Chicago Looks to Overhaul Its Zoning and Land Use Policies to Address Environmental Discrimination

The City of Chicago and environmental justice organizations finished collecting feedback from residents on a new plan to address environmental justice issues on Wednesday. The community engagement process is part of a broader endeavor to reform policies and processes that the federal government found to be racially discriminatory. The city risks losing hundreds of millions in federal housing dollars if it doesn’t devise a plan to address the issue by this fall.

Officials turned to communities on the frontlines of environmental pollution to engage residents in co-designing a plan to present to Mayor Brandon Johnson by this fall. People for Community Recovery, an environmental justice organization on the far South Side of Chicago, is one of the groups leading this effort. Hazel Johnson, known as the “mother of environmental justice,” founded the organization more than four decades ago to address health and environmental concerns in the Altgeld Gardens, a community surrounded by landfills and other hazardous facilities and anointed the “toxic donut.”

“This is a dream come true for her,” said Johnson’s daughter, Cheryl Johnson, the organization’s current executive director, at a community engagement meeting. “We are in the driver’s seat.”

Heavy industry in Chicago is concentrated in the South and West sides. Both areas have the highest percentage of Black and Latino residents in the city and are considered “sacrifice zones” for bearing the brunt of pollution from industrial activity and other polluting sources. Among American cities, Chicago has the largest life expectancy gap, with people in some neighborhoods expected to live up to 30 years longer than people in other neighborhoods a few miles away, according to research by the New York University School of Medicine. 

Environmental justice communities called for an investigation of the city’s zoning and land use policies. The groups alleged environmental discrimination by enabling the shifting of polluting industry away from affluent and predominantly white neighborhoods into predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. 

The investigation by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development came after owners of a massive metal recycling facility in Lincoln Park, an affluent and predominantly white neighborhood on the North Side, tried to relocate the facility to the Southeast Side in 2018. Residents near the General Iron facility at Lincoln Park complained of toxic emissions, bad odors and water pollution, and the facility caught fire twice in 2015, causing a smoke plume in the area, according to findings from the investigation.

The proposed relocation spurred a movement from residents and environmental justice advocates arguing that the General Iron relocation is not an isolated case. The movement involved a 30-day hunger strike and led to a federal civil rights investigation. In July, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that the city has zoning and land use policies in place that push polluting activity from neighborhoods made up of mostly white residents to neighborhoods that are predominantly Black and Hispanic that already are experiencing a disproportionately higher environmental burden.

The May settlement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires that the city complete a study of environmental burdens, health conditions and social stressors across Chicago and that it uses that study to inform updates to permitting, environmental and land use policies. 

The city plans to use the findings to create a map identifying environmental justice communities. Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot filed an executive order for a “cumulative impacts assessment” in her last days in office in May.

Leaders of the environmental justice initiative plan to propose a zoning and land use ordinance to present to Mayor Johnson in the fall. The three main goals of the recommended policies are:

• Creating governance systems and structures to ensure that city policies and processes promote environmental justice
• Requiring the city to consider environmental, health and social stressors in decision-making
• Ensuring people who live in environmental justice neighborhoods directly benefit from local development 

Specific recommendations under these goals include formalizing a community advisory board to provide recommendations to the Mayor’s Office and other city departments on decisions involving environmental justice, setting higher standards for community engagement in permitting and reforming the city’s zoning code. 

“Departments would be required to consider the totality of the impacts a facility could have in the surrounding community,” said Ellis Walton, co-chair of the plan’s policy working group and associate attorney at the Environmental Law and Policy Center.

The city also has a draft Environmental Justice Action Plan, which outlines strategies to guide accountability and changes in practices and policies in environmental justice communities. The aims of these strategies include reducing pollution from transportation, improving transparency in environmental data and decisions and strengthening air quality regulations and enforcement.

The city’s Office of Climate & Environmental Equity, the Chicago Department of Public Health and community partners collected feedback from residents on their draft proposals this summer through surveys as well as written and verbal comments at in-person meetings.

At in-person meetings, residents brought up an array of concerns, including having a lack of understanding of the permitting process, how the city is ensuring it is doing sufficient community engagement and whether residents’ concerns will actually be considered in permitting decisions. 

Sherelle Withers, a resident of the West Side neighborhood of West Garfield Park, said she found out about the proposed plans after the online survey had closed. She attended two in-person meetings after she learned of the initiative. Among the concerns she expressed at the meetings was the need for more time to have community discussions.

“We need more time,” said Withers. “How do we know enough people heard about this?”

According to city officials, there will be more opportunities for resident input in implementing environmental justice initiatives in the future.

Environmental justice leaders expressed hope and excitement about the new initiative and Mayor Johnson’s term. Johnson grew up with asthma in Austin, a West Side neighborhood, and has publicly supported the creation of a Department of the Environment to oversee the protection of environmental justice communities.

Zoning and planning policies that incentivize heavy industry in communities of color, poor enforcement of air pollution laws, insufficient community engagement and inadequate consideration of existing health burdens in industry permitting decisions are just some of the issues environmental justice advocates hope the initiative addresses.

Some residents expressed skepticism, asking officials how this would be any different than the city’s previous initiatives. 

The city launched the Healthy Chicago 2025 campaign to address the core causes of health disparities in the city, including structural racism. By the city’s estimates, a white resident is expected to live 10 years longer on average than a Black resident, an estimate that went up from 8.8 years since before the Covid-19 pandemic. Latino residents have seen the steepest decline in life expectancy over the years, with a 7-year drop since 2012. 

Angela Tovar, the city’s chief sustainability officer who grew up in the Southeast side, said at a community engagement meeting that what sets this effort apart from past initiatives to address environmental justice issues is that all city departments that touch on the issue from now on will have to consider environmental justice in their daily operations, something they were not required to do before.

Officials from the Chicago Department of Public Health told Inside Climate News it does not have a total cost estimate for the environmental justice initiative yet. 

The cumulative impacts assessment findings and Environmental Justice Plan will be released by September. The city council will hold hearings on the assessment and the plan in September.