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Five decades ago, Clair C. Patterson, a California Institute of Technology geochemist who pioneered techniques to measure lead levels, warned that legacy lead contamination would come back to haunt cities. He argued that Americans’ blood lead levels were unsafe, and his findings provided key evidence for environmental activists who successfully sought to remove lead from gasoline. But as Shafer would soon learn, tiny-home living appealed to more than those with a taste for civil disobedience. More than a decade in the making, the venture has collected funding from the federal and state government and two private companies to turn the Jordan Downs complex into a “mixed-income” community housing more than 700 additional families. It is also introducing much-needed fresh food options (including support for a 2.5-acre urban farm), more green space, the replacement of 65-year-old lead-filled buildings, and increased public transit to different employment hubs across the notoriously car-centric city. On paper, the project appears to fulfill demands Watts residents have been making since 1965.
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The 1980s saw a construction boom of high-density apartment complexes on Santa Ana’s east side, which increased the population in the very areas that had long borne the brunt of industrialization — and where Grist’s own testing found elevated levels of lead in the soil. In essence, by allowing private developers to replace single-family homes with high-density apartment complexes, the city effectively increased the number of children exposed to lead and other contaminants. One survey of a Logan ZIP code by the nonprofit Latino Health Access in 1996 showed that, on average, about half the residents there were younger than 20. By 1977, when the barrio had 130 residential units and 20 industries, residents were calling on the city to phase out those businesses by removing the neighborhood’s industrial zoning designation altogether. The councilman who represented Logan told the Santa Ana Register that the zoning change was not the answer, claiming that if it happened, many residents wouldn’t be able to afford to upgrade their homes, or would choose not to upgrade. Meanwhile, Chepa rallied Logan residents by “banging on doors.” She was able to fill the city council chambers.
Decades after Watts revolted, the Black neighborhood is being ‘revitalized’ — but the cost is steep
In an Orange County Register story, some council members were quoted as saying they “didn’t think they’d ever find a final solution to a problem that began before they were born.” They also pledged to try to be fair to both sides. Ultimately, the neighborhood would remain mixed-use — though Romero and Joe Andrade have worked with the city to convert various individual industrial parcels back to residential use. “Being born here, right down the street, your heart’s always in it,” Joe Andrade told me last fall.
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The soil would become a repository of proof illustrating how generations of a Mexican barrio were poisoned by lead and other noxious pollutants. Residents knew little about this soil contamination, despite the city’s environmental assessments calling for a deeper exploration of potential lead exposure in the neighborhood in the late 1970s. Comprehensive citywide soil test results were not publicly available until 2017, when I published an investigation that found hazardous levels of lead in the soil in neighborhoods across Santa Ana, which today is Orange County’s second-largest city. To follow up, I conducted hundreds of additional soil tests over the course of 2018 and 2019 in neighborhoods that, like Logan, carried the burden of the city’s industrialization.
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Regulators typically don’t require businesses below a certain size threshold to report emissions. For example, the federal Toxic Release Inventory Program requires reporting from facilities with 10 or more employees that also manufacture or process toxins at volumes greater than 25,000 pounds per year. Thus, according to Frickel, smaller businesses like welding shops tend to fly under the radar. Because the number of historically industrialized sites across the country is so vast — and continues to expand — potentially contaminated soil is a systemic problem, and one that is not being tracked by most regulatory agencies. The hot, dry Santa Ana winds that whip through Orange County’s Logan barrio are fierce and temperamental.
That means an introduction of new residents that are making tens of thousands of dollars more annually than those already living in Jordan Downs — a potentially big problem for low-income renters, if the area’s median income starts to rise. In the years since DTSC claimed no further action was needed, community members like Watkins have taken it upon themselves to test the soil using a crowdsourced X-ray fluorescence machine. According to their data, lead levels around both original housing structures and newly-constructed affordable housing buildings are nearly 100 ppm, far below the 2011 readings but still significantly above the state-approved level of 80 ppm. However, DTSC and the city of Los Angeles have declined to take further action, saying that although some test levels are above state limits, lead levels fall below 80 ppm when samples are averaged across the entire property. These perils are exemplified on the corner of Century Boulevard and South Alameda Street. To the east is the Alameda Corridor, a 20-mile long freight rail line leading to the port of Los Angeles, carrying 14,000 trains responsible for thousands of tons of air pollution annually.
In response to a request from Grist, the city of Santa Ana searched for but could not locate any records indicating that these field tests were conducted in response to the 1978 report’s recommendation. That report also said that, at the time, airborne lead concentrations were declining and would continue to do so as lead was phased out of gasoline. However, if Logan was converted to residential use, the report cautioned, more people would likely suffer from lead exposure.
Those fateful decisions would lead to an explosive level of turnover of polluting businesses in Logan in the latter half of the 20th century. A Grist analysis of businesses that churned through Logan from the early 1960s to 2014 shows that a majority of those businesses no longer exist, and have been replaced by new commercial or light industrial businesses. By the end of World War II, Santa Ana had more than 50 industries and only two industrial areas.
The timetable for that phaseout is yet to be determined, and Wilmington’s wells would not be affected by the move. A Grist and Capital & Main analysis shows that communities around hundreds of schools statewide, which disproportionately serve low-income students, students of color, and medically underserved populations, would immediately see the benefits if CalGEM instituted setbacks. Of course, the number of people protected depends on how far the agency mandates that oil drilling can take place from a home, school, or hospital. Los Angeles County has no required setbacks protecting residents from oil and gas wells, which are sited in close proximity to homes, schools, and medical facilities. As a child, Ashley Hernandez remembers pretending that the oil pumpjacks that loomed over her neighborhood were dinosaurs. The strange metal animals pecked rhythmically at the earth, sandwiched between homes, next to playgrounds, in the parking lots of grocery stores, sucking the oil from the sediments beneath her neighborhood of Wilmington in southern Los Angeles.
“There’s been a growing body of epidemiological literature trying to understand what impacts oil and gas developments have for communities living nearby,” said Jill Johnston, assistant professor of public health at the University of Southern California. A small batch of soil samples were sent to the Tulane University School of Medicine laboratory of Dr. Howard Mielke, one of the nation’s leading experts on soil lead contamination, to confirm the accuracy of the XRF tests in the field. His lab conducted an agreement analysis and found that Grist’s soil samples and Tulane’s analysis had a very strong agreement of nearly 90 percent. Any effort to rebuild the Logan that once was would require cleaning up any contaminants found in the soil.
In September, as part of an emergency resolution on climate change, the Santa Ana City Council pledged to address lead contamination throughout the city. By 1970, about 8 percent of the acreage in the area around Logan was dedicated for manufacturing industries. At the time, the vast majority of the land was zoned for either light or heavy industrial use, while only 1.4 percent was zoned residential. The industrial businesses at that time employed between 1,200 and 1,400 people, but few of those firms employed Logan residents.
The boundaries of the two zones fell squarely around existing Mexican barrios in the city, including Logan. As the city pushed to attract more industry in the following decades, the commission’s zoning decisions would have dramatic long-term consequences for the Latino residents in those neighborhoods. At Grist’s request, Orange County archivists searched for and found evidence of half a dozen such covenants in Santa Ana. One from 1941 restricted “African, Mongolian, Japanese, Asiatic, Spanish, Mexican, or Indian races or their decendants [sic]” from occupying lands and properties in a tract called Westwood Park. The earliest racial covenant uncovered was part of a grant deed signed in 1921, while the latest was signed in 1943, just five years before the U.S.
A 1970 housing condition survey found that many homes had fallen into disrepair, with only six units in sound condition; only 10 percent of the dwellings were worth more than $10,000. It’s been nearly a century since the city zoned the already-established residential barrio of Logan for industrial use. It absorbed the environmental degradation of each era that thrust Logan into modernity. As the neighborhood’s agricultural roots gave way to industry, products like petroleum, aviation gasoline, lead ore, heavy metals, chemicals, herbicides, and pesticides came and went on the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroad lines — but a part of them never left. Logan has been described as the Plymouth Rock of Santa Ana, a predominantly Latino city now home to about 335,000 people, because it’s where the city’s earliest Mexican and Mexican American residents settled.
In 1969, the city lifted the ban against home improvements and expansions, but residents told city officials that they still faced resistance from banks who weren’t eager to make loans in a neighborhood that was still zoned industrial. By the early 1970s, the barrio had over 130 single-family and apartment units as well as more than 30 industrial or commercial properties, including metal works, auto salvage shops, and lumber supply businesses. One resident, whose property shrank when the state appropriated a portion through eminent domain for the construction of the Interstate 5 freeway, told the Los Angeles Times that her house rattled when the trains passed, and she didn’t like how the nearby junkyard burned tar on Saturdays. Sampson also discovered that even within these neighborhoods there was variation in the blood lead levels, which he attributes to the local manufacturing history. He found that lead exposure rates are higher in neighborhoods that have mixed industrial and residential uses, much like Logan.
Farmers are the main reason that California now pumps nearly seven cubic kilometers of groundwater a year, or about as much total water as what’s used by all the homes in Texas. Sucking water from deep underground has caused the surrounding land to settle as the pockets of air between layers of soil collapse, wreaking havoc with bridges and even gravity-fed canals. Though California passed its first-ever groundwater regulations in 2014, water districts won’t be required to limit pumping for at least another four years. We will fill any clean growler.The cleanliness of your growler is extremely important for the health of the beer. We recommend that you rinse your growler several times with hot water immediately following consumption and allow it to dry completely.
In 2011, Christopher Smith, freshly out of college and starting to imagine the shape his adult life might take, bought a plot of land in “middle-of-nowhere” Colorado with the dream of building a small homestead on it with his own hands. The precipitous costs of meeting building code requirements quickly eroded that vision, and he began to lose faith in ever having enough money to have a home on that land. About a decade ago, L.A.’s current housing authority CEO, Douglas Guthrie, spearheaded a similar process in Chicago. It led to the almost total displacement of a majority-Black public housing complex in favor of “mixed-income” housing. In the meantime, DTSC has removed at least another 1,690 tons of contaminated soil from the area since 2018, and an additional 870 tons have been removed from nearby Jordan High School, according to DTSC’s Hazardous Waste Tracking System.
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