Environmental Racism in Los Angeles and Its Formation

Environmental Racism in Los Angeles and its Formation

The siting of a $500 million railyard project backed by BNSF Railroad Company, which recently won the approval from Los Angeles Harbor Commissioners and Los Angeles City Council, has been a highly debated issue in Long Beach, Los Angeles. According to a report from Pacific Swell, ‘The BNSF railway’s project would serve as a transfer point between the harbor complex and rail. Short-haul trucks would travel four miles up the freeway to move containers of cargo onto trans.’ (Molley Peterson, 2013) The siting is regarded by environmentalists as a malicious act towards minorities and until June 8th, three complaints about the siting of railyard has been filed by environmentalists. As attorney David Pettit said ‘the projects’ own environmental review admits health and other impacts will be worse in the area’s mostly poor and minority neighborhood.’ The debate around few questions about environmental racism in Los Angeles.

The first question is: are minorities in Los Angeles really more prone to polluting factories. A research by Boer, who uses both univariate and multivariate regression models, provides solid evidence for the existence of environmental racism in Los Angeles. Boer collects data from all eighty-two Los Angeles County hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities(TSDF) sites listed by the California State Department and uses exposure of TSDF as a measurement of his study since TSDFs poses a potentially significant health hazard to nearby residents and TSDFs siting usually require an extensive government permission,. Boer first compared simple regression model with and without TSDFs and finds statistically different result caused by race. According to Boer, even control the variables such as income, industrial land use and manufacturing employment, race still correlates with the locations of TSDFs. He then uses a multivariate model which includes the same factor, by controlling both...