Chicago law would shift where polluting companies operate todayheadline

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Chicago city leaders are set to consider a major overhaul in how and where polluting businesses are allowed to open, nearly two years after the city settled a civil rights complaint that alleged a pattern of discrimination threatening the health of low-income communities of color.

The measure, expected to be introduced Wednesday, would transform how heavy industry is located and operated in the country’s third largest city. If passed into law, it would require city officials to assess the cumulative pollution burden on communities before approving new industrial projects.

As the Trump administration dismantles protections for poor communities facing lopsided levels of pollution, Chicago’s ordinance is a test case for local action under a federal government hostile toward environmental justice. Over the past three months, the Trump administration has already undone long-standing orders to address uneven environmental burdens at the federal level and challenged government programs monitoring environmental justice issues across the country. 

Now, advocates are hoping the local legislation becomes a blueprint for how state and local governments can leverage zoning and permitting to protect vulnerable communities from becoming sacrifice zones. 

“The Trump administration is trying to erase history,” said Gina Ramirez, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Midwest director of environmental health. “You can’t erase our industrial past — it’s literally haunting us.”

Chicago’s industrial history is especially pronounced in low-income communities on the city’s South and West sides. The proposed ordinance would give these communities a voice in the permitting process via a new environmental justice advisory board, Ramirez said. 

“Nobody wants to be sick,” said Cheryl Johnson, an environmental activist on the Far South Side who has been advocating for pollution protections for almost 40 years.

The Chicago ordinance is named after Johnson’s mother, Hazel Johnson, who started fighting in the 1970s for the health of her neighbors at a public housing community surrounded by a “toxic doughnut” of polluters.

Cheryl Johnson runs People for Community Recovery, an organization started by her mother, with the same mission to protect human health. “The most important thing — and the only thing that we get — is good health or bad health,” Johnson said. “That’s what my mother fought for.”

In 2020, Johnson’s group, along with several other local environmental justice organizations, launched a civil rights complaint over the city’s role in the relocation of a metal-shredding operation from its longtime home on the North Side to a majority Black and Latino neighborhood on the far South Side of the city.

An investigation by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded in 2022 that Chicago had long placed polluters in low-income areas, while sparing majority-white affluent neighborhoods. 

In a binding agreement with former President Joe Biden’s administration, the city promised to offer a legal fix. Former mayor Lori Lightfoot signed the agreement with HUD hours before she left office in 2023. Her successor, Mayor Brandon Johnson, vowed to follow the agreement and said that September that an ordinance proposal would be offered in short order.

But weeks and months turned into years, and community, health, and environmental advocates complained that the mayor was slow-walking his promises. Nearly two years later, the city is finally set to deliver. 

Not all community groups are happy with the proposal. Theresa McNamara, an activist with the Southwest Environmental Alliance, said at a recent public meeting she didn’t think the measure would go far enough. She called it a “weak piece of crap” based on her understanding of the main points.

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Experts said the law’s success would depend on the city’s will to execute and enforce it.

“There’s a lot of states and even cities that have assessment tools, but the question is, what do you do with those?” said Ana Baptisa, an environmental policy professor at The New School in New York.

In New Jersey, Baptista helped pass a similar ordinance — then the first of its kind — through the Newark City Council in 2016. Since then, local and state governments across the country have followed suit. At least eight states have passed this type of legislation, including California, Minnesota, New York, and Delaware. 

Still, Baptista said Newark’s bill has failed to rein in polluting industries. “It proved to be what we feared: a sort of formality that oftentimes doesn’t even get completed,” she said. 

Even without power to deny or constrain new pollution sources, the advisory board itself marks progress, according to Oscar Sanchez, whose Southeast Environmental Task Force helped file the original civil rights complaint,. 

Sanchez added that as the federal government retreats from its commitments to environmental justice, state and local entities are on the front line of buffering communities from greater pollution burdens.

“We are pushing the needle of what people can try to achieve in their own communities,” he said.