After decades of roadway projects that indiscriminately bulldozed through predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods and created a legacy of toxic exposure, a planned fix under the Biden administration was set in motion.
The Environmental Protection Agency and public health researchers have thoroughly recorded for years that residents living near busy highways are exposed to higher levels of nitrogen dioxide and particle pollution, or soot, and that this pollution disproportionately affects Black and low-income populations. The Department of Transportation attempted to address the issue with the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Grant Program, an initiative established in 2021.
The Reconnecting Communities program was both welcome and long overdue. It provided planning grants for studying ways to restore neighborhoods bisected by highways, as well as construction grants to carry out proposed projects that improve community walkability and vitality. But before the program could be implemented, it was put on pause indefinitely. President Donald Trump’s administration opted to withhold billions in funding earmarked for air monitoring projects in Black and low-income communities and shuttered the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice.
Tell Congress: Hold Zeldin Accountable for Corrupting EPA’s Mission
Not only will communities in need not be mended because of the funding freeze for the Reconnecting Communities program, but it also appears as though more tailpipe pollution is on the horizon, poised to fill the air that marginalized communities breathe in daily.
In July, the EPA announced it would repeal the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the legal and scientific foundation of the agency’s responsibility to limit climate pollution, along with all greenhouse gas pollution rules for cars and trucks. EPA wants to do this despite scientific evidence that regulation of tailpipe climate pollution inevitably also reduces soot and ozone pollution, potentially saving thousands of lives annually.
A long history of roadway pollution
From Houston’s Fifth Ward to Atlanta’s Westside, and from New Orleans’ Claiborne Avenue to Syracuse’s Southside, millions of Black and Latino communities live in the shadow of major highways. These roadways, built under the guise of “urban renewal” and highway “infrastructure modernization,” reinforce existing racial segregation, physically separating communities of color from white communities and bringing with them dangerous pollution and constant noise. Living near them has been linked to health harms like asthma, heart disease, and even premature death.
The history of pollution in marginalized communities dates all the way back to the era of slavery and the plantation systems, says Joyceia “Joy” Banner, Co-founder of The Descendants Project, an organization that advocates for the cultural preservation of the descendants of the enslaved and against environmental injustice in the Louisiana river parishes. She thinks of this as corporate pollution.
“[Plantations] were corporations at the end of the day,” Joy says. “We don’t see a plantation as a business because of everything else that went on. But laws to support the corporations that were plantations allow industry to come in and to exploit Black people. It’s the same system that polluters are using now.”
Descendants, like their ancestors, are being sacrificed. “Descendant communities have become their sacrifice zones … through the sacrificial zoning of our people. The system, the laws, everything that we are facing, didn’t start in the ’90s or even the 1900s. It’s been since the 1700s,” Joy contends.
Widespread health impacts
Tailpipe pollution is one of the biggest sources of air pollution in the country. “In some areas, like where I live in Philadelphia, pollution from vehicles is the number one source of air pollution that we breathe. And that’s true in many places,” says Alex Bomstein, Executive Director of Clean Air Council, an environmental organization serving the Mid-Atlantic Region.
People living near highway pollution are frequently left to make their own decisions about health impacts and their family’s safety. Stephanie Reese, mom of two boys moved to Woodbridge, Virginia—about midway between two cities, Washington, DC, and Richmond, both with their own legacies of roadway pollution. In 2024, when her sons were ages 8 and 14, she made the difficult choice to move again. Woodbridge is next to Interstate 95, the longest north-south interstate and the sixth largest in the U.S. Stephanie, Moms’ Director of Strategic Implementation and Justice, says that when her sons would play outside, they would experience issues with the air quality. It was time to go.
She was well aware that people living within a few blocks of a highway deal with a lot more tailpipe pollution than others. “That includes things like fine particulate matter,” notes Alex. Fine particulate matter, also known as soot pollution or PM 2.5, are particles that are 2.5 micrometers or smaller. “That’s the deadliest type of air pollution. It’s actually one of the leading causes of deaths of all sorts worldwide,” says Alex.
“We had one year where we had the combination of what was coming off the highways and also wildfires, causing just an extremely difficult time for my kids to enjoy being outdoors,” Stephanie recalls. “There are times when there’s just traffic sitting, and you see the trucks and the plumes of smoke billowing into your neighborhood.” They only lived in that house for two years, but being a few minutes from the highway became too big an issue for her family, so they relocated.
Resources needed
The solution to these impacts of living in close proximity to roadways is financial. “There has to be investment actually in the community to try to right the wrongs of the past,” says Abre’ Conner, director of the Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at NAACP. “If there’s not money earmarked, if there’s not money that is directly meant to go toward these infrastructure concerns, it’s not going to end up going there,” he says. Even if money comes from the federal government, it often goes to the states. “Unfortunately, in a lot of the places where we see the highest disparities, part of it is because the governor is allocating money away from the places that need it the most,” says Abre’.
Now that plans for the federal government to mitigate vehicle emissions—especially in communities breathing a disproportionate amount of them—are being rolled back, Stephanie feels public education is more critical than ever. She wishes more people understood the long-term health effects to the historically marginalized communities that live near major roadways.
“It feels as though there’s the assumption that, ‘Oh, it’s just short-term. They might have issues for a period of time,’” Stephanie says, adding: “No! This degradation is happening to their lungs, and it is going to impact their adulthood. And if they’re women, it could impact their maternal health. So again, it has a long-standing impact.”
With the Trump administration’s rollbacks of pollution protections and justice initiatives, these “long-standing impacts” will surely reverberate across Black and Latino communities bisected by major roadways for decades.
Tell Congress: Hold Zeldin Accountable for Corrupting EPA’s Mission