Editorial: When will City Hall finally stop using Southeast Side as a trash pit?

Lori Lightfoot’s one-word mantra when she campaigned for mayor? Equity.

At countless speeches and public appearances, the mayor hammered away at the need to erase the inequities that made unnecessarily burdensome the lives of Blacks and Latinos on Chicago’s South and West sides.

Lightfoot’s now more than three years into her first term, and she has made strides in pursuing equity on some fronts, most noticeably through her Invest South/West Initiative, the public-private sector partnership that seeds investment and jobs in neglected South and West Side communities. But on one front, she has stumbled, and the best window into that lack of progress can be found on the city’s Southeast Side.

That’s where, for decades, Black and Latino families have lived amid garbage dumps, toxic waste, Superfund sites and polluted air and water. Southeast Side activists describe their plight as “environmental racism,” and say it has persisted through the Lightfoot administration — principally in the form of a longtime polluter that City Hall allowed to move from the North Side’s tony Lincoln Park neighborhood to the Southeast Side.

Those activists now have findings from the federal government to back them up.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s blistering July 19 letter to Lightfoot concludes that City Hall’s “causing and facilitating the relocation” of the General Iron scrap metal recycling operation from Lincoln Park to the Southeast Side reflected “a broader policy of shifting polluting activities from White neighborhoods to Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, despite the latter already experiencing a disproportionate burden of environmental harms.”

For years, General Iron was the bane of Lincoln Park. Residents of the affluent, mostly white neighborhood repeatedly complained about the noxious odors spewing from the scrap metal recycler’s property and the metallic dust that layered on their patios. The Chicago Department of Public Health cited General Iron 11 times over a five-month period in early 2020 in response to complaints of untreated emissions coming from the company’s scrap shredders.

So, City Hall in 2018 began putting pressure on General Iron to pick up stakes. Lincoln Yards, the multibillion dollar mix of retail, office and high-end residences had been pitched for prime land along the North Branch of the Chicago River, and city officials viewed General Iron’s noxious operations as incompatible with the mega-project’s planned boutiques and bike paths. Under Rahm Emanuel, who was mayor at the time, city officials “pushed hard” for General Iron’s relocation to the Southeast Side, the HUD letter stated.

When Lightfoot took over in 2019, she forged ahead with the scrap metal recycler’s move. Her team signed an agreement with General Iron and the company with which it merged, RMG, locking in its shutdown of operations in Lincoln Park without requiring from RMG any binding commitments to safeguard the health of Southeast Side residents.

Lincoln Park would get gleaming glass-and-steel edifices and the Southeast Side would get scrap metal and more pollution.

That’s hardly equity. We have talked to longtime Southeast Side residents who scoffed at RMG’s promises of more jobs for the community once the plant opened. If job growth came with the caveat of accepting yet one more polluter in a part of the city teeming with polluters, then residents wanted nothing more than to keep RMG out.

And that’s exactly what they did. Southeast Side activists kept sounding the alarm, and ultimately sought intervention from the federal government. HUD stepped in, investigated and formally released its conclusions in the letter to Lightfoot. Interestingly, HUD first informed Lightfoot’s team of its findings in February. Not long after that, her team did an about-face and turned down a critical permit that RMG needed to begin operations. RMG is appealing that permit ruling.

HUD says Chicago must affirm that permit denial, but that won’t mean City Hall is completely off the hook.

The General Iron/RMG episode didn’t happen in a vacuum. It reflected a long-standing City Hall practice of putting polluters, landfills and toxic sites in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. That’s a core finding in the HUD letter, and the Biden administration is threatening to put on hold millions of dollars in Chicago-bound Community Development Block Grant funds unless Lightfoot’s administration adopts new policies that end environmental discrimination against predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.

That should become a top priority for Lightfoot.

For some time now, we have been sounding the same alarm that Southeast Side activists have been putting out. It has taken threats from the federal government to get the mayor’s team to act. It shouldn’t have to come to that. It would be simpler if the mayor remembered what she pledged to bring to a city that for so long has kept intact a dynamic of haves and have-nots. Equity.

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