In Chicago, your ZIP code still decides how long you live. My neighbors on the Southeast Side die younger than people who live a few miles up the lakefront. A new Illinois law finally forces the state to address one of the biggest reasons why.
The gap is staggering. Depending on your neighborhood, life expectancy in this city swings by two decades – from the high 80s in the wealthy lakefront neighborhoods to the 60s in the most disinvested communities, where polluting factories are allowed to concentrate.
Same city, completely different odds of growing old.
Last week, the Illinois General Assembly finally acted to change that system. It passed a law – now on Governor Pritzker's desk – requiring the state to weigh the pollution a community already carries before approving more. If this bill becomes law, the pollution burden in my neighborhood would have to be taken into account before another new facility is imposed alongside the 200 existing industrial facilities.
Every single facility adds a health threat. The accumulation of polluters creates a dangerous environment and a twenty-year gap in our life expectancy.
This law is a step toward dismantling the redlining that made neighborhoods like mine into sacrifice zones for toxic industry, and Pritzker should sign it without hesitation.
I grew up in the shadow of industry, a working-class community of color where the smokestacks and chemical plants always seem to land. When I think about the life my kids will live, I have to think about the risks of them playing in the park, and how to protect them from the air they breathe.
None of this is abstract for me. I learned how that burden gets built during the most intense environmental justice fight of my life.
Almost a decade ago, a massive metal shredder called General Iron tried to leave a gentrifying corner of Lincoln Park and move to my neighborhood – a business too dirty for the wealthy North Side, simply relocated to the community that already bears the heaviest pollution burden in the city. My neighbors said no. Some even went on hunger strike for almost 30 days to make the city listen.
We won. The permit was denied. But the system that tried to bring General Iron to our neighborhood remains intact.
Credit: passigatti/Big Stock Photo
Now, while the state has moved forward, Chicago's Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance – named for the Southeast Side activist known as the mother of the environmental justice movement – has stalled at City Council, blocked by the same old industry talking points we have heard for years.
Chicago’s alders, the city’s elected leaders, continue to say that protecting health is bad for jobs, bad for growth, bad for business. That argument quietly treats our lungs and our futures as a cost of doing business. It requires the people who live next to the pollution to keep subsidizing someone else's profit with their health.
That logic should sound familiar because it is not just a City Council stalling tactic. It’s the same stance that we see from federal agencies. The same administration that moved to erase the scientific finding underpinning our clean air protections has been handing polluters exemptions from the law. The worldview is identical, only the stage is bigger. The message is that a community's health is an acceptable price, and the people paying it are expected to stay quiet.
I don't buy it, and neither should Springfield or City Hall. Growth that shortens lives is not growth. Pritzker should sign this law and treat it as a floor, not a ceiling. And the City Council should stop hiding behind arguments that federal agencies have long tolerated, and that the Trump administration has now made policy.
My son didn't choose the ZIP code he was born in. It should not determine how long he lives. For generations, my neighborhood has been told its health was negotiable. We move from pollution to progress by refusing, finally, to accept that clean air is a privilege rationed by ZIP code, and that some neighborhoods exist to absorb what others refuse to bear.
