Residents slam city for failing to reduce influx of industry
A walk down West 26th Street, the bustling main artery of Little Village on the city’s Southwest Side, is a feast for the senses. Quinceañera dresses sparkle in storefront windows; music streams from taqueria speakers. Street vendors serve up elotes and chicharrones and everything in between.
The people, the culture, the colors: These are the things Jazmine Torres loves about her neighborhood.
“I visit Mexico, and it’s just like home,” said the lifelong Little Village resident.
The smells, too, are irresistible, she said. But only on the weekends.
“Because if you get the weekday smells, you’ll smell oil, diesel,” Torres, 26, said. “But if you go walking down 26th Street on the weekend, you’ll smell tamales, champurrado, birria, pan, the fresh breads, the tortilla company.”
The neighborhood is home to more than two dozen industrial facilities that use medium or heavyduty diesel trucks, according to a 2019 count by the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. It is also bordered by dozens of other facilities in adjacent neighborhoods.
The city’s Department of Planning and Development did not respond to a question about whether it keeps data regarding the number of industrial facilities by neighborhood.
Little Village, where residents have fought for years for cleaner air and are now demanding a moratorium on warehouse development, is one of several communities the Tribune is visiting as part of its environmental justice series.
According to a city planning report from 2019, South Lawndale, the community area that shares roughly the same boundaries as Little Village, carries a higher burden of air pollution relative to the rest of Illinois. Ninety-five percent of the Illinois population experiences equal or less exposure to PM 2.5, a harmful particulate matter caused by diesel pollution. (The city collects pollution data based on community area rather than neighborhood.)
A 2020 city air quality report estimated that 5% of premature deaths in Chicago each year can be attributed to exposure to PM 2.5.
Torres lives by West 31st Street and South Pulaski Road, a few blocks from where Target opened a warehouse distribution center in July. A laundromat, hamburger stand and other businesses line 31st Street near her home; it is also one of the neighborhood’s major trucking corridors.
“During the summer, it’s hard to have your windows open to be able to smell the breeze, or hear the birds,” said Torres. Instead, she said, she’ll just hear the big trucks passing: the sound of wheels hitting a pothole, the smell of diesel.
Among Little Village residents, who have fought for years for cleaner air, there is a pervasive sense that elected officials — the mayor, most aldermen — are not concerned about what is in the air in Little Village.
Baltazar Enriquez, the president of the Little Village Community Council, has lived here his whole life. There has always been pollution in Little Village, he said, but it’s worse now because there are more warehouses. He’s frustrated not only by the pollution and its health risks, but by the day-to-day challenges that come with living along a trucking corridor, such as traffic jams.
“It causes stress, but also it’s polluting our lungs,” he said. “And the mayor’s fine with that, because she don’t live here.”
“They would never think of putting this type of factory in Wrigleyville. They would never think of putting these factories, you know, in the Gold Coast,” Enriquez said. “So why are they going to put them in our neighborhood?”
‘A cradle of pride’
Sometimes called the “Mexican capital of the Midwest,” Little Village is a place where families come and stay put for generations.
“People planted seeds in Little Village and the roots have dug in deep,” said Kim Wasserman, executive director of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. “It’s just a cradle of pride, and remembrance of where we come from, and sharing of what we do as people.”
Wasserman, who now lives in neighboring McKinley Park, said she has family that comes from all over the country — from upstate New York, from Houston — to experience the culture in Little Village.
“The reality is, there isn’t a lot of spaces for us in this country, especially in the Midwest,” Wasserman said. “And I think Little Village kind of just has a stronghold, in our culture, in our food.”
Mexican people started moving into Little Village in the late 1960s and 70s, a mix of immigrants and Chicagoans who had been displaced from the Near West Side after the construction of the University of Illinois at Chicago, said José Acosta-Córdova, who in addition to his work for the environmental organization, is a second-year Ph.D. student studying the history of freight in Chicago at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Before that, the neighborhood was a white ethnic stronghold, home primarily to Czech, Polish and German immigrants. The area had started industrializing in earnest in the 1920s, in large part because of the land’s proximity to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which allowed goods to travel to and from Chicago via the Mississippi River, Acosta-Córdova said.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Chicago went through a deindustrialization period, with most of its industry moving out to the suburbs and other parts of the country and world, said Acosta-Córdova. But in the early 1990s, Mayor Richard M. Daley officially created Chicago’s 26 industrial corridors — including the Little Village Industrial Corridor — with a program called the Local Industrial Retention Initiative.
“By this time, all these neighborhoods where all the industrial corridors were at had become majority Black and Latino,” Acosta-Córdova said, except for some former white ethnic neighborhoods such as Brighton Park that were still transitioning demographically.
These days, Little Village’s industrial corridors are home to asphalt plants, rock and metal-crushing facilities, oil and gas facilities, and of course, warehousing, Acosta-Córdova said.
Along 31st Street and parts of California Avenue near the canal, lots are set off with chain-link fences, their squat and windowless facilities punctuated occasionally by thin cylindrical towers.
Across the bridge, more facilities line the canal’s southern edge. Trees and shrubbery, growing wild, rise up from the water’s edge. When trucks rumble by, the air smells of exhaust.
Across the United States, neighborhoods that bear the brunt of industrial air pollution tend to be Black, brown and low-income. Diesel trucking accounts for a “huge fraction” of air inequalities across the United States, said Sally Pusede, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Virginia. That’s true even though diesel trucks make up just a small percentage of the vehicles on the road.
“They emit just a huge amount of pollution,” Pusede said. In a recent study, she and her fellow researchers found that when diesel traffic was reduced by 60%, air pollution inequality across the U.S. decreased by 40%.
PM 2.5, found in the exhaust of diesel vehicles, is known to be particularly hazardous to respiratory health.
PM 2.5 is dangerous in part because it is so microscopically small. “If you look at one strand of your hair, you can fit about 20 to 30 — perhaps more than 30 — of these (particulates) along the width of one strand of hair,” explained Tiffany Werner, a community science organizer with the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago.
Because PM 2.5 is so tiny, we can’t sneeze or cough it out. Instead, the particulates settle deep into our lungs, and sometimes even into our bloodstreams.
“It’s very tiny, and it’s carrying a lot of toxins,” Werner said. Those toxins can be particularly damaging to young children, whose lungs aren’t fully developed, people with chronic respiratory illnesses and the elderly.
‘Nothing but diesel trucks’
On a blistering hot day in July, a crowd gathered outside the Exchange 55 warehouse on 35th Street and Pulaski. More than a year earlier, Hilco Redevelopment Partners had demolished a smokestack on the site, a botched operation that coated Little Village in ash and dust in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Neighborhood residents say they still don’t know what was in that debris and what may still linger in the soil and in their homes.
The Crawford Generating Station, the coal-fired power plant to which the smokestack once belonged, had been linked to asthma attacks and premature deaths and was shuttered in 2012 in response to years of community activism. Despite calls from residents to halt construction of a facility that would bring more diesel traffic to the neighborhood, Target opened its warehouse where the coal plant once stood.
“We deserve more than dirty air in our neighborhood,” Wasserman said at the July protest. “What do we got? Nothing but diesel trucks lining this street. What’s it going to be like when this warehouse opens?”
In November 2020, Hilco and its contractors reached a settlement in the smokestack demolition case. They agreed to pay $370,000, funds to be set aside for a Little Village health center to help address long-term health concerns in the community.
Community members said that wasn’t enough.
They want air monitoring systems near the Target warehouse, air filtration systems for residents affected by the implosion, soil sampling by the city near the implosion site and the public release of the Chicago inspector general’s report on the demolition. They’re also asking for a moratorium on new warehouse development.
A spokesperson for Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Cesar Rodriguez, did not comment specifically on calls for air monitoring, filtration systems, soil sampling and a warehouse moratorium. Rodriguez said the city had responded to the inspector general’s office in late November and that a summary of the report and the city’s response would be available in the office’s next quarterly report.
“As the Mayor has said many times, the significant dust emission resulting from the scheduled implosion on the site of the former Crawford Generating Station was totally unacceptable, and immediate steps were taken to clean up the neighborhood and hold those responsible accountable,” Rodriguez wrote, pointing to the city’s passage of a demolition implosion ordinance earlier this year.
Target spokesperson Jacqueline DeBuse reiterated comments the corporation made in July, stating that the company had worked with the developer to design incoming and outgoing traffic routes that direct trucks to the highway and eliminate the need for them to use residential streets.
But Acosta-Córdova said development and diesel emissions are too unregulated.
Trucks are supposed to stay off residential streets, but they often don’t, community members say. The city’s new air quality ordinance requires environmental and traffic impact assessments for new development. But environmental justice groups didn’t support that ordinance, viewing it as too weak.
Acosta-Córdova points to Hilco’s own assessment that its new Target warehouse would bring fewer than 200 diesel trucks to the neighborhood per day. Advocates did their own research, finding that warehouses of similar size attracted anywhere from 500 to 1,000 trucks per day.
Hilco did not respond to requests for comment.
Acosta-Córdova views the air quality ordinance as essentially theater, the environmental impact assessments as work companies can fudge to deflect community criticism.
Rodriguez said the city and its health department were “committed to environmental equity,” and had made “significant progress in establishing stronger regulations to increase air safety monitoring and to hold operators accountable.”
“We will continue to work closely with community partners to mitigate any health risks caused by severe air pollution,” he wrote.
‘It’s never fresh air, and you can tell the difference’
When Mercedes Cervantes’ daughter Leila was about 6 months old, she had her first asthma attack. Cervantes remembers her wheezing. “Her chest was so tight,” she said.
“You could just see her struggling for air,” Cervantes said.
Cervantes grew up in Little Village, and lives in the neighborhood with Leila, now 15, a younger daughter Cecilia, 14, and Cervantes’ parents.
Leila’s asthma is now well-controlled by an inhaler and supervision from her pulmonologist. But Cervantes worries about kids who don’t have access to doctors. And she’s sure the air in Little Village is the reason Leila has asthma. Cervantes said her mother also has asthma, though hers isn’t as severe as Leila’s.
“It’s never fresh air, and you can tell the difference,” Cervantes said.
In Little Village, it’s par for the course to have some kind of respiratory health issue, or a health issue aggravated by the inability to breath, said Wasserman, the environmental organization director. “You either have something, or somebody in your family has something,” she said.
Torres, the lifelong neighborhood resident who lives near the demolition site, said she has a chronic cough, the product of walking pneumonia. She said she has to be careful about where she takes Rocky, her Shih Tzu Yorkie mix, for a walk. If she goes to Piotrowski Park, near the 31st Street corridor, she notices when she coughs, the phlegm turns dark gray.
Wasserman got involved in the environmental organization after her baby developed asthma in the 1990s. When she took him to the emergency room after his first asthma attack, the doctor asked Wasserman where she lived. The doctor was interested in understanding what was in her backyard, she said, how close she lived to the highway.
“For me, it was a question of wanting to understand what was in the air that you breathe in the neighborhood, and who else was this happening to,” she said.
Wasserman’s heartened that people want to stay in Little Village and fight for it.
“I think that every generation that keeps coming up has a better and better understanding of values of what it means to fight, of that sense of pride of our community,” she said. “And thankfully it’s no longer this notion of, you get up and leave the neighborhood, but now you get up and you stay in the hood, and you fight to make it a better place. And I think that that’s just such a beautiful thing. And people are hungry for that.”
Mercedes Cervantes was always going to fight, regardless of her daughter’s asthma. She was born into the movement; both of her parents are activists.
But Cervantes wants the rest of Chicago to think about Little Village, too.
“I guess this is to ask more people to care about our communities, about Black, brown and Indigenous communities. And see the humanity in us, instead of just criminalizing us,” she said.
“As if we don’t deserve clean air, as if we don’t deserve equitable funding ... to not just throw us away.”