WASHINGTON – The Justice Department on Friday opened a wide-ranging investigation into the city of Houston’s failure to address environmental racism, including the rampant dumping of trash, and even bodies, in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. officials say.
The investigation, prompted by hundreds of resident complaints filed by a local legal aid group, is likely to be one of the most ambitious environmental justice reviews undertaken by the department in recent years.
The investigation will be led by the civil rights division in coordination with the department’s new office of environmental justice. It will assess whether officials in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, systematically discriminated against residents by allowing 11 of 13 incinerators and landfills to be located in the city’s northeast section over the past few decades.
The announcement is part of the Biden administration’s broader effort to address racial disparities that have relegated people of color to areas where they face a much greater risk of exposure to carcinogens and other harmful pollutants, floods and a host of environmental pests that reduce life and quality. of the values of life and property.
Many of the problems outlined Friday by Kristen Clarke, the deputy attorney general who heads the civil rights division, stem from a decades-long history of injustice rooted in racism and malign neglect, historically at the hands of white local officials.
But some problems are more recent: The Justice Department plans to pay particular attention to reports that residents calling Houston’s 311 system to complain about dumping and other environmental violations have been routinely ignored, Clarke said during a call with the journalists
Illegal landfills in lower Houston “not only attract rodents, mosquitoes and other insects that pose health risks, but can also contaminate surface water and affect proper drainage, making areas more susceptible to flooding,” Clarke said.
Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, criticized the investigation, saying his administration had increased fines for illegal dumping and taken steps to improve conditions in the city’s black and Latino neighborhoods.
“The City of Houston was surprised and disappointed to learn of the third-party illegal dumping investigation initiated by the US Department of Justice,” Turner said in a statement. “Despite the DOJ’s statements, my office received no advance notice. This investigation is absurd, baseless and without merit.”
The mayor, who is black, added that he had “prioritized the needs of historically under-resourced and underserved communities of color.”
The Justice Department’s investigation was prompted by a complaint from Lone Star Legal Aid, which has been monitoring complaints from residents in the northeast section of Houston. The area has become a dumping ground for “home furniture, mattresses, tires, medical waste, garbage, corpses and vandalized ATMs,” Ms. Clarke.
Amy Catherine Dinn, managing attorney for the legal aid group’s environmental justice division, said: “This is all part of the city’s legacy of environmental racism, but this problem has gotten worse as the city has grown. , and these neighborhoods have been deprived of the resources that the richest white neighborhoods receive”.
Ms Dinn said neighborhood residents had carefully documented hundreds of incidents of illegal dumping on residential streets around a local rubbish dump. They have logged their complaints through the city’s 311 system, only to wait months for help while similar problems have been addressed much more quickly in wealthier neighborhoods, he said.
“This is not a one-time problem,” he added. “The city has basically allowed this community to be used as a dumping ground.”
The environmental disparities outlined by the Justice Department Friday are woven into the city’s urban fabric, a patchwork of commercial and residential buildings. Houston has some of the least restrictive zoning laws in the country; as a result, many of the city’s oil processing facilities, petrochemical plants, landfills, and transportation lots have been located adjacent to low-income or working-class residential neighborhoods.
A 2016 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services found that people living in Houston’s Harrisburg/Manchester neighborhood, a predominantly Latino area bordered by industrial facilities, had significantly higher rates of cancer and asthma higher than people in other, whiter parts of the city even further removed from the garbage industry.
In May, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announced a series of policies aimed at elevating the department’s environmental justice efforts from symbolic to substantive, including the creation of an office within the department responsible for addressing the “harm caused by environmental crimes, pollution and climate change”.
Even before then, the department had begun exploring criminal and civil cases under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, beginning with an investigation into the Lowndes County Flood Management and Sanitation System, Alabama, one of the poorest and poorest in the country. areas affected by the environment.
In most of these investigations, including the Houston investigation, the department aims to negotiate settlements with localities to address the issues they encounter, Ms. Clarke.