NYC’s Congestion Pricing Program Comes with the Cost of Sacrificing Constitutionally Mandated Human Rights of NYC’s Environmental Justice Communities
Black Agenda Report
By: Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
Mychal Johnson, co-founder of the Bronx based climate and environmental justice (CEJ) organization, South Bronx Unite , decried congestion pricing as sacrificing the health and human rights of poorer Black and Brown folk to accommodate wealthier, mostly white, New Yorkers in mid and lower Manhattan.
According to Johnson, asthma hospitalizations in some Bronx communities are 21 times higher than in any other New York City neighborhood. Columbia University’s Center for Children’s Environmental Health affirms that areas of the South Bronx have one of the highest death and disease rates from asthma in the country .
We already know that majority Black and Brown communities like the Bronx experienced higher morbidity rates during the height of the COVID pandemic due to exposure to poor air quality, lack of adequate access to healthcare, and other socioeconomic variables associated with poverty and un/underemployment. Congestion pricing may now increase the vulnerability of the Bronx, Staten Island, and other DACs to future pandemics and other health-related calamities exacerbated by exposure to poor air quality.
