L.A.’s Ugly History of Environmental Racism
Flint, MI and its water contamination disaster put environmental racism on the map. Put simply, environmental racism is policy-making and economic-planning that disproportionately and significantly targets communities of color as locations for industry, its waste, and other adverse environmental factors. Examples of environmental racism abound in today’s world, from the location of oil drilling in certain communities in the Niger Delta to excess pollutants in inner cities across the U.S.
Los Angeles is a prime example of structural environmental racism. L.A.’s industrial development compounded factors that removed land management agency from communities of color, institutionalizing a racist system and foregrounding adverse environmental outcomes for generations to come.
Los Angeles was a late bloomer, industrially-speaking. Originally home to the Chumash and Tongva tribes, L.A. was settled by the Spanish in the 1780s and grew slowly. By the turn of the 20th century, the population was only 100,000, compared to New York’s one million residents. For centuries L.A.’s coast line had been largely composed of estuaries, or marshlands that made boat access incredibly difficult, but at the outset of the 1900s, following decades of political battles, the city commenced major hydraulic dredging and the ecology of the coast transformed. By 1915, the city was ready for its industrial boom.
With a port now fit for international trade, L.A.’s profile as an economic star began to rise. Infrastructure was built, foundations laid, and labor forces recruited, all concentrating in the urban core. Advertising campaigns boasted of the area’s cheap Latino labor force and ideal location near the railroad. Entire communities (of color) were displaced by a growing super-highway-system to facilitate the movement of people, cars, and prosperity.
Why did industry concentrate in the urban core? For this, we need to spend a minute considering Los Angeles’ peculiar economic geography. L.A. occupied a unique place in the American cultural mind, a sort of Western utopia where the rich and successful could go to relax and live “the good life.” As these rich and successful (white) people moved to L.A., they took up plots of land far away from the downtown area: to be rich and successful was to have a large house and a pool, not a cramped urban apartment. The result is a map that looks like this, with the rich on the periphery and the poor at the center.
Enter encroaching industrialization. Naturally, industry occupied land in the urban center, near the railroads and cheap labor force. The city was zoned for these purposes. Did the poor population in the urban center have the same kinds of land management rights as their rich peers on the periphery? No. The city managed its industrial urban land, while individuals managed (and owned) their land on the periphery. The city intentionally kept prices low in the core to attract industry and investment.
Of course, one reaction in the academic literature is to place the onus on zoning laws or habits of policy-makers and consumers. In the L.A. context, the defense would be that the property values happened to be cheaper in communities of color, and industries are motivated to seek out less expensive land. This argument, however, fails to address the reality that the lower property values were co-created through a variety of actions over time, including deprivation of government services and intentional decentralization of wealth in the area.
And then the situation worsened. The years following World War II were marked by a great relocation. Industry decamped to the margins in favor of innovative and technological development over labor-intensive factory-based labor. The marginality of communities increased as the dynamic became a self-fulfilling system; authors Judd and Simpson explain “the shift from an economy of large composite firms performing many tasks to one characterized by small firms performing specialized tasks contributed to industrial and residential dispersion.” In other words, industry left the urban core leaving behind lower property values, waste, and thousands unemployed.
Relocation of economic opportunity away from the urban center to the margins has a compound effect on marginality in Los Angeles, increasing economic inequality and solidifying the structures that lead to environmental racism. It is within these structures that environmental racism can be particularly pernicious. Politicians, leaders of industry, and policy makers sometimes argue that environmental racism does not exist, but rather that it is the coincidental placement of certain hazards in or near communities of color (or that communities of color move to these sites), but not with malicious intent. All the same, these communities are now geographically prevented from engaging in the wealthiest parts of economy. They are economically and spatially marginalized away from prosperity.
At the center of this entire story is the reality of environmental racism. With industrial factories comes industrial waste. With highways comes pollution. And with both comes the acceleration of land degradation that threatens all of our economic futures. The City of Los Angeles found that “residents in Westlake and Southeast Los Angeles have less than half an acre of park space available per 1,000 residents, significantly lower than the City average of 8.9 acres.” In Watts, a central L.A. neighborhood, a survey found that ninety percent of residents buy bottled water due to unsafe drinking water in the city.
Even from the start, the city denied water access specifically to communities of color in the 19th century in the transition from open canals to closed pipes, reinforcing stereotypes of these communities as dirty or diseased. Such moves laid the foundation for a legacy of institutionalized racism that would continue throughout industrialization.
Land use patterns and zoning laws from the industrial age persist, meaning the communities of color located in the center are more exposed to industrial hazards but do not have opportunities to leave. As the shift from assembly lines to more variable modes of production evacuated the economic activity and employment opportunities, the zoning laws were not changed. As a result, industries continue to locate there, but those that tend to locate in the urban center are the ones that “nobody wants,” including incinerator projects and other heavy machinery-based companies. Multiple studies have found evidence of environmental racism in the location of landfills, highways, and hazardous waste treatment and storage facilities.
L.A.’s history, politics, and economic structure is complicated. This is merely a skim off the surface of a deeply-rooted, twisted, and complicated context and doesn’t address nuances like the differing outcomes for Mexican vs black vs Asian communities. But the result is clear. An institutionalized and structural environmental racism in L.A. exists and is the result of the city’s unique industrialization.
It is now obvious that because the problem exists on many levels, it must be resolved at many levels. Exclusively providing political opportunity to communities of color will not resolve the economic problems, just as providing restitution for racist policies and exclusion from land management in the past probably will not resolve problems posed by the highways in these neighborhoods. Review of current Los Angeles city planning efforts do appear to address a number of issues in environmental racism, like seeking to connect communities to safe drinking water, healthy food, and green spaces. There are, however, no mention of plans at the structural economic level. It is this structural economic level that must be addressed in order to restore even limited land management capacity to communities of color.
[This article is adapted from a paper written over the course of the author’s master studies. For the full paper, please send a message.]
