Traffic moves along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
When longtime environmental advocate Adriana Espinoza was tapped by Mayor Bill de Blasio to lead New York City’s first environmental justice study, she had no idea that in a matter of weeks, the entire city would shut down.
The Covid-19 pandemic was already spreading throughout the five boroughs — and just as quickly as Espinoza had set up her desk at City Hall, she was packing it up to work from home, like millions of her fellow New Yorkers.
But the public health crisis would soon give her work new meaning.
Communities of color that have long lived in the shadow of power plants, highways and waste transfer stations were among the hardest hit by the pandemic. Black and Latino residents have had significantly higher death rates than their white counterparts — often due to higher rates of preexisting respiratory conditions that trace their root, in part, to living in highly polluted areas of the city.
A Harvard University study showed that a person living for decades in an area with high levels of particulate matter — often the exhaust resulting from fuel combustion — is 15 percent more likely to die from Covid-19 than someone in a region with one unit less of fine particulate pollution.
Against that backdrop, Espinoza saw a newfound urgency to not only expose the environmental injustices that exist throughout New York, but create new standards for the government agencies she works with to undo them. Her office hopes to release a draft report in the coming months.
“The reality is more folks are recognizing, day by day, that structural racism impacts every aspect of how a person moves through society,” Espinoza told POLITICO. “There is a reckoning that your health and your physical environment and your economic outlook are intrinsically linked to each other and have to be addressed systematically in order to improve people’s lives.”
New York has joined a wave of local governments that have increased efforts after emerging from the pandemic to address environmental racism. Across the Hudson River, New Jersey recently passed a law to deny permits for power plants and other high-polluting sources in neighborhoods that are already disproportionately exposed to environmental and health risks. Other cities are looking at tearing down highways that divide Black communities and expose residents to excessive vehicle pollution and traffic.
The Biden administration has similarly increased its focus on environmental justice communities through the Justice40 initiative — a program meant to ensure at least 40 percent of federal investments in climate and clean energy go to disadvantaged communities. But as Democrats continue to haggle over the details of President Joe Biden’s social spending and climate bill, environmental experts see a benefit in local governments using their authority to advance environmental justice priorities.
“I do think the states are very important in many respects because they control permitting,” said Peggy Shepard, the executive director for WE ACT for Environmental Justice in New York. “At the federal level, the EPA can develop a lot of new initiatives, but it is the states that grant the permits.”
Shepard, who also sits on the White House environmental justice advisory council, said state governments have taken on a larger role in carbon reduction efforts since former President Donald Trump was in office, where he withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement to reduce emissions. She expects that trend to continue as the pandemic places a greater emphasis on environmental hazards.
“It’s shone a light on systemic bias that has created the conditions that so many of our communities are experiencing,” Shepard said. “I think all of those things culminated in a perfect storm to raise the visibility of environmental justice.”
In New York, that’s playing out in the form of a comprehensive study of environmental justice issues throughout the five boroughs.
The study itself has been a long time coming. After years of advocacy, the City Council passed two bills in 2017 requiring a comprehensive study identifying environmental justice areas and a new working group to craft initiatives to better respond to the issues faced by environmental justice communities.
But work didn’t begin in earnest until 2019, when de Blasio named Espinoza as the city’s environmental justice adviser to oversee the entire effort. Since then, city officials have been finalizing the scope of the study — which will lay out all of the issues the report will cover and the city’s methodologies for assessing them.
As part of that process, the city held town halls and collected public comments from New Yorkers on what they consider to be the top environmental issues in the area. While any resident could submit a comment, the city was intentional in reaching out to designated environmental justice communities — such as East Elmhurst in Queens; Brownsville in Brooklyn and Hunts Point in the Bronx.
City officials are already getting new insight early in the process. When filtering through the comments, residents citywide listed garbage, access to parks and noise as the top three environmental issues plaguing the city. But when isolating comments submitted by residents in designated environmental justice communities, the top three issues shifted to access to healthy foods, poor indoor air quality and pests.
“For me, what that highlights is [that] the issues of New Yorkers in environmental justice areas are urgent quality of life and health matters,” Espinoza said.
Once the final scope is determined, city officials will work on the study and issue recommendations to city agencies. Espinoza didn’t give a precise timeline for the entire process, but said the scope should be published “soon.”
Espinoza said New York is one of the first cities to conduct a localized study of environmental justice issues before crafting a plan of action.
The city is coordinating with officials in Seattle, which released a blueprint five years ago identifying environmental justice issues throughout the city. Lylianna Allala, Seattle’s climate justice director, said the agenda has been crucial in guiding the city’s environmental agenda.
“It really came from this feeling of being disempowered and living in a beautiful city — an incredibly beautiful city — with progressive climate policies, but still not feeling those policies in the same way that more privileged, wealthy and white constituents were feeling,” she said.
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