Katrina Exposes Residential Segregation in New Orleans

Steve Lerner, author of Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor, explores the realities of residential segregation in New Orleans and offers suggestions to ensure racial and economic equity during the rebuilding process:

The recent scenes of large numbers of low-income, African-American residents in New Orleans who were left behind during the evacuation due to Hurricane Katrina made it clear that residential segregation is still alive and well in the United States. Exclusionary zoning has made it possible for suburban jurisdictions to keep out minorities and the poor. Our cities are also divided up into “favored quarters,” where the affluent have their homes, and less desirable parts of town, where the poor live. In New Orleans, it is said, one can tell the income of a resident by the elevation of the property on which he lives. The rich live in the high-elevation districts such as the French Quarter and in Uptown while the poor are relegated to the lowlands that are vulnerable to flooding.

Similarly, affordable housing for the poor is often located adjacent to locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) such as toxic and municipal dumps; highly-polluting refineries, chemical plants, and cement kilns; nuclear power plants, generating stations, and high voltage lines; incinerators, water treatment plants, and asphalt batching plants. Living “on the fenceline” with these highly toxic industries causes the poor to be disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals and to suffer the health consequences that stems from that exposure.

As plans proceed to build back housing in New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish, and other coastal areas in Louisiana and Mississippi, care should be taken to ensure that adequate flood protection measures are in place to protect poor as well as rich communities. Similarly, it would make sense to reorganize the landscape so that residential homes are not built back adjacent to highly toxic facilities that have demonstrated over the years an inability to keep dangerous emissions from wafting over the fenceline into neighboring residential areas.

Before we rush to build everything back the way it was, we should have a national debate about land use policy particularly as it affects low-income and minority Americans who are disproportionately exposed to flooding and toxic releases from industry. Part of this discussion should focus on the establishment of buffer zones around highly-toxic waste dumps and heavily-polluting plants. Above all, we should avoid spending money building back homes next to toxic facilities that will once again compromise the health of those who live in these fenceline communities.

We might also use this period before the rebuilding begins to decide whether industries should be allowed to maintain pools of toxic chemicals and oil wastes in holding ponds that are regularly emptied when storm and floodwaters flush through these coastal facilities. We should also consider requiring companies whose toxic wastes were swept away by this storm to pay for the cleanup of the toxic sludge that now coats much of the storm-wrecked coastal parishes.

-- Steve Lerner is Research Director of Commonweal, a health and environment research institute, and author of Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor (MIT Press, March 2005).