How Economic Zoning Promotes Environmental Racism

Disparities between the quality of life in different neighborhoods occur all across the United States, but one of the sharpest divisions is in our own community. In West Oakland, residents are expected to live seven years less than residents of the Oakland Hills. Higher rates of asthma, heart failure, and stroke all plague West Oakland — the result of environmental racism. Environmental racism is defined as “racial discrimination in the development and implementation of environmental policy.” This typically refers to the concentration of industrial-grade pollutants, oil refineries, heavily-trafficked freeways, and toxic waste sites in neighborhoods that have a majority population of color. The practice of environmental racism gets its roots from economic zoning, which was first established in 1926 and is still used today. 

Initially, cities employed racial zoning. Racial zoning allowed city officials to designate the houses in a particular neighborhood as only available to members of a particular race, thus effectively creating racially segregated sects of the city. Racial zoning was outlawed in 1917 by the Supreme Court Case Buchanan v. Warley on the grounds that such zoning infringed on the rights of homeowners to sell to whomever they wished. 

Almost immediately after the illegalization of racial zoning, city planners developed economic zoning. This was essentially racial zoning with codewords standing in for explicitly racial terms like “white” or “black.” These terms included “residential,” “commercial,” and “industrial,” among others. “Residential” fairly exclusively referred to neighborhoods with single-family homes, “commercial” meant businesses, and “industrial” referred to areas where large corporations conducted operations involving hazardous dumping and mass pollutant production. Laws restricted what types of structures could be built in which areas. Most notably, “residential” areas prohibited the construction of apartment complexes or industrial work sites within their boundaries. 

Due to a history of overtly racist legislation that enforced unequal job and housing opportunities, economic zoning laws facilitated de facto segregation. White families tended to live in single-family homes while black families tended to live in apartments or public housing projects. The restriction of “residential” areas to single-family homes thus meant that the majority of black families had to seek apartments in the “commercial” or “industrial” zones. 

As patterns of neighborhood racial flow solidified over time, with white people settling into residential areas and people of color, especially black people, being directed into industrial areas, the foundations for modern environmental racism were laid down. 

This is seen plainly in the modern racial demographics of Oakland. The Oakland Hills, zoned as a “residential” area, are almost completely white (76.4% white, 15.5% asian, 5.5% hispanic, 1.3% black, 0.3% native, and 1% other races or mixed). Meanwhile, West Oakland and the Oakland Waterfront, zoned as “industrial” areas, are populated by people of color (53% black, 22% hispanic, 15% white, 10% asian, and <1% native). The inhabitants of the Oakland Hills enjoy clean air, clean water, and easily-accessible green spaces. The inhabitants of West Oakland, on the other hand, have been subject to numerous environmental injustices over the years. A chemical spill from the AMCO Chemical Company, which stored bulk materials along Third Street and ceased operations in 1980, was only just cleaned up three years ago (the owners of AMCO abandoned the site, leaving the chemical spill to contaminate the neighborhood’s soil and water). Industrial operations in the Port of Oakland emit diesel into the air and increase asthma rates among local residents. The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP), one organization of resistance in the area, has threatened lawsuits and even brought a civil rights complaint against the city in 2017 for disregard to the health of West Oakland residents. WOEIP also, in that same year, published data on the rates of pollutants within various West Oakland neighborhoods (the data was collected in partnership with other environmental groups, Google, and University of Texas, Austin). Despite the active resistance by WOEIP and other grassroots groups, the toxic materials in the area leave West Oakland residents facing a myriad of health issues from which their white counterparts in the Oakland Hills are exempt. This is environmental racism in action. 

Economic zoning was not necessarily intended to concentrate industrial pollutants in communities of color, but it was certainly intended to protect white neighborhoods from those exact hazardous materials. Residents of these areas first became aware of the negative health impacts during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Factory strikes and City Hall sit-ins became a more common practice as people called for environmental accountability from the government and for the removal of polluting industries from neighborhoods. In 1999, California passed Senate Bill 115, which assigned the California State Office of Planning and Research with the responsibility of overseeing environmental justice programs. Though California has some of the most ambitious carbon-mitigation plans in the nation, there is concern over a lack of care shown to individual communities within the state’s borders — including West Oakland. Today, along with WOEIP, several groups actively resist environmental injustice, such as No Coal in Oakland and certain green jobs initiatives brought forward by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. (To learn more about how to get involved with any of these groups, click the corresponding blue link.)    

Ultimately, the environmental injustices enacted in West Oakland are the result of decades of racist city planning policy. Government officials knew communities of color would have less political clout and less economic power than white communities, and that it would thus be easier to implement industrial sites in those neighborhoods. Building a chemical storage site or an industrial loading zone in the Oakland Hills would meet strong resistance from the white residents, and it’s likely that the officials who proposed the idea would find themselves swiftly voted out. So, city officials designated communities of color as industrial areas and gave high-pollutant corporations a pass to set up shop. The resultant Environmental Justice Movement, as it lives today, is a fight for racial equality, adequate healthcare for all, and the basic human right to live with dignity.