Study: public housing is too often located near toxic sites

October 3, 2000
Web posted at: 2:48 PM EDT (1848 GMT)

DALLAS, Texas (AP) -- Across the nation, poor people, mostly minorities, live in federal housing projects whose locations expose them to toxic pollution, The Dallas Morning News reports in a three-part series.

"It is an American tragedy," said Henry Cisneros, who was secretary of housing and urban development from 1993 to 1996. "But we sweep it under the rug and forget about it."

A study by The Morning News and the University of Texas-Dallas found that some 870,000 of 1.9 million federally subsidized apartments are located within about a mile of factories that reported toxic emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency. The pollution included legal, permitted emissions and accidental releases.

HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo declined to be interviewed for the Morning News' three-part series, which started Sunday, but issued a statement calling the charges "outrageous." Cuomo said the story "advocates an unrealistic and unbalanced approach to managing environmental concerns."

He said HUD is getting a bad rap, that it is local governments that determine the locations for the federal developments based on growth plans and other criteria.

Economics played a role in locating developments in many communities, the Morning News said. As whites who formerly lived near polluting plants climbed the financial ladder and moved away, the property that they left behind was inexpensive enough to attract officials for places to build public housing.

"Everyone you see here is low-income -- poor and black," said Sammy Smith, who lives in a HUD-subsidized project in Bossier City, La., next door to land where toxic waste has been dumped for decades. "It's like we're in the jungle and we're at the bottom of the food chain."

The Morning News reported that people living in subsidized housing complain pollution causes health problems in their communities -- including cancer, birth defects, respiratory ailments and developmental delays in children.

However, those claims are hard to prove. The EPA warns that exposure data for particular neighborhoods might not be sufficiently accurate to guide local policy decisions or predict an individual's risk of getting sick.

"Public housing developments are not isolated enclaves. They share the same air with surrounding neighborhoods, and public housing residents make up just a small fraction of the people living and working near sites of potential air pollution," said Leland Jones, a HUD spokesman. "It has long been the nation's policy to clean up pollution -- not to run from it by relocating tens of millions of people and abandoning our cities."

But critics say a federal program to rebuild the worst housing projects, called the HOPE IV Urban Revitalization program, is simply entrenching a system that already pushes poor people into polluted areas, the newspaper said.

Elinor Bacon, the HUD official in charge of HOPE VI, said she is confident that the agency has enough safeguards -- such as environmental reviews of each project -- to ensure that families live in safe places.

However, the Morning News said records it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that in some cases the environmental reviews failed to note the existence of these hazards.

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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