Struggling to Breathe in Asthma Alley

The South Bronx is trying to fight back against a long-running asthma epidemic, despite fears that a new trucking facility will make things worse.

South Bronx activist Mychal Johnson is used to listing off the reasons his neighborhood of Mott Haven suffers from some of the worst asthma rates in the state. There’s the three massive highways that encircle it, the nearby garbage facility that handles a third of New York City’s waste, and the ubiquitous factories and warehouses clustered along the coastline. Most visible, though, are the trucks barreling down the South Bronx’s thoroughfares which spew pollution that locals breathe in every day.

“It’s been well-documented that this community is considered Asthma Alley because of the poor air quality,” Johnson said.

Asthma in the South Bronx — a mostly Black and Hispanic community located in the US’ poorest Congressional district — is an epidemic. The South Bronx’s asthma rate is eight times the national average, and one in four children suffer from the disease, according to some estimates. That’s in a borough which has an asthma death rate four times the state average, or over 40 per million.

This epidemic doesn’t seem to be abating, either. Asthma prevalence rates for Medicaid users in South Bronx neighborhoods all increased from 2009 to 2013. In the neighborhood of Hunts Point — home to the largest wholesale food market in the world, bringing in truck traffic from all over — 2 in 10 of those surveyed have the disease.

At fault are tiny particles emitted by diesel vehicles, buildings, and other sources that lodge themselves deep in people’s lungs, exacerbating the risk of asthma-related hospitalization and death.

Johnson and other locals are worried that the situation will keep getting worse unless the sort of development the South Bronx has experienced drastically changes. While formerly industrial neighborhoods in Brooklyn have successfully shifted to startups, tourism, and other sectors, the South Bronx continues to be one of New York’s main clearinghouses for heavy industry and logistics.

The latest addition to this inventory is FreshDirect, a grocery delivery service which was given over $120 million in tax credits and cash incentives to build its new headquarters in the South Bronx in 2012. That happened despite substantial local opposition led by South Bronx Unite, a community group Johnson co-founded. The facility, which broke ground in 2014, is expected to be operational next summer; it will bring jobs, but also an estimated 1,000 added daily truck trips to the neighborhood. (Residents also question the quality of those jobs, given that FreshDirect promised to only hire locals for non-union jobs, some of which pay below the living wage.)

“These kinds of projects have been dumped in our community because it’s a poor community of color,” Johnson said.

Johnson fears FreshDirect’s trucks would worsen the South Bronx’s already-catastrophic asthma rates, whose real-life effects aren’t hard to find. Schoolchildren regularly miss class due to asthma attacks, while adults miss work. People die too — like William Lopez, who was wrongly jailed for a drug murder for 23 years only to be killed by a massive asthma attack 18 months after he was freed in September 2014.

Ed Garcia Conde, a local blogger behind the Welcome2TheBronx website, said friends had to rush him to the emergency room last year after he stepped out of an air-conditioned taxi on a hot day in Port Morris and had an asthma attack.

“I couldn’t take another step,” he said. “It was terrifying.”

To Conde, who repeatedly editorialized against FreshDirect from his blog, the fact that the company was given millions in tax credits despite the South Bronx’s already-heavy truck presence was further proof that the neighborhood remained a dumping ground for projects the rest of the city didn’t want.

Conde is also worried FreshDirect won’t keep a 2012 promise that it would convert its fleet of trucks to a “100% green transportation fleet” by 2017. Conde said the firm had an opportunity to revamp its fleet after it lost 100 trucks to Hurricane Sandy in 2013, but that it bought 15 new diesel-only trucks a year later, as he documented in a blog post based on photos of the trucks he received.

“Every politician who supported FreshDirect, in my opinion, has blood on their hands,” Conde said.

The specifics of FreshDirect’s plan for a “100% green transportation fleet” remain unclear. It bought 10 electric vehicles from a Bronx company in 2012 but it is unknown how close it is to fully converting the fleet, or even what “100% green” really means. (The firm did not respond to requests for comment.)

Dr. Hal Strelnick, a professor of family medicine at the Bronx’s Albert Einstein University, said FreshDirect needed to comply with the “highest standards of pollution control” if it wanted to have a positive impact. Strelnick has done research on truck routes in the Bronx and said that people who lived within 100 yards of them, along with other pollution “point sources” like dry cleaners, have anywhere from 25 to 100 percent higher rates of asthma.

However, Strelnick said asthma rates in the Bronx were increasing not just because of traffic but a “perfect storm” of factors including substandard housing and high poverty levels that limit access to medical services. Yet another issue: due to a ‘diversity gap’ in clinical trials, asthma medication often isn’t as effective for minorities — and the South Bronx is 99% Black or Hispanic.

Councilmember Rafael Salamanca, who represents several South Bronx communities at the New York City Council, said asthma was also worsened by local ignorance about risk factors.

“People don’t realize their kid needs to go to the doctor if he’s wheezing, and some adults think they’re strong enough, not realizing this may be a late trigger of asthma and maybe you should get it checked out,” said Salamanca.

Salamanca knows that from experience: he has asthma too, and remembers “long nights in the hospital” with his mother when he was a child. Though it has subsided, he always carries a yellow inhaler with him.

Salamanca said progress was being made in the fight against asthma, chiefly through initiatives like designated truck routes and the Hunts Point Clean Trucks Program, a federally-funded project which provided rebates to retrofit 500 older diesel trucks with cleaner engines.

But that program is wrapping up, and Salamanca said educating locals about asthma through public awareness campaigns, one of which began last month, would be the most important factor in reducing asthma in the near term given the South Bronx’s vehicle-dependent economy.

“Asthma is a problem in this community and I think it will continue because of the amount of vehicular traffic that we have, but education is key on how to address it,” he said.

Others are trying a different approach. The Haven Project, which is run by the New York Restoration Project, a city charity, aims to transform the southeastern coast of the Bronx into a series of interconnected green corridors and bicycle lanes along the (currently inaccessible) waterfront.

Bethany Hogan, government relations and special projects manager for the NYRP, said the South Bronx has one of the lowest rates of access to green space in the city, increasing the risk of asthma and other diseases like obesity.

“We know that there’s a direct connection between people’s nearness to open space and their health outcomes,” she said.

The Haven Project is expected to begin breaking ground in two years and is partly funded by a $2 million grant from the City. (If completed, all the project’s phases would cost up to $20 million.)

Hogan said she hoped the project would put the natural assets of the South Bronx, like its scenic coastline, to the forefront of its development, rather than industrial zones and plans for luxury condos far out of reach for locals.

“What I tend to say to people is this part of the world has gotten the rest of what the city doesn’t want for a very long time,” Hogan said.