In 2023, the city of Chicago reached a settlement deal with the federal government over a brazen bit of environmental racism: City officials had tried to move a polluting business, a metal recycling facility, from the wealthy, white North Side to the Black and Brown and poor Southeast Side.
Now, the Trump Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development will not enforce the settlement. The case is one of seven high-profile investigations into housing discrimination that HUD officials dropped last month.
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“No administration previously has so aggressively rolled back the basic protections that help people who are being harmed in their community,” a HUD official told ProPublica, which first reported the news. “The civil rights protections that HUD enforces are intended to protect the most vulnerable people in society.”
Polluting Chicago’s Black and Brown Southeast Side
The situation with the scrap metal facility, called General Iron, was almost comically racist. The business, which shreds junk cars and other items in order to sell the metal, had long operated in the very wealthy and very white Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side of the city. Over the years, complaints from residents mounted about both the pollution and noise generated by General Iron, and as early as 2016, the city began to encourage the business to relocate, which it eventually agreed to do after being promised help from City Hall to find a new location.
What the city and General Iron eventually landed on in what Biden’s HUD called an “unusually close collaboration” was a new location in the Calumet Industrial Corridor on the Southeast Side — a part of Chicago that is not only predominantly Black and Brown and poor, but has a long history of being overburdened by industry too. According to HUD’s initial findings (again, from the Biden era), “relocating the Facility to the Southeast Site will bring environmental benefits to a neighborhood that is 80% White and environmental harms to a neighborhood that is 83% Black and Hispanic.”
The settlement between HUD and Chicago was signed during former mayor Lori Lightfoot’s last days in office, after her administration initially responded to HUD’s finding of discrimination by saying, “Any allegations that we have done something to compromise the health and safety of our Black and Brown communities are absolutely absurd.”
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Included in the binding settlement agreement was a provision that the city pursue land-use and permitting reform. Under the current Mayor Brandon Johnson, the city has developed a new environmental justice-led approach to permitting industrial projects, but the ordinance has been stalled in the city council.
“It’s terribly wrong for the federal government to drop these cases, because [the cases have proven] that the city of Chicago has made discriminatory practices against the Southeast Side of Chicago,” Cheryl Johnson, executive director of the environmental justice organization People for Community Recovery, told Block Club Chicago. “On the other hand, it demonstrates how local and state [governments] need to activate.”
A Local Push for Environmental Justice
The new permitting ordinance is named after Cheryl Johnson’s mother, Hazel Johnson, who is known as the “mother of environmental justice” thanks to the organizing work she did in the 1970s and ‘80s around the pollution from the old Pullman factory and other industrial sites that was killing Black residents in housing project she lived in on the South Side.
Mayor Johnson’s administration said it will continue to push for both environmental and housing reforms without either pressure or support from HUD. But federal housing authorities washing their hands of these kinds of investigations marks a significant and worrisome shift. The agency is now going to “prioritize investigations of specific allegations of actual discrimination, rather than dictate or influence land use policy,” Robert Doles, director of HUD’s Office of Systemic Investigations, said.