Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood has long had an industrial side. Set along the New York Harbor, there are docks and warehouses as well as homes where longshoremen and their families once lived. But even a community built on shipping is being taxed by its modern era of logistics: Amazon now occupies some 800,000 square feet of warehouse space in Red Hook, attracting a parade of trucks that make sure those Prime orders arrive at New Yorker’s apartments within 24 hours.
The many trucks are increasing pollution in the neighborhood. And while Red Hook has become gentrified in recent decades, the majority of residents in the neighborhood — more than 6,000 out of around 11,000 — all live in one place, Red Hook Houses, part of New York City Public Housing, and all of them are Black or Latinx.
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According to a January report from the Environmental Defense Fund, neighborhoods across New York are starting to look a lot like Red Hook. One out of every four residents across the state now lives within a half mile of a so-called mega warehouse of at least 50,000 square feet. And no matter where in the state they are located, from five boroughs to upstate to Western New York, the surrounding neighborhoods more often than not have demographics like Red Hook: Black and/or brown, and low income.
The report found that, statewide, Black New Yorkers are 59% more likely to live within a half mile of a mega warehouse “than would be expected based on statewide demographics.” In New York City, where Black people comprise about 20 percent of the population, Black residents are 17% more likely to live within a half mile of a warehouse. In the Hudson Valley, that number jumps to 101% — even though it is, generally speaking a much whiter region. It’s even higher in Central and Western New York: Black residents are 124% more likely to live within a half mile of a warehouse.
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While there are particularities to New York’s warehouse boom, the overall trend is the same in the 10 other states that EDF has looked at too: “No state distributed the risk from warehouses evenly,” the report says. “Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, American Indian and low-income people bear the brunt of the risk from living close to warehouses.”
Big warehouses come with a lot of truck traffic, and all of the pollution generated by those semis, particularly when they’re idling. When a mega warehouse comes to a neighborhood, it often becomes the top local source of air pollution, with the trucks that serve it emitting nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and the fine particulate matter that can wreak havoc on lungs, particularly of young children. The report notes that while diesel trucks are only 10% of all motor vehicles on the country’s roads, they produce half of the transportation sector’s nitrogen dioxide emissions.
The report also notes that nationwide, the whereabouts of warehouses are cloaked in secrecy. Unlike refineries and other facilities that release pollutants into the atmosphere — and whose emissions are tracked publicly — warehouses aren’t required to be transparent about their environmental impacts. Emissions from warehouses are also unregulated and the facilities don’t undergo environmental reviews.
The EDF report backs up the findings of a 2021 Consumer Reports analysis of the health and environmental impacts of Amazon warehouses nationwide on communities of color.
“People can get their Amazon packages and never have to think about the Black and brown communities who bear the brunt of having the warehouse in their backyard,” Ana Baptista, associate director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School in New York City, told Consumer Reports.
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Indeed, putting a disproportionate amount of warehouses in Black and brown communities will only exacerbate existing public health disparities, particularly for asthma. Compared to white kids, Black children are five times as likely to be hospitalized due to asthma, and eight times more likely to die from asthma.
The report, as New York assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes said in a release, “highlights the obvious truth that many of our redlined working-class communities of color have experienced over the last several years: the proliferation of increasingly large last-mile warehouse facilities has worsened the effects of pollution, health risks and safety in their communities as our city and state stall behind enacting necessary health and environmental regulations for them.”