"Toxic Tour" promotes eco-justice

• Sarah Morton
• November 1, 2006

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We all know that recycling is good for the environment. But if that recycling takes place in your own backyard, is it good for your environment?

On a brisk but clear Saturday in October, about 20 students, faculty and alumni from the Planners Network at University of Illinois-Chicago gathered on foot to take a two-hour “Toxic Tour” of Little Village, courtesy of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization.

Planners Network focuses on a variety of social justice issues that often happen under the radar of traditional planning. Established in 2005 by a group of urban planning students, the network serves as an alternative to other planning organizations and brings together professionals, activists, academics and students involved in physical, social, economic, and environmental planning.

Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) has been working since the early 1990s to keep polluting industry out of their neighborhood. They’ve used various tactics including protests, boycotts and demonstrations to rally residents to work together, to assure that development benefits them environmentally, economically and socially.

“The Toxic Tour perfectly compliments Planners Network's mission of looking at local planning through a social justice and equity lens,” said Lee Deuben, the PNUIC member who organized the tour. “While LVEJO is a grass roots organization and they don't consider themselves planners, per se, they are the people on the ground promoting change and taking action that greatly benefits the health and well-being of their community.”

The planners see much to learn from LVEJO's progressive campaigns and programs. The Toxic Tour covered just a small part of the Little Village (South Lawndale) neighborhood, but it gave a clear picture of the battles community residents have had to fight, from stymied requests for a park to schools built on contaminated land.

Part of LVEJO’s mission is to empower residents of all ages. To that end, the tour was conducted in part by LVEJO's youth leaders who are working to become certified guides.

Lead guide Kimberly Wasserman, an organizer with LVEJO for more than 15 years, gave the group a brief history of Little Village’s struggles with industry, the city and their own alderman. She argued that what LVEJO is demanding is not extravagant.

For example, she said, a large site they want to be converted to a park would not even begin to fulfill a minimum standard of two acres of open space per 1,000 residents in Little Village. This 24-acre vacant lot at 28th Street and Sacramento was the first stop of the tour. The site has been an EPA Superfund site for more than a decade, meaning that it contains toxic chemicals.

Residents have hoped that once the site was cleaned up, it would be turned into a park or a school. According to LVEJO’s website, the city agrees that five new schools are needed in Little Village, yet only 16 acres in the neighborhood are designated for two new schools.

The rest of the open land is designated for commercial or industrial use. Despite community activism, the 28th and Sacramento site was sold to a company called Celotex for a factory that used to be in a north side Chicago neighborhood and moved when $500,000 condos were built across the street.

But the factory gained approval to move across the street from existing (and cheaper) homes in Little Village. The company has hired only two people from the neighborhood, a fraction of the residents LVEJO says it promised it would.

Just down the road from the factory is a barrel recycling plant. The plant hires a greater number of Little Village residents, but LVEJO says it also has had many worker violations, in addition to illegally dumping and burning toxic chemicals. Wasserman said that the plant has cleaned up their act since LVEJO reported the violations to officials but is still not a great neighbor.

The tour then crossed several railroad tracks that form a boundary between a residential neighborhood and the industrial district. Wasserman is adamant that LVEJO is not trying to run these companies out of town.

“We want them to stay, but we are encouraging them to use cleaner practices,” she said. One plant recycles plastic, “which is great, but who knows what kind of health effects could result from this that might not show up for 30 years? We’re kind of like human guinea pigs.”

Farther up the road and just a quarter-mile away from homes, a coal burning electric plant was clearly visible. Here was a place where, organizers say, the environmental justice tour had made some impact: After LVEJO brought people out there for years, the plant finally made some changes.

Unfortunately, the changes were merely cosmetic. Where coal used to be piled nearly into back yards, there are now rolling green hills with freshly planted trees. However, “If you could see over the hill, you would see that the pile of coal is just as big,” said Wasserman. “Though the hills do block the dust a little.” Little Village's Zip code has the third-worst air pollution in the eight-county Chicago Metropolitan area and hundreds of people with asthma.

The wind shifted as the tour made its way along the railroad corridor, bringing a dense odor that some compared to burning plastic. But the landscape gradually changed to more natural patterns. Birds could be heard singing as wind rustled through the leaves of mature trees.

The tour’s final stop was a large vacant lot surrounded by brush-covered hills. The site currently serves as an illegal parking lot for freight trucks, but LVEJO envisions it becoming a massive urban agricultural project.

Though the site is too isolated to be suitable for a park, it could be a wonderful place for residents to grow fruits and vegetables on a larger scale than they are currently able to in backyard gardens.

At least one Planners Network member volunteered to teach urban gardening techniques to residents. Others were intrigued by LVEJO’s take on urban planning.

“Pollution and poverty are often presented as separate problems,” said UIC student John West. “This tour revealed how back-room political dealings and strong corporate interests led to pollution in the back yards of the working class people of Little Village.”

Wasserman and her colleagues at LVEJO may not have all of the answers to environmental problems, but they are working hard to make sure that they at least have some political leverage in what happens in their backyard. “People are proud of our neighborhood,” said Wasserman.

To learn more about how residents in Little Village are fighting for environmental justice, go to http://www.lvejo.org

Sarah Morton is a master’s candidate in Urban Planning and Policy at UIC, a photographer/archivist for LISC's New Communities Program and a member of PNUIC.

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