“Mama, I can’t breathe.” Louisville’s dirty air has steep medical and economic costs

ABSTRACT

The calls for greater racial equity also means cleaning up the air, water, and soil. Poor people needlessly suffer more in Louisville than the same low-income people in West Coast cites. If we adopted the same tough, environmental regulations as our West Coast Counterparts West Louisville would surely bloom instead of slowly die. The unfairness between black and white neighbourhoods is stark and vivid. As the great urbanist, Jane Jacobs, once said: “everyone hungers for a first class neighbourhood for both pride and dignity … nobody wants a second class neighborhood.” First class neighbourhoods are safe, healthy, sustainable, and prosperous. It is a human right; a Worldwide right.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• Black Lives Matter
• pollution
• lifespan

Acknowledgements

This is a revised and greatly expanded (4 times bigger) version of a paper that was published in City Lab / Bloomberg originally. This article was reposted by various environmental, and planning groups to over a million readers: Sierra Club, Pro-urban, Community Urban blog, ACSP, and other places as we know. We thank the editors (Jennifer Sondag and David Dudley) for giving us permission to republish parts of this article. Special thanks to Tracy Walsh our Editor at Bloomberg for making this even stronger, insisting on revisions and fact checking. Our thanks to additional editing with Carla Snyder and Lily Rose: Gilderbloom, J. “Hans” and Gregory D. Squires (2020) “The Health Emergency that is Coming to West Louisville” City Lab / Bloomberg wire services April 22, 2020. https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2020/04/air-pollution-covid-19-health-environmental-justice-poverty/610366/ At the University of Louisville, we worked with graduate student, Jeremy Chesler, who put together two CDC Tables 1 and 2 on comparing the dirty air in West Louisville neighbourhoods near Rubbertown and far away East neighbourhoods and cities with clean air. Other students at the University of Louisville seminar: James Mains, Bunny Marie Hayes, Sait Sarr Makayla Marr, and Sarah Catherine Haynes gave us good feedback. Our thanks also to our colleagues who participated in our seminar discussions Justin Mug, Russell Barnett, Robert Friedlander, and Dwan Terner.

Table 1. Health outcomes: USA vs. west Louisville vs. clean air cities.

Table 2. Health outcomes: west Louisville vs. east Louisville

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).