Hunts Point is lined with trucks. (Credit: Sacha Shaw)
The Bronx has the highest rate of asthma in New York City, and the problem appears to be getting worse.
Asthma-related visits to emergency departments have been on the rise since 2020. The Bronx has double the rate of asthma-related hospital visits than any other county in New York State,with more than 21,000 cases a year, according to statistics from the Department of Health.
For Bronx resident Elina Jimenez, asthma isn’t a statistic. Her eldest child has the illness and struggles with medication-related depression.
Jimenez is fed up with the trucks and the traffic that her family has to live alongside — and fed up with the pollution and the inequality that her community endures.
She is angry at the politicians who should be serving the community. They are “putting profit over human life,” Jimenez said.
A federal policy, first implemented in 2017 by the Trump administration and made permanent this past July, has led to more truck traffic in Jimenez’s neighborhood.
The “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” created so-called opportunity zones, designating census tracts where investors receive capital gains tax breaks. The zones were designed to “spur economic growth and job creation in low-income communities,” according to the Internal Revenue Service.
But some academics studying the intersection between health and public policy said the zones are likely having an adverse impact on public health, particularly on the prevalence of asthma.
Policies like these, have “unintended negative consequences,” said Peter Muennig, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University. “Opportunity zones are designed to boost local economies, but they don’t have any emphasis on other measures of well-being, such as health.”
According to Mayor Eric Adams’ Office of Sustainability website, “New York City’s air quality is cleaner than it has been in over fifty years”. Yet data from the health department suggest that concentrations of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) – a key air quality indicator – have risen across all boroughs. In the Bronx specifically, recorded PM2.5 concentration is the highest it has been in over five years.
This type of pollution is produced by vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions and other forms of combustion. It is closely linked with lung cancer, heart disease and asthma.
Truck exhaust pipe in Hunts Point industrial zone. (Credit: Sacha Shaw)
Since the opportunity zone legislation passed in 2017, Amazon has opened three warehouses in Hunts Point. Jimenez’s community district now has the highest concentration in the city: approximately one warehouse per 50,000 residents. By contrast, that ratio in Manhattan, which also has three warehouses, is one per 532,000 residents, according to data from the New York University’s Furman Center.
Amazon warehouses serve as hubs for e-commerce, with many operating 24 hours a day to process online orders and deliver them. Residents living near these warehouses are exposed to an almost endless flow of trucks and delivery vans, according to monitoring by the Department of Transportation (DOT).
In Hunts Point, DOT traffic monitoring stations located on Leggett Avenue, the street of the newly opened warehouses, show a significant jump in truck traffic. It has grown from 6% truck traffic in 2018 to almost 40% after 2019, and has remained high ever since.
“The more vehicles you have, the more congestion you have,” and “most of that congestion is from diesel trucks, which are super, super deadly and contribute to asthma,” said Muennig.
Amazon deliveries “really adds a lot to air pollution,” and could lead to growing rates of asthma in children, he said.
Some other public health experts share this view.
“I would expect that there would be some unintended, more insidious consequences, [of] such increased traffic to and from Amazon’s facilities in the South Bronx,” said Gaige Kerr, assistant research professor at George Washington University’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health.
“The additional pollution that Amazon’s facilities and activities would attract via increased traffic would likely contribute to dirtier air, sicker kids and adults, more ER visits, hospitalizations, and even premature deaths,” said Kerr.
It is difficult to directly establish whether the 2017 tax breaks are responsible for the expanded presence of Amazon in the South Bronx, as the legislation does not require companies to disclose this tax benefit.
“We don’t know — because there so little transparency — how many big corporations have taken advantage of it and they don’t tend to disclose when they do,” said David Wessel, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and Director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, who has written a book on opportunity zones.
Even so, Amazon has caught national attention for expanding into opportunity zones. According to data from the policy center Good Jobs First, and as reported by The Washington Post, the company has opened more than 153 facilities in opportunity zones since 2018.
“Amazon has a reputation for having terrible work conditions, causing local environmental pollution, and is a questionable net benefit for a community,” Muennig said.
An investigation by The Guardian and Consumer Reports found that Amazon has located most of its warehouses in communities with high numbers of low-income residents and people of color.
Much of Hunts Point is zoned for industrial activity, so there is business logic to opening in the area.
“But when making business decisions like these, Amazon is taking advantage of a national legacy of racist policies that have kept cities across the country segregated for generations, and have resulted in disproportionate health and environmental impacts to communities of color,” Quinta Warren, associate director for sustainability policy at Consumer Reports, wrote in their report.
Congressional District 15, which encompasses much of the Bronx, is the poorest
in the nation. The district is also already a significant outlier on many public health metrics, according to County Health Rankings and Roadmaps, a center run by the University of Wisconsin. According to their rankings, the Bronx is the least healthy county in New York State, and it significantly trails national averages in premature deaths, low birth weight, and access to healthy food.
Poor air quality disproportionately impacts “people of color and people who are economically oppressed,” said Mychal Johnson, South Bronx resident and co-founder of South Bronx Unite. “It is not unknown that our community is considered Asthma Alley.”
The now permanent opportunity zones are “tightening of the noose around the neck of the residents,” said Johnson. “We don’t need more truck traffic. We don’t need more things that are going to add to the cumulative environmental impacts we suffer from because of heavy diesel truck-intensive operations.”
Johnson, like Jimenez, is worried about the future and worried for his young child growing up breathing polluted air.
Amazon told Columbia News Service that they are not currently planning to expand operations in the Bronx further.
“While we’re always evaluating our network to ensure we’re meeting our customers’ needs, we don’t have specific expansion plans to announce at this time. We’re proud of our existing operations throughout the Bronx and the New York City region and the jobs we’ve created for the local community,” the company said in a statement to Columbia News Service.
The Mayor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
About the author(s)
Sacha Shaw is a freelance journalist at the Columbia School of Journalism. He specialises in data investigations, as well as international and environmental reporting.