Issue fatigue: Attacking pollution in Pilsen

The West Side Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen has lead in the soil, a coal plant grandfathered past the Clean Air Act, an EPA-fined smelting plant, a sanitary canal and is bound on three sides by smog-producing interstates and freight rail.Dorian Breuer of the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization said it's hard to get people to care about Chicago pollution.

"Toxic pollution in those communities is just one of a whole litany of complaints that are not likely to be addressed," Breuer said.

In low-income, minority Chicago neighborhoods such as Pilsen, Englewood and Little Village, neighborhood-based environmental groups are finding it hard to bring their issues to the fore. Concerns about gangs, violence, poverty, joblessness, a lack of services and gentrification are competing for weary residents' attention.

"I would almost describe it as 'issue fatigue' in these communities -- that there are so many issues in these areas and so much to work on," Breuer said.

That fatigue extends not only to the residents, but to the neighborhood groups themselves.

Jean Carter-Hill is the executive director of Imagine Englewood If, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the quality of life in the low-income, black neighborhood. The group conducts safety, community outreach and lead-poisoning prevention programs.

The high lead levels in Englewood soil come from old buildings that used to be on vacant lots. After demolition, the rubble was buried in the lots.

"Some of [the lots] are still vacant and the children still play in them and they get lead poisoning," Carter-Hill said.

Currently, Imagine Englewood If has three staffers - Carter-Hill, who works for free, and two part-timers hired on the expectation of grant money. The grant money didn't come through and Carter-Hill might be forced to let one or both of the part-timers go.

This means choosing priorities, Carter-Hill said. The majority of residents' concerns, she said, involve violence and gangs.

"You're limited with resources, so which one are you going to work on today? Which one are you going to do?" Carter-Hill said.

Breuer said residents of Pilsen, which the U.S. Census Bureau once considered the largest Mexican-American community after East Los Angeles, worry that gentrification could price them out of their long-time homes. However, it's not as much a concern in nearby Little Village, said Lorena Lopez of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization.

"We're not selling out to Starbucks. We're selling out to factories, so what's really worse?" Lopez said. "I can tell you there's about 150 industries and most of them pollute."

Little Village has one of Chicago's two coal plants. The other is in Pilsen. Both were built before the Clean Air Act of 1970/1977, so are held to a much lower environmental standard than a new plant would be.

A 2002 Harvard School of Public Health study linked the Fisk plant in Pilsen and the Crawford plant in Little Village to more than 40 deaths, 550 emergency room visits and 2,800 asthma attacks a year.

Adding insult to injury, Lopez said, is that the Crawford plant in Little Village sells its electricity out-of-state.

"For us to have the burden for somebody else's electricity, it's just unbelievable," Lopez said.

The plant is on her group's "toxic tours" of the neighborhood. Other stops include a plant that burns leftover chemicals from steel shipping drums; a plastic recycling plant moved to the area from the ritzy, North Shore Lincoln Park neighborhood; a recycling plant that takes garbage from eight other neighborhoods so smells and attracts rats, and a 24-acre former asphalt plant that contaminated 170 nearby homes with cancer-causing chemicals.

The former asphalt plant is part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund project, which helps clean uncontrolled hazardous waste sites.

"It's much more than global warming; it's really about people's direct health," Lopez said. "It's ridiculous how we can have brownfields and Superfund sites and factories just in one place. It's all in one place."