"About a 30-minute drive south along the highways that split up the city, residents in majority-white areas live on average 24 years longer."

A while back we did a post on the California Environmental Quality Act rollback. The usual YIMBY crowd couldn't imagine why anyone would say a bad word about it, but when you read the fine print, it turned out that some of the most radical and troubling parts of the bill had absolutely nothing to do with increasing housing supply.

 

The new exemption for “advanced manufacturing” facilities in areas already zoned for industrial use — including plants that build semiconductors and nanotech — drew some of the fiercest criticism. State law defines the category as processes that improve or create new materials, products or technologies. 

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A major proponent of the exemptions, State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco said in an interview with CalMatters today that criticisms by environmentalists were  “extreme, unfounded, melodramatic statements.” 

Elsewhere in the interview, Wiener talked about how environmental deregulation will "bring clean advanced manufacturing to California.” Historically though, this kind of manufacturing has not been by any stretch of the imagination, clean. 

California’s Santa Clara County, the seat of Silicon Valley, has more federal Superfund sites than anywhere else in the US.

The county is home to 23 sites in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, meaning the federal government recognizes them as highly contaminated areas and have earmarked them for cleanup. (It’s the same program the Trump administration seeks to cut by 30%.) Almost all of the Santa Clara Superfund sites are located where there once were (or still are) high-tech manufacturing sites.

 Wiener then emphasized that point about zoning.

Wiener said the changes exempt manufacturing projects only on land that is already zoned as industrial. The goal is to make it easier for high-tech industries to build, with Wiener arguing that California risks losing out on major private-sector investment because it’s too costly and difficult to build in the state. 

Here too, the history is ugly. These industrial areas are disproportionately likely to be near low income, often majority-minority neighborhoods, often with tragic results. 

From Adam Mahoney [Emphasis added]: 

Recent research, co-led by Black women researchers and conducted specifically with Black women residents, found that 80% of Black women in [Settegast, a majority-Black neighborhood in northeast Houston] live in high-risk soil contamination zones, with 80% of those residents reporting chronic health conditions.

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In a neighborhood once defined by its rural charm and tight-knit community, the slow encroachment of industry, neglect and gentrification has transformed both the landscape and the lives of its residents. The average resident in Settegast is expected to die before they reach retirement age. About a 30-minute drive south along the highways that split up the city, residents in majority-white areas live on average 24 years longer.

The neighborhood sits trapped between a massive rail yard, a freeway, and five industrial sites that release thousands of pounds of lead and toxic chemicals. 

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When Rivera moved to Settegast in the late 1970s, “it was changing over from a white community to a Black one,” she explained. “Once we came in here, we did not get the same services as the other community had, and we really didn’t know how to fight for resources to keep it up.” 

The neighborhood’s neglect became visible in the crumbling drainage system, sewage build-up, and the slow but steady encroachment of industry. She watched as concrete batch plants and metal recycling companies crept closer, their hulking machinery and clouds of dust transforming the area. 

“Not only did it start to look different, we lost the smell of the neighborhood, too,” she said. The air, once sweet with the scent of the green earth, became tinged with the pungent smell of industry. 

The transformation of Settegast not only scarred the land but also the humanity of its residents. Residents are more vulnerable to poor health from environmental and climate threats than 99% of Americans, according to research by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University. 

Living in a neighborhood where there aren’t grocery stores with fresh food and hospitals remain distant, Rivera’s seen her neighbors die at younger and younger ages. Today, life expectancy there is the lowest in Houston, and men often die before reaching their 60th birthday. She has seen families unravel under the weight of this loss, as well as unpaid mortgages, and mounting property taxes.

Since the neighborhood has an average household income that is less than half the Houston average, she said, when people die young without wills or estate plans, “their families find themselves drowning. Many simply walk away or sell for whatever they can get.”