“I felt like I was moving to an American dream, not knowing that my home was located on toxic soil.”
Lydwina Hurst, a resident of Gordon Plaza in Orleans Parish, shares her story on the same cruel irony faced by many Black Americans who believed they were settling in a perfect community, but instead were sold death sentences. Gordon Plaza was marketed to Black Americans as affordable housing for those starting to rise to the city’s middle class, But what these families did not know was Gordon Plaza was built on 45 acres of toxic landfill saturated with arsenic, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and extremely high levels of lead.
Gordon Plaza is a living example of how a neighborhood and built environment are a social determinant that plays a key role in the health of individuals. When safety and wellbeing is disregarded when developing housing, neighborhoods, and policies, the result is a visible decline in the physical and mental health of individuals.
Research consistently shows that the quality of your home and environment heavily influences your health; low-income neighborhoods are often connected to higher crime rates, increased pollution, and exposure to harmful toxins. When looking deeper into these neighborhoods and those who live in them, a similar pattern can be seen, just as Gordon Plaza was marketed toward Black Americans, many of these affected neighborhoods are inhabited by people of color.
Gordon Plaza is part of an 85-mile stretch of land called “Cancer Alley” where chemical
plants and refineries have encroached into the backyards of disadvantaged neighborhoods. A survey done by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the race/ethnicity composition of residents living near the DuPont plant, a community within the area considered Cancer Alley, reveals the specific demographics of those living in these disadvantaged communities.
The events of Gordon Plaza, the residents living near the DuPont plan, also known as the Deka facility, and the whole of Cancer Alley are just one small example of an issue affecting the entire nation.
These cases are not coincidental; larger structural issues such as the decades of policies allowing the expansion of industrial corporations into the communities of disadvantaged Black Americans with no regard to their health or wellbeing. One of the clearest examples of structural racism is redlining. Redlining dates to the Jim Crow Era, one of many policies and laws enacted to restrict, exclude, and further segregate Black Americans.
While the explicit practice of redlining today is illegal, its effects have lasted through the decades, when looking at the association between historic redlining and present day health outcomes increased risk of diabetes, hypertension, and early mortality due to heart disease, worse mental health and worse self-rated health, increased rates of gunshot-related ED visits and injuries, increased odds of preterm birth, higher rates of diabetes specific mortality and years of life lost, and worse COVID-19 outcomes than residents within non-redlined areas was seen.
Lydwina Hurst is a survivor of breast cancer, but her story is one of many. The residents of Gordon Plaza have sought justice by demanding a fully funded relocation for all residents of the community. Not just supporting this course of action but implementing it in other communities actively facing exposure to toxic chemicals or unsafe environments could be a way to give these residents the safe and healthy environment and life they deserve. Along with this, implementing regulations on how close chemical plants or other facilities can be established to a community and regulations on pollution and emissions will ensure the health of future communities, as well as fixing historical redlining once and for all. Demetrius Coonrod, the first black female city councilmember in Chattanooga, proposed incentivizing investment in economically deprived areas as a way to address historical redlining . Opportunity zone programs are the product of this proposal aimed at investing in these disadvantaged communities. Although this may serve as a solution to this ongoing issue, it is most important to track the effects and significance of these programs to ensure it is serving its purpose of bettering neighborhoods and built environments for those in disadvantaged communities due to larger structural issues.
