Poverty and Pollution Blowing East

Political expedience often pushes undesirable, but necessary, land uses out of rich neighborhoods. These coal stacks, prisons, and highway overpasses are what The Smart Growth Manual calls LULUs, or what Joe Cortright calls “disamenities” in a piece for City Commentary. "Poor neighborhoods tend to bear a disproportionate share of the exposure to environmental disamenities of all kinds," Cortright writes. Worse still, these disamenities tend to create a feedback loop. "If a neighborhood is highly polluted or crime-ridden, people with the economic wherewithal to move elsewhere typically will. When they abandon dirty or dangerous places, the rents fall, and by definition, the residents of these neighborhoods disproportionately become those who lack the resources to afford a better alternative:  the poor," Cortright explains.

Sadly, all this is not new news to city watchers. What gives new perspective is a historical study from St. Andrew's University. "The study shows that variations in pollution levels are significant factors in explaining the distribution of poverty within cities in the 19th century," Cortright reports. One interesting insight from the study reveals why the East End was so often the poorer side of industrial cities. The idea investigated here is that in cities powered by coal, if the prevailing winds blew from West to East, that meant that pollution would be blown to the east side of town, causing issues that long outlasted the industrial revolution.