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The private backing of the redevelopment project is at the root of this concern. In partnership with the BRIDGE Housing Corporation and The Michaels Organization, the city of Los Angeles first embarked on the billion-dollar plan to redevelop the 700-unit public housing complex into a 1,400-unit “mixed-income” community in 2008. Since 2017, the partners have received more than $70 million in grants from the state and federal agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, plus more than $100 million in loans from major banks. The project, which first broke ground in 2018, is transforming a majority of the publicly-owned and subsidized housing into housing that is privately-owned — but still publicly subsidized. The area’s poverty rate has ballooned to 2.5 times higher than the national average, and life expectancy is 10 years shorter than it is in the affluent enclaves of West LA. On top of all that, no other place in California suffers more cumulative environmental burdens, according to the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
Lawn equipment spews ‘shocking’ amount of air pollution, new data shows
Urban residents in every corner of the U.S. unknowingly live in neighborhoods burdened by toxic contaminants. Most of this residue escaped regulatory scrutiny — the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t comprehensively regulate toxic releases until the late 1980s — and indeed most cities never even bothered to measure these pollutants. The fight to restore Logan could one day make the neighborhood healthier to live in, but without a massive remediation effort, the barrio will always carry the stain of its industrial past. The Resnicks are quick to point out that it’s not just plant workers who’ve benefited — the nut boom has improved the lives of farmworkers, too. Back when cotton was still king in Kern County, migrant workers who’d picked spring oranges and summer grapes in other parts of the Valley would descend on Lost Hills for a few weeks to work alongside cotton combines during the fall harvest. It wasn’t easy to bring kids along, so they usually stayed behind in Mexico or Guatemala.
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In the mid-20th century, they’d deliver gusts forceful enough to wreak havoc throughout the Southern California region, destroying orange crops, uprooting trees, downing power lines, and upending lives. But in the Logan neighborhood, one of the city of Santa Ana’s poorest barrios at the time, children like Cecelia Andrade Rodriguez eagerly awaited the wind’s arrival in the fall. Once an abundant food source for Northern California’s dwindling salmon population, the Delta smelt has been nearly eradicated by those enormous pumps capturing the flow of water from the Sierras. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the smelt as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, setting the stage for pumping limits. Worried about getting short shrift on water deliveries, the Resnicks and other farmers in five local water districts threatened legal action.
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In 2015, a coalition of youth and advocacy groups, including Communities for a Better Environment, sued the city of Los Angeles over its practice of rubber-stamping residential oil drilling projects. The groups ultimately settled with the city, which agreed to make changes in the well permitting process. Without statewide setback rules, the regulatory landscape varies dramatically at the local level. Some counties have no setback rules at all, while others, like Ventura County, have setbacks of 1,500 feet from homes and 2,500 feet from schools for new wells. California’s regulatory body for oil and gas, the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, is currently in the process of drafting a public health rule that could include statewide setbacks. Wilmington and the neighboring community of Carson are home to five oil refineries, as well as the Wilmington Oil Field — the third-most productive patch in the United States.
All can releases are posted on our homepage, in our newsletter, and across our social media accounts. Please be courteous to our neighbors and fellow businesses when choosing where to park. Yes, Grist House Craft Brewery is an adult establishment that has always welcomed children, and we’d like to continue to do so. Lawn equipment also contributed to a litany of other air toxics, such as formaldehyde and benzene, according to the report, which is titled “Lawn Care Goes Electric.” But perhaps the most concerning pollutant it releases is the fine particulate matter known as PM2.5. Tiny houses are tailor-made Airbnb bait, so to speak, and have become the highest-grossing “unique space type” on the platform, producing $195 million in revenue for hosts in 2021. Older wheat varieties that naturally adapted to their place are critical for flavor diversity and climate change.
This means some farmers are still able to flood their fields to grow cattle feed, even as residents of towns such as Okieville and East Porterville have to truck in water and shower using buckets. Such an incredible stockpiling of the state’s most precious natural resource might have attracted more criticism were it not for the Resnicks’ progressive bona fides. They’ve spent $15 million on the 2,500 residents of Lost Hills — roughly 600 of whom work for the couple — funding everything from sidewalks, parks, and playing fields to affordable housing, a preschool, and a health clinic. Many states and municipalities offer rebates on battery-powered lawn equipment, and more people are making the switch. That’s true even in the commercial lawn-care sector, which is responsible for the bulk of emissions but is more difficult to electrify because companies often need more powerful machines, with longer runtimes, than residential users. Mueller and Smith didn’t live in the tiny house they built together for more than a couple of months.
Cosmic cocktails, beer Olympics, Kennywood charcuterie, and more Pittsburgh food news - PGH City Paper
Cosmic cocktails, beer Olympics, Kennywood charcuterie, and more Pittsburgh food news.
Posted: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Decades after Watts revolted, the Black neighborhood is being ‘revitalized’ — but the cost is steep
To the south is Atlas Iron and Metal, a 72-year-old industrial site that is now part of the federal Superfund program to clean up sites of large-scale hazardous contamination. There, 25-foot mounds of shredded metals tower over a wall shared with the local public high school, and sharp metal scraps are known to rain down on students. A nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
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The clinics have a full-time, bilingual doctor, health coaches, and prescription medications — all free of charge. “There are all sorts of costs related to poor health,” Stewart Resnick said at the Aspen Institute in July. “My hope is that this really doesn’t become a charity, but rather works, and that we will get a payback” — both in terms of productivity and reduced health care costs. The chef in the employee cafeteria made us adobo-chicken lettuce wraps — part of a healthy menu intended to combat diabetes and obesity. The company’s new, far-reaching health initiative also includes free exercise classes in the employee gym, a weekly on-site farmers market, and a program that pays people up to $2,700 a year to lose weight and keep it off. Since the program began in January 2015, the Wonderful workforce has shed 4,000 pounds.
The Resnicks expanded into agriculture in 1978, mostly as a hedge against inflation. They purchased 2,500 acres of orange trees in California’s Kern County citrus belt. Ten years later, during the state’s last great drought, they snatched up tens of thousands of acres of almond, pistachio, and citrus groves for bargain prices.
They thought getting their home off fossil fuels would be straightforward. Chaos ensued. - Grist
They thought getting their home off fossil fuels would be straightforward. Chaos ensued..
Posted: Thu, 21 Mar 2024 07:00:00 GMT [source]
More than 3,400 onshore wells have been drilled in the field since oil was first discovered there in 1932; today, the site pumps out 46,000 barrels per day from 1,550 active wells. Wilmington is also home to more than 50,000 residents, more than 90 percent of whom are people of color. Due to the impact of the oil and gas drilling and refining, census tracts in Wilmington are exposed to more pollution than 80 to 90 percent of the state of California. Meanwhile, predominantly white Palos Verdes — some 12 miles west of Wilmington, on the other side of Interstate 110 — is exposed to less pollution than 85 percent of the state. The soil samples were collected in public spaces such as sidewalks and parks, community gardens, and residential yards with verbal consent from the occupant.
The wells are loud and emit noxious odors — sometimes the smells evoke rotten eggs, she explained, other times they’re sickly sweet. “A lot of our experiences on the front line are a physical attack on our body,” said Hernandez. The Logan that Andrade sees today is not the Logan that he or his sister, Cecelia Andrade Rodriguez, remember from childhood. Andrade Rodriguez, now 71, lives nearby in the city of Garden Grove but still helps organize the annual Logan reunion. At 42, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which her doctor told her was likely due to environmental causes.
Sam Romero said the proposed road extension opened residents’ eyes to just how little regard the city had for the neighborhood. Santa Ana planning commission records show that the commissioners were strategically approving and denying zone changes that placed a heavier industrial burden on eastside barrios that were near the downtown central core. In 1929, records show that the commission was pressured by the Santa Fe Railroad and Richfield Oil companies to consider zoning a portion of the Logan barrio for heavy industrial use.
They moved to New York for some time to work on their documentary, and eventually broke up. Smith moved to Los Angeles, intermittently transporting the tiny house around rural properties in Colorado and Montana. The cost and ordeal of moving it became too onerous, and he eventually sold it in 2020. But the rise of Airbnb offered a “guaranteed business model” for people who wanted to make a tiny house into a legitimately profitable investment, said Zach Milburn, a real estate developer. In 2005, when the sustainable-housing developer and writer Lloyd Alter first laid eyes on a sleek, solar- and wind-powered tiny house on wheels, designed by the architect Andy Thomson, he fell completely in love with it.
Nevertheless, the barrios were essentially abandoned in terms of urban development, she noted. Landmarks may be lost over time, and memories can fade, but for people like Andrade, whose family history is intertwined with protecting the barrio, the battle scars remain. The few, dedicated families of Logan who persisted are a story of a people who paid the cost of modernization while being segregated from the very progress that Santa Ana hoped to achieve.
After the fall harvest comes winter pruning, spring pest management, and summer watering and mowing. The nut industry’s nearly year-round employment has allowed farmworkers to put down roots. They can live with their families, send their kids to school, and start to grasp for the American Dream.
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