This article was originally published on Word In Black.
Chicago’s infamy for environmental injustice is as old as the city’s history as an industrial center. Its stockyards, train yards, and factories have always been clustered around Black and Latinx communities, often on the South and West Sides. But a new ordinance currently under consideration by the city council could finally break the long, awful tradition.
Introduced last month by Mayor Brandon Johnson and cosponsored by five aldermen, the Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance would remake the zoning review process in Chicago, particularly for industrial land use.
“Chicago is the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, so it is only right that we take the lead nationally on protecting our most vulnerable communities from the harm of pollution,” Johnson said in a statement. “Chicago has a long history as an industrial hub, but that industry has at times come at a cost to working-class Chicagoans. Economic development cannot be a tradeoff where we sacrifice the health of Black and brown communities. We need to build thoughtfully, and that means ensuring that our zoning policies help protect all Chicagoans from excessive pollution.”
If passed, the ordinance would require that a number of environmental justice roles be added to the city bureaucracy, including an environmental justice project manager at the Department of Environment and an environmental justice advisory board. But the biggest process change would be a new requirement that a cumulative impact study be conducted for any permit application for “heavy industrial land used” in order “to assess potential environmental and health impacts as part of the zoning process,” according to the mayor’s office.
“By applying a more thorough zoning review process for heavy and intensive land uses that have the greatest potential for pollution exposure, the ordinance aims to prevent additional stressors from compounding in already-burdened communities,” the statement said.
The ordinance is named for the so-called Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement, Hazel Johnson. A resident of Altgeld Gardens Homes on the South Side, Johnson was instrumental in uncovering the extensive pollution in the housing project from nearby landfills — pollution that likely contributed to the death of her husband from cancer in 1969. The organizing work that she did in the decades that followed, first as a member of her community’s local advisory council and later through People for Community Recovery, an organization that she founded, Johnson laid out the road map that generations of environmental justice organizers are still following.
But while the name and intent of the new ordinance are commendable, the proposal has its critics, including some of Johnson’s contemporaries, who felt they were left in the dark in the run-up to the ordinance being introduced.
Theresa Reyes McNamara, chair of the Southwest Environmental Alliance, said at an April meeting of the city council’s Committee on Environmental Protection and Energy, “I’ve asked for the full ordinance. I never got it. I asked some of the aldermen that are sitting here around the tables: ‘Have you seen it?’ No. It’s hush-hush.” (A spokesperson for Mayor Johnson told the Chicago Tribune that the city doesn’t make draft legislation public before an ordinance is introduced.)
Now that the proposal is public, and open for public comment, the community will get that chance to weigh in. But the ordinance may have other hurdles too: after being introduced, it was referred to the council’s Rules Committee, which Block Club Chicago refers to as “where legislation is often sent to die.”
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