15, no. 8 (2010): 761–­774; Diane Sicotte, “Diversity and Intersectionality among Environmentally Burdened Communities in Philadelphia MSA, USA,” Urban Studies 51, no. 9 (2014): 1850–­1870. 20 The calculator for Confidence Intervals for Relative Risk was created by David J. R. Hutcheon, http://​www​.hutchon​.net/​confidrr​.htm. 21 Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic System: Version 2.0 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011), accessed April 4, 2012, https://​data2​ .nhgis​.org/​main. 22 Bureau of Street Cleaning, Streets Department, “Annual Report, 1924,” Streets Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia; Bureau of Street Cleaning, Streets Department, “Annual Report, 1929,” Streets Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia. 23 List of Licensed Dumps (n.d.) (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 24 Letter to P. W. Purdom, Director of Philadelphia Public Health Department, and Raymond Smith, Air Pollution Control Section of Philadelphia Public Health Department, Re: Positive Location of Licensed Dump Areas, July 25, 1956 (Public Health Department, Air Pollution Control Section Files 1952–­1970, Box A-3136, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 25 Bureau of Street Cleaning, Streets Department, “Annual Report, 1932” (Streets Department, Streets Reports, Box A-3614, Folder 84.14e, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia); City of Philadelphia, Streets Department, “Department of Streets Progress Report, 1963–­1967” (Streets Department, Streets Reports, Box

242  •  Notes to Pages 200–201

A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia); City of Philadelphia, Streets Department, “Solid Waste Management Plan, 1970” (Streets Department, Streets Reports, Box A-2781, Folder 88.2, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia). 26 New Jersey Industrial Directory (Union City, NJ: Hudson Dispatch, 1949); Twelfth Industrial Directory of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, 1950). 27 United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Is My Facility’s Six-­Digit NAICS Code a TRI-­Covered Industry?,” last modified March 16, 2014, accessed January 16, 2014, http://​www2​.epa​.gov/​toxics​-­­­­release​-­­­­inventory​-­­­­tri​-­­­­program/​my​-­­­­facilitys​-­­­­six​ -­­­­digit​-n ­­­­ aics​-­­­­code​-t­­­­ ri​-­­­­covered​-­­­­industry. 28 Hemamala Hettinge, Paul Martin, Manjula Singh, and David Wheeler, “The Industrial Pollution Projection System,” World Bank Policy Research Department, Policy Research Paper 1431 (1995).

Index Act 97 (Solid Waste Management Act of 1980, Pennsylvania), 112, 115 affluent communities: definition of, 23–­24, 26tab; location of, 27map, 29 affluent, predominantly black communities: Cheltenham Township as, 147; definition of, 23–­24, 24tab, 26tab affluent, substantially white communities: ability to control space, 141; Chestnut Hill as, 141–­142; definition of, 23–­24, 24tab, 26tab; environmental privilege in, 141; freedom from environmental burdening in, 143; as outer-­ring suburban communities, 143; as shapers of Philadelphia, 142. See also wealthy, white communities African Americans: deaths due to dilapidated housing, 75; environmental inequality among, 34; effect of manufacturing job loss on, 118; effect of suburbanization of employment on, 121; elite, 74; employment discrimination against, 12, 49, 86–­87, 93; environmental racism suffered by, 91–­93, 91tab; enslavement of, 43; exploitation of, 36; Great Migration of, 72, 83, 107; as homeowners, 86; housing discrimination against, 37, 46–­47, 73–­74, 86, 96, 106–­107, 126–­127; in industrial neighborhoods, 70; as manufacturing workers, 47, 70–­71, 71tab, 85; oppression of, 46; political activism of, 75; residential

segregation of, 46–­47, 49, 72–­73, 82; as sanitation workers, 79; social class differentiation among, 146–­147; suburbanization of, 74; unemployment among, 75, 86–­87, 93, 118; as war workers, 45–­46, 49, 65, 73, 76 air pollution: from incinerators, 113; in Kensington neighborhood, 96; in Philadelphia, 96; social meaning of, 110 Alexander v. Sandoval, U.S. Supreme Court decision in, 1, 134 Bartram incinerator, 98. See also incinerators Bridesburg-­Kensington-­Richmond Planning Analysis Area, Philadelphia: East Central incinerator in, 105; environmental hazards in, 9, 143–­146; as extensively burdened community, 186–­190tab; as industrial suburb, 12; median household income in, 144; racial/ethnic composition of, 145map; as racially segregated area, 143–­144; share of industry and waste facilities, 98, 99tab, 143; social class category of, 144 Bridesburg neighborhood, Philadelphia: air pollution in, 96; environmental hazards in 9, 144; as extensively burdened community, 163; median household income in, 9; nuisance industry plants in, 66; racial/ethnic composition of, 9; waterfront redevelopment in, 154–­155 243

244  •  Index

Bristol Township: as extensively burdened community, 186–­190tab; as industrial satellite city of Philadelphia, 12; industrialization of, 95–­96; Levittown in, 95–­96 Burnett, Carole, 3, 5 Camden City, New Jersey: cement recycler in, 133–­134; deindustrialization in, 124; economic decline of, 105, 124–­125; effect of Benjamin Franklin Bridge on, 75; employers in, 67; as extensively burdened community, 151, 186–­190tab; as food desert, 129; incinerator in, 130–­131; median household income in, 124–­125, 148; legal battles on behalf of, 1, 133; manufacturing employment in, 67, 75, 105; median household income in, changing, 125tab; Puerto Ricans in, 105; racial/ethnic composition of, changing, 125tab, 148; rioting in, 125; as satellite city of Philadelphia, 12; sewage treatment plant in, 130; urban problems in, 125; war production in, 76; as waste magnet, 133–­134; waterfront redevelopment in, 152–­153; Waterfront South neighborhood, 153 Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority (CCMUA) sewage treatment plant: building of, 130; complaints about, 130 Camden County Resource Recovery Facility: promoted by mayor, 130; protest against, 130–­131. See also incinerators Center City, Philadelphia: African Americans in, 93; pollution-­intensive industry cluster in, 90map, 91, 94map; racial/ethnic composition of, changing, 107; share of industry and waste facilities, 98–­99, 99tab; urban renewal in, 101–­102; wealthy residential areas in, 62, 67–­68, 68map Cheltenham Township, 145–­147 Chester City, Pennsylvania: casino in, 7; cement crusher in, 4; city government of, 4, 7; death rates in, 4; economic decline in, 126; enhanced participation in, 134; environmental hazards, 4–­5; environmental health issues in, 4–­5; environmental justice activism in, 131, 135; exclusionary development in, 7; as extensively burdened community, 151, 186–­190tab; factories in, 6, 134; as food

desert, 4, 129; homicide rate, 4; incinerator in, 4, 5, 131, 154; infant death rate in, 4; Kimberley-­Clark in, 134; legal cases on behalf of, 1; manufacturing employment in, 67; median household income in, 125, 126tab, 148; poverty in, 3–­4; race riots in, 74; racial/ethnic composition of, changing, 4, 125–­126, 126tab, 148; retail shopping district in, 6; as satellite city of Philadelphia, 12; school system, 6; sewage treatment plant in, 4; shipyards in, 5; Soil Remediation Systems incinerator proposed but not built in, 134; stigmatization of, 4, 6–­7; Thermal Pure medical waste sterilization plant in, 134; truck traffic in, 5; urban problems in, 126; wartime employment in, 5–­6; waste disposal facilities proposed but not built in, 134; wastewater from fracking, proposed treatment of, 135; waterfront redevelopment in, 153–­154; zoning regulations in, 134 Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL), 134 Chestnut Hill, 63, 69 Chicago, Illinois, 48–­50 City Reduction Plant: complaints about, 105; location of, 79, 98. See also incinerators Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI, 1 civil rights movement, in Philadelphia, 86–­87, 99 Clean Air Act, 111 Clean Water Act, 111 commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs): characteristics of host communities near, 114; data sources for, 181–­183, 182tab; hazard points, 19tab; hazardous waste disposal at, 112; opposition to siting of, 114; “path of least resistance” in siting of, 115; in Philadelphia area, proximity to, 18, 116tab, 159–­161; racial composition of host communities, 115; risks of proximity to, 114–­115; as symbol of environmental racism, 114 communities, definition of, 16, 179–­180 Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), 111–­112

Index  •  245

construction and demolition landfills: data sources for, 182–­183, 182tab; hazard point system, 19tab containment, 35–­36 contamination: of air (see air pollution); of land, 58; of water (see water pollution) Covanta incinerator: amount of trash burned, 4–­5; environmental racism and siting of, 129–­131; trash from New York transported to, 5, 134–­136; trash from Philadelphia burned in, 135 data sources: limitations of, 183–­184; sources of 1950 data, 196–­201; sources of 2010 data, 180, 182tab deindustrialization: causes of, 118–­119; consequences of, 2, 150; job loss due to, 85, 117–­121; onset of, 171; in Philadelphia area, 109, 117–­121; in Philadelphia City/ County, 85, 117–­121; of textiles industry, 75, 117; uneven effects of, 117–­121, 117tab, 120tab. See also manufacturing jobs: loss of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, poverty in, 4 Delaware County Regional Water Control Authority (DELCORA): as proposed site for treating wastewater from fracking operations, 135; water treatment plant, 4 Delaware River: importance to early industry, 59–­61; location near as risk factor for environmental inequality, 27–­28, 149; pollution of, 2, 78; waterfront redevelopment along, 152–­156 disadvantaged communities: definition of, 23–­24, 26tab; environmental hazards in, 148; location of, 27map disadvantaged, high-­minority communities: Camden City, New Jersey, as, 148; Chester City, Pennsylvania, as, 148; definition of, 23–­24, 24tab, 26tab; social problems in, 147–­148; West Philadelphia as, 148 distancing, 149–­150, 154 distributive injustice/distributional inequality, definition of, 19–­20, 32 diversity: of definitions of environmental injustice, 32–­33; of environmental justice

issues, 33; in racial/ethnic composition among environmental justice communities, 29; in social class status among environmental justice communities, 29 Douglas, Mary, 110 Downey, Liam, 160, 162 Doyle, Michael (Fr.), 151 drinking water: effect of political corruption on, 76–­78; quality and safety of in Philadelphia, 60–­61, 68–­69, 76–­78, 80, 83 DuBois, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.), 146 dumps, 79–­80, 97–­98. See also garbage disposal; landfills East Central incinerator: complaints about, 105; location of, 98; Philadelphia garbage burned in, 112. See also incinerators Eastwick neighborhoods: redevelopment of, 101–­102; as waste magnet, 132–­133 Eastwick Project Area Committee, 133 economic blackmail, 151 electric power plants: data sources for, 181, 182tab; hazard points, 19tab environmental classism, 106 environmental hazards: description of, used in the analysis, 180–­183; number of, by community characteristics, 22tab; social meaning of, 110–­111 environmental inequality: causes of, 12–­13; definition of, 17–­20; factors in the development of, 165–­173; in Philadelphia area, 11; as a process, 30; theory of, 13, 136–­137, 137fig environmental inequality formation, 12, 35, 80; important factors in, 58, 165–­173; in Philadelphia area, 80–­83, 106–­108, 136–­138, 137fig environmental injustice: in context of law, 32; in context of governance, 32; definitions of, 32–­33; as lack of recognition, 33; as unequal vulnerability to disasters, 33 environmental justice communities: activism in, 54–­55, 113, 130–­131, 133–­136, 172–­173; enhanced participation policy for, 134–­135; official (Pennsylvania) definition of, 31–­32, 135 environmental laws: federal, 109, 111–­112; state, 111–­112, 115, 151

246  •  Index

environmental privilege: in Chestnut Hill, 141–­142; in white, wealthy communities, 141 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 111 environmental racism, 91–­93, 91tab, 106–­107 environmental stigma: consequences of, 127–­128; definition of, 127; as a property of places, 127 Errichetti, Angelo, 130 ethnic succession: definition of, 122–­124; in industrial communities, 123–­124 eugenics, 72 Euro-­Americans. See white ethnics explanations for environmental injustice and inequality: disconnection from empirical research, 40; economic, 37–­39; in Philadelphia area, 137fig, 162–­164; race-­based, 35–­36; social-­class-­based, 38–­39; sociopolitical, 39–­40 extensively burdened communities: definition of, 25; exploitation of, 150–­152; list of, 186–­190tab; location of, 21map; quality-­of-­life issues in, 20; racial/ethnic and social class diversity of, 29; social characteristics of, 22tab; spatial clustering of, 185map factories: location of, in 1950, 87, 88map, 94map Fairmount Park: creation of, 67–­69, 80, 141–­142; unequal access to, 69 Falls Township: as extensively burdened community, 163, 186–­190tab; Grows Landfill in, 106, 145; as industrial satellite city of Philadelphia, 12, 107; industrialization of, 95–­96; Levittown in, 95–­96, 115, 145; manufacturing workers in, 145; median household income, 145; percentage non-­Hispanic white, 145; U.S. Steel Fairless Hills plant in, 95, 145 federal environmental laws, 171–­172; Clean Air Act of 1970, 111; Clean Water Act, 111; Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), 111–­112; National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), 111; Resources Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA), 111–­112. See also environmental laws: federal

garbage disposal: closing of unsafe landfills, 112; crisis in, 112–­113, 115; data sources for sites of, 182tab; dump locations, 80, 81map; exported to counties outside Philadelphia, 106; incinerators, 4–­5, 19tab, 79, 98, 105–­106, 112–­113, 115–­116, 129–­131, 182–­183, 182tab; increasing volume of waste, 112; open dumping, 79–­80; in Philadelphia, 61, 79–­80, 105–­106; reduction plants, 79–­80; rising cost of, 115; social meaning of, 54. See also City Reduction Plant; dumps; incinerators; landfills Gary, Indiana, 47–­48 gas hub, proposed development of, 155–­156 GEMS landfill, 128 generalizability: assumptions of, 42–­43; of factors that shaped environmental inequalities, 158–­159; limits of, 44 gentrification, 45, 170 geographies of responsibility, 39, 151 Germantown, 63 Germantown-­Chestnut Hill Planning Analysis Area, 142 Great Depression, 75 Grows landfill, 106 Harrah’s Casino, 7 Harrowgate Incinerator: complaints about, 105; location of, 79, 98. See also incinerators Harvey, David, 38 hazardous waste disposal: in landfills, 97; after RCRA, 111; in TSDFs (see commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities) high-­minority communities, definition of, 23, 24tab; 25map, 28 Hispanics: changes in Census Bureau enumeration of, 23; environmental inequality among, 34, 44–­45 historical research: generalization and, 44; on the Rust Belt, 46–­51; on the Southeast, 44–­45; on the Southwest, 46 historical turning points, 176–­177 Holcim, environmentally hazardous dust from, 133–­134. See also Saint Lawrence Cement Holifield, Ryan, 32

Index  •  247

Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), 75–­76. See also redlining immigrants: from Asia, 45; employment of, 73, 82; from Europe, 36, 47–­48, 50; from Ireland, 62; from Italy, 73; from Mexico, 45, 47; neighborhoods of, 67; from Poland, 73; residential segregation of, 72; from Russia, 73 incinerator ash, 113 incinerators: Bartram, 98; City Reduction Plant, 79, 98, 105; Camden County Resource Recovery Facility, 130–­131; Covanta, 4–­5, 129–­131, 135–­136; data sources for, 182–­183, 182tab; East Central, 98, 105, 112; hazard points for, 19tab; Harrowgate, 79, 98; Northeast, 98, 105–­106, 112–­113; Northwest, 98, 105–­106; proposed for Naval Yard, 113; racial/ethnic characteristics of host communities, 115; “waste-­to-­ energy,” 113, 116tab indentured servants, 61–­62 industrial development: onset of, 165; in Philadelphia, 56, 57fig, 58–­83 industrial districts: competing interests of residents in, 144; consolidation into Philadelphia, 66; as immigrant clusters, 67; in Philadelphia, 12, 63–­66, 64map; racial/ethnic diversity of, 2; social class diversity of, 2 industrial mix (blend of skilled and unskilled labor), 165–­166 industrial satellite cities, 12 industrial waterfront development, 170–­171. See also waterfront, Delaware River inequities in future generations, 32 inner-­ring towns/suburbs, 1, 25 intersectionality: definition of, 22, 30, 51; environmental inequality and, 139–­149; paradigm, 43–­44; of places, 140–­141; as tool for theorizing, 51–­53; white privilege intersecting with nonprivileged social class status, 145–­146 Interstate-­95, 10, 133, 154 Jews, employment in Philadelphia, 73 Kensington: air pollution in, 96, 110; drinking water source in, 77; economic

competition between African Americans and whites in, 143; as extensively burdened community (see Bridesburg-­ Kensington-­Richmond Planning Analysis Area); Harrowgate Incinerator in, 79; manufacturing in, 63–­64, 64map; median household income of, 9; nuisance industry plants in, 66; pollution-­intensive industry cluster in, 90map, 91, 92map; racial/ethnic composition of, 9, 53, 65, 85, 144; redlining of, 76; skilled workers in, 67; strikes in, 71, 74–­75; as textile district, 143; unskilled workers in, 65 Keystone Paving and Construction, 5 landfills: closure of, 112; cost of, 112; data sources for, 182tab, 183; dumps, improvement over, 97–­98; hazard points, 19tab; in Philadelphia, 106–­107; rising cost of, 112–­113; 127–­128; size of, 112 land use, 37–­39, 42, 52–­53, 100 Lansdowne Borough: environmental hazards in, 147; manufacturing workers in, 147; median household income in, 147; as middle-­class, predominantly black community, 147; percentage black, 147; percentage in management occupations, 147 Latinas/Latinos, 45. See also Hispanics Layer I, II, III. See industrial development Leake, Willie Mae, 131 Levittown, 94–­96, 107, 138 location of community (as risk factor for environmental burdening), 24–­25 Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, California, 44–­45 lower middle-­class communities: definition of, 23–­24, 26tab; location of, 27map Lower North Philadelphia: African Americans in, 94; as extensively burdened community, 186–­190tab; pollution-­intensive industry cluster in, 90map, 91, 95map; share of industry and waste facilities, 98, 99tab Main Line communities: location of, 67, 68map; spatial sorting, 142. See also wealthy, white communities Manayunk: immigrants from England in, 110; location of, 25map, 60;

248  •  Index

Manayunk (continued) redevelopment of, 142; unskilled workers in, 65; water pollution by factories in, 77 manufactories, 61, 70 manufacturing industries: location in Philadelphia City/County, 93, 94map, 95map; racial composition of employees, 123tab; wages in, 124tab; wartime production in, 72, 78 manufacturing jobs: loss of, 85, 117–­121; suburbanization of, 117tab, 119–­121, 120tab manufacturing workers: African Americans as, 70–­71; Asian women preferred as, 35; children as, 71; environmental inequality among, 34–­35; European immigrants preferred as, 36, 50, 70; health and safety of, 66, 70–­72; layoffs of, 75; mechanics as, 61–­62; Mexican men preferred as, 35; residential locations of, 119; social contract with, 150; unionization of, 62, 72; unskilled, 62–­63; wages of, 119, 166; whites as, 93; working conditions of, 166 Marcus Hook, Borough of, 12 market dynamics, 37 Mennis, Jeremy, 159, 162 methods: for calculating community risk for extensive burdening, 195–­196, 197–­199tab; for constructing racial/ ethnic composition categories, 185–­192, 191tab, 192tab; for constructing social class categories, 192–­194, 194tab; for creating measures of extensive environmental burdening, 184–­185; for mapping community conditions and environmental hazards in 1950, 196–­200; for mapping communities and environmental hazards in 2010, 178; for measuring spatial clustering, 185map middle-­class communities: definition of, 23–­24, 26tab; location of, 27map middle-­class, predominantly black communities: air quality in, 146; definition of, 23–­24, 24tab, 26tab; Landsdowne Borough as, 147 Mills, Charles, 110 Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP), 159, 177 Mount Airy, 63, 69

municipal governments, political fragmentation and, 151 municipal solid waste landfills. See landfills National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), 111 negative racialization: causes of, 128–­129; consequences of, 128; definition, 128 neighborhoods, definitions and boundaries of, 180 Northeast incinerator: closure of, 113; complaints about, 105–­106; location of, 98; Philadelphia’s garbage burned in, 112. See also incinerators Northern Liberties: African Americans in, 63; manufacturing in, 63, 64map; unskilled workers in, 65 North Philadelphia: African American influx into, 75, 82, 86, 94, 107; as extensively burdened community, 186–­190tab; redlining of, 76; urban renewal in, 101–­102 Northwest incinerator: closure of, 113; complaints about, 105–­106; location of, 98 noxious industries/nuisance industries: definition of, 16, 66; location of, 16, 66; social meaning of, 110 outer-­ring suburbs, 25 participative injustice, 32 Pellow, David, 12 Penn, William, 5–­6 Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP), enhanced participation policy for environmental justice communities, 31, 134–­135 Philadelphia City/County: city planning in, 100; east-­west divide in, 81–­82; elite residential districts in, 67, 68map; extensively burdened communities in, 186–­190tab; garbage disposal in, 61, 79–­80, 81map; gas hub development proposed for, 155; homicide rate in, 4; industrial districts of; 63; location of factories in, 70; neighborhoods in, 16–­17; poverty in, 3–­4; racial/ ethnic composition of, 86, 94–­95; racial/ ethnic relations in, 15–­16; Republican political machine in, 72; social inequality

Index  •  249

in, 11; Street Cleaning Bureau of, 79–­80; transition to manufacturing economy in, 59; urban renewal in, 99, 101–­102; waterfront redevelopment in, 152–­156; as “Workshop of the World,” 66. See also Center City, Philadelphia Philadelphia Coke, 9, 155 Philadelphia Metropolitan Area: extensively burdened communities in, 186–­190tab; median household income in, 3, 8, 18map, 144, 147; metropolitan governments in, 102, 105; political fragmentation of, 102; population in each county, 103–­104tab; race relations in, 15–­16; racial/ethnic composition of, 86; rationale for focus on, 175–­176; spatial statistical research on, 159–­162 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois), 146 Phoenix, Arizona, 11 places: development of, 52; relational, 53; spatial sorting within, 53 planning, onset of, 171 Planning Analysis Areas, definition of, 16–­17 political corruption, in Philadelphia, 76–­79 pollution: of air (see air pollution); of land (see contamination); social meaning of, 54; of water (see water pollution) pollution-­intensive industries: definition of, 87; location of, 87, 89map, 93, 94map, 95map; population near, 91, 92map; spatial clustering of, 87, 90map, 95map, 106 Port Richmond: air pollution in, 10, 96; environmental hazards in, 9; as extensively burdened community, 163; industrial land use in, 63, 64map; median household income in, 8; neighborhood conditions in, 9, 101; nuisance industry plants in, 66; pollution-­intensive industry cluster in, 90map, 91, 95map; racial/ ethnic composition of 8, 144; redlining of, 76; skilled workers in, 67; truck traffic in, 9. See also Bridesburg-­Kensington-­ Richmond Planning Analysis Area predominantly black communities: as affluent and middle-­class communities, 146–­147; definition of, 23, 24tab; location of, 25map, 28–­29

predominantly Hispanic communities: characteristics of, 28; definition of, 21tab, 23; location of, 25map, 28 predominantly white communities: definition of, 24tab; as extensively burdened communities, 143–­146, 145map; location of, 25map, 29 predominantly white, lower middle-­class communities: definition of, 23–­24, 24tab, 26tab predominant racial/ethnic minority groups, 167 Primas, Randy, 130 Princen, Thomas, 149 privilege: environmental, 53; white (see white privilege) procedural injustice, 32 public attitudes: toward polluting industry, 100–­101, 110–­111, 172; toward waste and waste disposal facilities, 110–­111, 172 Puerto Ricans: as agricultural war workers, 28; effect of manufacturing job loss on, 118; as manufacturing workers, 85; in Philadelphia City/County, 94 qualitative research: generalization and, 44; on the Rust Belt (see Rust Belt); on the Southeast, 44–­45; on the Southwest, 46. See also historical research quantitative research: assumption of generalizability, 42–­43 (see also scope); cross-­ sectional, 42; disconnection from other research literatures, 41; on environmental inequality in Philadelphia area, 159; findings of, 33; intersectionality in, 43; interdisciplinary nature of, 41; national-­level, 42–­43 (see also scope); relational issues in, 43; research aims in, 41; scale issue in, 41; shortcomings of, 34–­35; 40–­41. See also spatial statistical research race riots: in Chester, Pennsylvania, 74; in Philadelphia, 62 racial/ethnic composition, categorization of, 23–­24, 24tab racial/ethnic segregation in residential areas, 168–­169 racialization: negative, 128–­129 (see also negative racialization); of labor in

250  •  Index

racialization (continued) Philadelphia, 137; of places, 52; of urban space and labor, 35 racialized labor patterns, 167–­168 railroad lines: Main Line, 67; Pennsylvania and Reading, 65; in residential neighborhoods,100; role in industrial expansion, 65 redlining, 6, 75–­76 relational: nature of places, 53 (see also places); nature of social class, 38 (see also social class) research aims, 175 residential segregation: of African Americans, 46–­47, 49, 72–­73, 82; economic, 166–­167 Resources Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), 111 Richard, Margie, 46 risk factors for extensive burdening with environmental hazards, 21, 25–­28, 148–­149, 197–­199tab Risk-­Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI), 160–­161 Rittenhouse Square, 67–­68, 68map Roxborough-­Manayunk Planning Analysis Area, environmental hazards in, 142 Rust Belt, 2; definition of, 46–­47, 158; historical research on, 46–­51; pattern of environmental inequality in, 50–­51; population density in, 158; spatial statistical research on, 159–­162; theory of environmental inequality in, 157–­174 Safe Drinking Water Act, 111 Saier, Jackie, 7–­10 Saier, Mike, 7–­10, 100 Saint Lawrence Cement, 133–­134. See also Holcim sanitation workers, 79 Santa Clara County, California, 45 scale: community level, 179; from individual level to place level, 52; rationale for, 177–­178; research issues with, 41–­42. See also unit of analysis Schuykill River: industrialization of, 59–­60; 68–­69; industry on, 60; pollution of, 69, 77 scope: rationale for, 177–­178; research issues with, 42–­43. See also generalizability segregation, residential. See residential segregation

servants, indentured, 62 service occupations, low wages in, 121 servitude/slavery, environmental, 36 set-­aside of clean or beautiful areas for the wealthy, 166 sewage treatment plants: in Camden, 130; in Chester, 4, 135; data sources for, 182tab, 183; hazard points, 19tab; in Philadelphia, 96–­97 Shrader-­Frechette, Kristin, 32 shipyards: in Chester, 5; in Port Richmond, 66; in South Philadelphia, 66 siting of waste disposal facilities, 131–­132 slaves, 62 social class: categorization of, 22–­24, 26tab; county-­level inequality, 150–­151; diversity of extensively burdened communities, 29; as embedded in place, 39; exploitation, 150–­152; inequality as cause of environmental inequality, 163–­164; relations, 38 Social Darwinism, 73 sociopolitical power, 39–­40 Solid Waste Management Act of 1977 (New Jersey), 112, 115 Solid Waste Management Act of 1980 (Act 97) (Pennsylvania), 112, 115 Southeast, historical research on, 44–­45 South Philadelphia: City Reduction Works in, 79; dumps in, 98; as extensively burdened community, 186–­190tab; housing collapse in, 75; industrial districts in, 63; pollution-­intensive industry cluster in, 90map, 91, 95map; racial/ethnic composition of, changing, 75, 85, 94; 107; redlining of, 76; share of industry and waste facilities, 98, 99tab; waste disposal facilities in, 163 Southwark, manufacturing in, 63, 64map Southwest, historical research on, 46 Southwest Philadelphia: dumps in, 98; as extensively burdened community 186–­190tab; racial conflict in, 85; share of industry and waste facilities, 98, 99tab; waste disposal facilities in, 163 spatial clustering: of environmental hazards, 20, 185map, 189; of extensively burdened communities, 21map, 24; by racial/ethnic composition, 28

Index  •  251

spatial statistical research: assumption of generalizability, 42–­43 (see also scope); cross-­sectional, 42; disconnection from other research literatures, 41; on environmental inequality in Philadelphia area, 159–­162; findings of, 33; intersectionality in, 43; interdisciplinary nature of, 41; national-­level, 42–­43 (see also scope); relational issues in, 43; research aims in, 41; scale issue in, 41; shortcomings of, 34–­35; 40–­41. See also quantitative research stigma, 111, 127–­128. See also environmental stigma; negative racialization strikes, in Philadelphia, 62, 71, 74–­75 study area, definition of, 15, 178 substantially diverse communities, definition of, 21tab, 23 substantially white communities, definition of, 21tab, 23 suburbanization: from 1950 to 1969, 93–­96; importance of, 2; of industrial plants, 107; onset of, 169; racial segregation as a factor in, 102 Sun Shipbuilding, 5–­6 Superfund sites: data sources for, 180, 182tab; hazard points, 19tab. See also Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act technologies: transportation and power generating, and location of industry, 165; waste disposal, 172 temporal issues, 54–­55 theories of environmental injustice and inequality: disconnection from empirical research, 40; lack of, 31–­32; in Philadelphia area, 137fig, 162–­164. See also explanations for environmental injustice and inequality Tobler, Waldo, 158 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI): data sources for, 181, 182tab; facilities, 18–­19, 19tab; in Philadelphia area, 159–­161 trash transfer stations: data sources for, 182tab, 183; hazard points, 19tab Treatment, Storage and Disposal Facilities (TSDFs). See commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities

TSDFs. See commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities uneven development, 37, 46 unit of analysis: communities, 179; issues with, 41–­42. See also scale upper middle-­class communities: definition of, 23–­24, 26tab; location of, 27map wages, of manufacturing workers. See manufacturing workers: wages of Walker, Gordon, 39 wartime manufacturing production, 72, 78. See also manufacturing industries waste: commodification of, 149; social meanings of, 54 waste disposal industries: consolidation of corporations in, 112, 122, 149; municipal workers in, 79, 122; racial composition of workforce in, 79, 122–­123, 123tab; wages in, 79, 122, 123tab, 124tab; unionization in, 122 waste disposal sites: in Philadelphia, 99tab; social meaning of, 110–­111; stigma attached to, 111. See also garbage disposal waste magnet: definition of, 13; effect on communities of becoming, 131–­136 waterfront, Delaware River: barriers to redevelopment of, 101; in Bridesburg, 154–­155; in Camden City, New Jersey, 152–­153; in Chester City, Pennsylvania, 153–­154; industrial land use on, 66, 80, 101; in Philadelphia, 154; redevelopment of, 152–­156, 170–­171 Waterfront South, 152–­153. See also Camden City, New Jersey water pollution, 2, 77–­78, 96–­97 water treatment plants, in Philadelphia, 77–­78 wealthy: in early Philadelphia, 61; residential areas of, 62–­63, 67, 68map, 82 wealthy, white communities; ability to control space, 141; Chestnut Hill as, 141–­142; environmental privilege in, 141; freedom from environmental burdening in, 143; as outer-­ring suburban communities, 143; as shapers of Philadelphia, 142. See also affluent, substantially white communities

252  •  Index

West Philadelphia: African American influx into, 83, 86, 94, 107; origins as middle-­ class suburban neighborhood, 32, 67; redlining of, 76; share of industry and waste facilities, 98, 99tab white ethnics, 85, 138. See also whiteness: changing definition of whiteness: changing definition of, 23, 36, 50, 62, 72–­73, 82, 85, 137–­138; limits of, 53 white privilege, 11, 36, 45, 141 whites: environmental inequality suffered by, 91; impact of deindustrialization

on, 118, 121; suburbanization of, 36, 85 Wilson, Sarah (pseudonym), 5 Wissahickon, 69 working conditions, of manufacturing workers, 166. See also manufacturing workers Wright, Erik Olin, 38 yellow fever epidemic, 65 zoning: exclusive, 39; hierarchical, 100; industrial, 38, 122; onset of, 171; in Philadelphia, 100; racialized nature of, 37

About the Author is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Drexel University, where she researches urban environmental inequality and teaches courses on environmental sociology and environmental justice.

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