The Federal Retreat From Fighting Environmental Racism Has Begun

By Word in Black, Willy Blackmore

HUD’s withdrawal from enforcing a Chicago settlement signals its pullback from protecting communities from pollution.

TIn 2023, the city of Chicago reached a settlement deal with the federal government over a brazen bit of environmental racism: City officials had tried to move a polluting business, a metal recycling facility, from the wealthy, white North Side to the Black and Brown and poor Southeast Side.

Now, the Trump Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development will not enforce the settlement. The case is one of seven high-profile investigations into housing discrimination that HUD officials dropped last month. 

“No administration previously has so aggressively rolled back the basic protections that help people who are being harmed in their community,” a HUD official told ProPublica, which first reported the news. “The civil rights protections that HUD enforces are intended to protect the most vulnerable people in society.”

Polluting Chicago’s Black and Brown Southeast Side

The situation with the scrap metal facility, called General Iron, was almost comically racist. The business, which shreds junk cars and other items in order to sell the metal, had long operated in the very wealthy and very white Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side of the city. Over the years, complaints from residents mounted about both the pollution and noise generated by General Iron, and as early as 2016, the city began to encourage the business to relocate, which it eventually agreed to do after being promised help from City Hall to find a new location. 

What the city and General Iron eventually landed on in what Biden’s HUD called an “unusually close collaboration” was a new location in the Calumet Industrial Corridor on the Southeast Side — a part of Chicago that is not only predominantly Black and Brown and poor, but has a long history of being overburdened by industry too. According to HUD’s initial findings (again, from the Biden era), “relocating the Facility to the Southeast Site will bring environmental benefits to a neighborhood that is 80% White and environmental harms to a neighborhood that is 83% Black and Hispanic.”

The settlement between HUD and Chicago was signed during former mayor Lori Lightfoot’s last days in office, after her administration initially responded to HUD’s finding of discrimination by saying, “Any allegations that we have done something to compromise the health and safety of our Black and Brown communities are absolutely absurd.” 

Read more on the federal retreat from fighting enviromental racism.

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