Fighting for Air

Like a crystal hidden inside a rough gray rock, the Homedale neighborhood on the west side of Phoenix lies within an ugly concrete shell. The little group of houses is completely surrounded by a perimeter of junkyards, piles of scrap tires, and giant warehouses.

The neighborhood is demarcated by unmistakable landmarks. On the southeast edge sits a truck stop, always filled with several dozen idling tractor-trailer rigs. To the northwest, a hulking power plant looms against the sky. Between truck stop and power plant is splayed a group of 440 residential houses. Although the area is increasingly spotted with sand lots and boarded up windows, most of the homes are lovingly tended with soft green lawns and bright flowers.

Many of the current homeowners grew up in this neighborhood, and now work to raise their own families here. Unlike many of the Phoenix metropolitan area’s fast-growing and transient neighborhoods, Homedale is the kind of place where people know each other. It is also the kind of place where they will band together when something is wrong. In fact, banding together is what they have had to do in 2002.

“Some of the community leaders think there are increased health problems in the area,” says Sara Grineski, a doctoral student in sociology at Arizona State University. Grineski works with Homedale residents as part of a special research training program for students.

“There were a lot of bad smells in the neighborhood. The residents were concerned about air pollution,” she explains. “There’s a Circle K truck stop that backs up into the neighborhood. The trucks idle all night long.”

Instead of merely speculating about the cause of their problems, Homedale’s community leaders decided to find answers. They brought their concerns to the attention of environmental researchers at ASU. Their case made a perfect workshop for the IGERT urban ecology program.

IGERT (Interdisciplinary Graduate Education and Training) is funded by the National Science Foundation. The program is designed to provide students an interdisciplinary research education in the life, earth, and social sciences.

An IGERT fellow, Grineski leads a team of students who are studying the Homedale neighborhood. The students are assisted by faculty advisors from ASU’s sociology and environmental engineering departments. The project gives Grineski and her colleagues hands-on research experience. Homedale residents will get scientific facts and quantifiable numbers to take before the Phoenix City Council, if in fact problems are discovered.

The study consists of four parts. First, Grineski and her fellow sociologists developed a resident survey to document health conditions, symptoms of illness, and other environmental concerns. A team of students and residents canvassed the neighborhood administering the surveys in both English and Spanish.

The second part of the study involves air quality monitoring. The ASU team installed monitors inside and on the rooftops of two Homedale houses. The monitors are used measure levels of particulate matter, elemental carbon, sulfate, and nitrate in the air.

Sulfate and nitrate are pollutants commonly released during the burning of gasoline or diesel fuel by cars and trucks. The same is true of elemental carbon.

“Elemental carbon only comes from human-made sources, mainly internal combustion engines,” explains Justin Boreson, a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering. “Although we can’t tell if the elemental carbon comes from cars or trucks, we know that diesel engines emit significantly more elemental carbon than do gasoline engines.”

The scientists also measure the concentration of particulate matter found in air samples. They are looking for particulates less than 2.5 microns in diameter, which the EPA considers most hazardous to human health. A micron is one millionth of a meter. For scale, consider that a single fiber in a shag carpet is about 4 to 5 microns across. A human hair is about 25 to 100 microns wide. Tobacco smoke particles are between 0.01 and 1 micron.

Residents with air monitors installed on their homes are asked to record activities such as cooking, burning wood, and using candles, all of which affect air content and quality.

The third part of the survey involves recording ethnographic and historical data about the neighborhood. Tim Collins is a doctoral student in geography. He is compiling the “big picture” information.

“I’ve been trying to conceptualize the neighborhood,” says Collins. “I look at any and every news report on that area. I’m trying to develop a typology of what issues keep coming up again and again.”

Collins’ research extends back to 1987, just before industrial growth in this area of Phoenix really took off.

“Heavy duty industrial development started there around the early 1990s,” he says. “Much of that had to do with the completion of Interstate 10. The west side of Phoenix really began to be heavily developed at that time.”

The final phase of the project will include hazard mapping. The IGERT team will create a map of what facilities exist in the area and how close they are to the homes, among other things. Hazard maps are a common tool used by scientists to study environmental justice issues, Collins’ area of specialization at ASU.

“[Environmental justice] has to do with distributions of environmental benefits and burdens over space or through time. It also involves power differentials—the process of delineating environmental benefits and burdens,” he explains.

Not surprisingly, environmental risks often exist in or near low-income and minority neighborhoods. For example, in the Homedale neighborhood, 88 percent of residents are Latino and 36.5 percent live below the poverty line. But these people are not powerless. Homedale residents are no strangers to collective action. Several years ago the community successfully resisted expansion of the local power plant that would have increased local air pollution.

Unfortunately, environmental hazards still threaten the neighborhood. Industrial accidents, fires, and other incidents plague the area regularly, causing concern among the residents.

The ASU researchers spent most of 2001 and 2002 collecting their data. They are now tabulating the numbers. Those numbers tell interesting stories.

Based on survey findings, residents of the Homedale neighborhood appear to summer from a higher than normal rate of respiratory ailments. Survey results indicate that 16 percent of Homedale adults and 16 percent of their children have been diagnosed with asthma. That number compares with national averages of 7.2 percent for adults (Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey, 2000) and 7 percent for children (EPA Office of Children’s Health). Homedale residents also report high rates of allergies, breathing problems, irritated eyes and nose, congestion, and chronic cough.

Although the study results are not yet final, the residents of Homedale are already seeing the fruits of their efforts. They hosted an environmental conference in the community center that included local government officials. As a result of that meeting, the neighborhood received a $90,000 Fight Back Grant from the City of Phoenix. (Phoenix provides one Fight Back grant per district per year).

The community can use the money as they see fit to improve their neighborhood. Homedale is the first Phoenix neighborhood to use the grant for environmental purposes.—Diane Boudreau