Even Breathing Is A Risk In One Of Orlando's Poorest Neighborhoods

ORLANDO, Fla. During the 15 years that Jacqueline Young lived in Griffin Park, a federal housing project, she always worried about the air that she and her granddaughter were breathing.

On bad days, her throat would hurt, and her granddaughter would have violent asthma attacks. Young, who often walked neighborhood kids to and from school, noticed that many of the children wore masks to protect themselves from pollution.

The air inside wasnt much better. The decrepit air-conditioning unit in Youngs apartment spewed out dust and forced her to keep the windows open, even when traffic was heavy. Sometimes, soot and particles floated through the air inside her apartment like it was snowing dust, said Young. We could never not think of the air we were breathing, she said.

She finally moved out last year, a refugee from the air itself.

Griffin Park is surrounded by two major highways that are used by hundreds of thousands of cars heading in and out of Orlando, Florida, every day. Whatever trees once buffered the noxious fumes and the roar of cars on all sides have been cut down. From above, you see a grid of apartment buildings encircled menacingly within a loop of the interchange, as if inside a noose.

The pollution in Griffin Park and its low-income Parramore neighborhood is violence of a kind Americans tend to ignore. But it is as deliberate and as politically determined as any more recognizable act of racial violence. What happened to Griffin Park was the sum of a series of choices made over the course of a century, the effect of which was to transmute formal segregation into the very air certain people breathe.

Although air pollution has generally decreased in the United States since the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970 , it still causes 200,000 early deaths each year . Men, poor people and African-Americans are disproportionately at risk. According to a comprehensive Harvard University study last year of air pollution in the U.S., black people are about three times more likely to die from exposure to airborne pollutants than others.

The study also concluded that many of these deaths could be prevented if the federally mandated air quality standards were tightened. Reducing current levels of so-called fine particulate matter by just one microgram per cubic meter of air would save about 12,000 lives every year, the scientists found.

But rather than making environmental standards more stringent, the Trump administration is moving to scrap a number of regulations and has proposed cutting the Environmental Protection Agency budget by almost one-third . The administration also collected 60 percent less in civil penalties from polluters through July 31, 2017, than any of the previous three administrations had collected during a similar time frame, according to the Environmental Integrity Project.

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They are not following science in the way they should, said Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in reference to the Trump administration. Theyre going in the opposite direction.

The Harvard study didnt look into why black people might be more vulnerable to fine particulate matter. Dominici, the lead scientist, said other research suggests that less access to health care and higher rates of health problems in general can increase the mortality rates within communities of color.

But the potential culprit isnt hard to identify. Last year, a federally funded study found that people of color were exposed to more transportation-related pollution than white people. While the study itself didnt identify the underlying causes, the senior author pointed to racial residential patterns, whereby low-income black people are more likely than whites to live near sources of pollution such as highways.

Segregation persists, entrenched through housing and zoning policy and through the construction of urban expressways that literally turned existing racial borders to concrete. This was not an unintended consequence; this was the whole point. As highway lobbyist Alfred Johnson later told an interviewer, some city officials in the mid-1950s were blunt about the goals of highway planning: Urban Interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local niggertown.