Toxic Burden: The Controversy of Affordable Housing in Baltimore’s Most Polluted Areas

BALTIMORE — As major city populations expand, affordable housing remains a critical issue in some areas. In many urban communities, low-income residents are increasingly concentrated in neighborhoods burdened by environmental hazards such as toxic waste sites with air and water pollution. This is the case in Baltimore City.

“South Baltimore in general, has been treated as, historically, like a sacrifice,” said Brian Rogers, Executive Director of the South Baltimore Gateway Partnership. “It’s like a place where, if there’s something that you need but don’t want to have to look at, you can put it in South Baltimore – far enough away from the center of the city that you don’t have to pay attention to it.”

According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Map screening tool, which offers information on the rate of pollutants, including particulate matter (PM), throughout the city, nearly all public and affordable housing in the city is located in regions most impacted by pollution. This is particularly true in South Baltimore, one of the most polluted areas in Baltimore.

Red areas are marked as highly polluted neighborhoods in Baltimore City, where low-income housing residents are highly concentrated. // Courtesy: of the Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental Justice Screening

The mapping database also compares the concentration of PM 2.5 particles and carbon monoxide released into the air daily. These pollutants result in illnesses related to the immune system, such as asthma and other respiratory diseases. An additional screening from the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI) shows that more than 700 toxic substances are released, including all hazardous air pollutants, from waste sites into South Baltimore.

The scarcity of affordable housing in cleaner, more desirable parts of the city often pushes families into polluted areas, where they face environmental hazards and lack access to essential services.

Courtesy: of the Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental Justice Screening

“I think that the incinerator was put there because there were residents from Black communities and Brown communities that the city never cared for,” said Councilwoman Odette Ramos, who represents Baltimore’s 14th District.

“So I don’t think communities would choose to be there. It’s just that someone chose to put those bad things there, and now the community has to deal with it.” - Councilwoman Odette Ramos of Baltimore's 14th District

UNDERSTANDING THE POLLUTION + HEALTH PROBLEM

There are several major industrial installations that impact the environment and residents’ health in South Baltimore, with the most impacted communities being lower-income and predominantly Black.

According to the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, South Baltimore’s respiratory health has the highest asthma-related hospitalization rates in Baltimore and a higher respiratory risk from toxic air pollution.

The Baltimore Refuse Energy Systems Company, known as BRESCO, is responsible for 36% of Baltimore City’s air pollutants. There are also over ten CSX Transportation locations in Maryland that play an important role in Baltimore’s transportation network. As one of the largest rail operators in the U.S., CSX facilitates the movement of goods to and from the Port of Baltimore, an economic engine for the Chesapeake region.

However, many residents have often complained about the aftermath of when CSX locomotives move train cars, oftentimes loaded with double-stacked shipping containers from the Port of Baltimore.

“When the trucks go by, it is dust galore,” says Westport resident Dasia Fields. “You wipe our table right now, you got dust all over your hands, it just makes your hands feel dirty.”

“The trains bring rocks and coal, and stuff like that, because it’s a train that comes up every two hours,” said Fields, who currently suffers from asthma. “And then they bring the trucks around, they break up the rocks, and it just be dust flying everywhere.”

It's not only the industrial facilities that pose a threat to residents' health; the internal conditions of older homes also present a risk.

Credits: Charlee Douglas

“People are living in areas with lots of vacant properties, that’s an environmental justice issue. There’s a lot of lead and asbestos, kids with asthma, mold,” said Ramos. “From the health perspective, we need to be addressing these vacant properties as well, and because there are some families that don’t want to leave or cannot leave those areas.”

“Some of them [affordable housing materials] have asbestos, or they’re constructed with materials that leak into the air and leak onto other surfaces,” added Dr. Lindsay Thompson of the Johns Hopkins University Urban Health Institute.

“People have higher rates of asthma and all the kinds of applications of disease that go along with that, chronic conditions and kidney failure.”

HISTORY – HOW DID WE GET HERE?

For over half a century, South Baltimore has been treated as a place for unwanted industrial developments. Decisions by Baltimore’s leaders to place major polluters in this working-class part of the city go back as far as the Reedbird Municipal Incinerator in Cherry Hill, which was shut down in 1976 after decades of use.

“It was not a coincidence that the housing was placed right near where there was an incinerator,” said Brian Rogers. “At the site of the current Middle Branch Fitness & Wellness Center was the municipal incinerator, and people who were against being located in Cherry Hill, one of their arguments was, ‘I can't believe you’re going to do this.’”

Cherry Hill, a predominantly Black, working-class neighborhood in South Baltimore, was built as war housing during World War II as part of federally funded worker housing to accommodate workers who were pouring in from places such as the rural South to work in industries in cities like Baltimore.

During the 1970s, Baltimore focused on modernizing infrastructure and improving the quality of life for its residents. According to the Baltimore City Archives, nearly 80% of the city’s residents were reliant on Medicare during this time.

The city’s leadership, including then-Mayor William Schaefer, was under pressure to launch a Pyrolysis Solid Waste Disposal Plant that handled 600 tons of solid waste daily. The facility operated under strict air quality control regulations and is part of the long history of industrial work in South Baltimore.

The Pyrolysis Solid Waste Plant was a recycling method that converted waste to plastic, oil and fuel oil. Warner Street, in South Baltimore, was the home of the city’s ongoing struggles with infrastructure.

In 1979, a letter from then-City Consultant Victor Moore to former Mayor Schaefer detailed $35,000 in repairs needed to fix issues along the street. Historically, housing along this area was built for industrial workers and their families.

The Department of State Planning, under former Governor Marvin Mandel, allocated funding for the Water Pollution Control for State and Interstate Program Grants, with $375,000 in federal funds and $5,776,078 in state funds during his administration from 1969-1979.

The Curtis Creek area, located on the west of South Baltimore within the Curtis Bay community, was home to the Delta Chemical Manufacturing Company, operator of the SOշ Recovery Plant. The wastewater was directed to a seepage pit near the plant, where it eventually infiltrated the groundwaters of the state.

The Delta Chemical Manufacturing Company draft shows the plant’s location in the Curtis Bay Community in South Baltimore, where it produced chemicals for water and wastewater treatment. // Courtesy of The Baltimore City Archives

“Looking historically, it included when, when ships of the immigrants would come into Baltimore, and they were worried about disease on board ships, they would quarantine the immigrants down in Curtis Bay,” said Rogers. “That’s why you’ve got like Quarantine Road down there. The Quarantine Road Sanitary Landfill is named after that history, when there was heavy industry with big smokestacks, it was put down there."

Dan Pontious has been with the Baltimore Metropolitan Council since 2012 and has a background in community development, along with environmental and consumer advocacy.

“When zoning came about, there were kind of two goals for it. One was a kind of racial segregation. Baltimore’s first zoning ordinance came in 1910, and it was a racial segregation ordinance,” said Pontious. “That was the only purpose of it was to segregate Baltimore racially. It was the very first one passed in the whole country.”

However, in 1917 the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation by city ordinance unconstitutional on property rights.

Pontius emphasized efforts to counteract these trends by pushing for affordable housing in higher-resourced areas and investing in infrastructure in formerly redlined neighborhoods.

“Who knows what’s going to happen with HUD (Housing and Urban Development) now for the next four years,” said Pontious. “During the Obama administration, they included air pollution as something that we should take a look at as something that could cause disparities by protected class under the Fair Housing Act, especially, with racial segregation patterns.”

The Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968 and aimed to undo the damage caused by redlining maps that promoted racial segregation and economic disparities.

“We want to make sure that folks can live where they want to live,” said Councilwoman Ramos. “But also shut down those things so that people don’t have to move if they can’t afford it or don’t want to.”

SOLUTIONS/THE CHALLENGES TO FIXING THE PROBLEM

“We are really working on all of these aspects of a healthy community, we have to do them all at once,” said Dr. Lindsey Thompson.

“You can’t just do them like ‘let’s focus on housing now and then let’s focus on public infrastructure, and then let’s focus on education.’ We have to do them all at once, and because health is not isolated at all.”

Thompson, who was recently appointed as the Associate Director for the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute, says they are working across different programs in the university, such as Real Estate and Infrastructure, Engineering, Public Health, and the Business School to raise awareness on the societal aspect of values focuses on the livability of cities and communities based off equity and opportunity.

She stresses the importance of addressing socioeconomic issues that arise with wealth disparity, along with affordable housing and living with high levels of stress.

“There’s social determinants of health disparities that are the same as social determinants of wealth disparities, all these wrap around things in our environment,” said Thompson. “Both our material environment and our environment of air quality and soil quality, but also the emotional and the institutional quality.”

Councilwoman Odette Ramos is working on policies that would decrease the number of vacant properties and promote affordable housing, like her Inclusionary Housing Bill, which hopes to improve the city’s rental laws and aims to provide access to better areas to lower-income community members. She also supports efforts being made to shut down polluting facilities.

“So we want to make sure that folks can live where they want to live, but also shut down those things so that people don’t have to move if they can’t afford it or don’t want to,” said Ramos.

Additionally, the Maryland Senate President, Bill Ferguson, suggested that the state will soon remove waste incinerators, such as BRESCO, from the state programs of renewable energy projects.

The challenge that has been slowing down shutting down the BRESCO Incinerator is that other counties also send their trash to the city and it produces steam that powers most of downtown, says Ramos. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the incinerator provides electricity for nearly 40,000 homes and provides energy to downtown Baltimore’s heating and air conditioning needs.

Ramos confirms that new construction must adhere to green building standards, including energy efficiency and other development-related matters such as land use and adaptability to solar power.

Undoing the damage of decades of disinvestment and environmental injustice is not easy or fast. But for longtime residents of South Baltimore, the change can’t come soon enough.

“Everybody has a right to safe and affordable housing,” said Thompson. “And you shouldn’t have to be rich to get that.”