‘Asthma Alley’: Why Minorities Bear Burden of Pollution Inequity Caused by White People
The Guardian
By Hazar Kilani
Mott Haven in the South Bronx is a classic example where black and Hispanic residents experience a particularly insidious ‘environmental inequality’
Daniel Chervoni looked out at the busy street from the small community park he tends as a gardener in the South Bronx and clenched his fist as another Fresh Direct diesel truck roared by, spewing exhaust as it took a popular short-cut through the neighborhood.
“They are the reason for our pain, this is why the lungs of Mott Haven’s residents are suffering,” he said. The park is a little patch of green squeezed between dense housing and a school in the low-income New York City neighborhood of Mott Haven, sometimes nicknamed “Asthma Alley” because it has some of the worst air pollution levels in the US.
Residents inhale the emissions of the hundreds of daily trucks going in and out of the nearby Fresh Direct warehouse, and exhaust emitted by constant traffic on the four nearby highways, as well as from the printing presses of the Wall Street Journal, a parcel depot and sewage works not far away. They need asthma hospitalizations at five times the national average and at rates 21 times higher than other NYC neighborhoods.
