L.A.'s Promising Clean Up Green Up Ordinance

In mid-April, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a ground-breaking policy to address pollution in three low-income neighborhoods that have a long history of being toxic “hot spots.” The ordinance, Clean Up Green Up, focuses on the overconcentration of polluting land uses—such as oil operations, diesel truck depots, auto dismantlers, granite cutters, warehouses, and factories—near homes, schools and senior centers in the neighborhoods of Boyle Heights, Wilmington, and Pacoima and Sun Valley. The City Council also adopted new citywide standards for air filters in new developments alongside freeways.

For decades, these low-income, predominantly Latino communities have suffered the health consequences of living alongside concentrations of industrial sites like junk yards, auto dismantling, gravel processing and oil refineries. The result has been high rates of asthma, cancer and other chronic diseases, and an increased risk of premature death.

These toxic hot spots in Los Angeles reflect a nationwide pattern, where people of color disproportionately bear the burden of pollution exposure and corresponding health risks. Data on exposure to toxic air pollutants demonstrate that LA area residents suffer from higher cancer risks than Californians as a whole, and the communities at highest risk are predominately Latino and African-American neighborhoods.  Not coincidently, these are the same communities that face inadequate land-use planning, persistent disinvestment, and lack of health-promoting resources and infrastructure.

That’s why the Clean Up Green Up win in Los Angles is so important—it creates a model to protect the health of those communities most impacted by environmental health hazards and those people most sensitive to the effects of concentrated pollution—children, the elderly, and the chronically ill. Clean Up Green Up uses traditional planning tools and other safeguards to prevent or reduce stationary sources of pollution near homes, schools, and other sensitive sites.  The initiative also supports the local community economies by targeting  technical assistance and financial incentives to businesses in these neighborhoods that want to clean up their operations, and by connecting them to local, state and federal resources, such as business planning support, low-interest loans, and help with navigating tax issues. It also streamlines the city permitting processes. 

Clean Up Green Up shows that healthy, equitable land use can be intentionally produced through strategic multi-sector policy action.  Other jurisdictions are already reaching out to the City of Los Angeles to learn more about this innovative legislative model that balances regulatory measures with economic incentives for business.

Prevention Institute applauds the hard work and dedication of the LA Collaborative for Environmental Health and Justice in securing this victory.  The four community-based organizations leading the Collaborative—Pacoima Beautiful, Union de Vecinos, Communities for a Better Environment, and Coalition for a Safe Environment-built upon years of community organizing around local environmental justice issues and proactively developed the policy framework that inspired the City of Los Angeles’s model ordinance.

From engaging residents in participatory action research and every step of the policy development process to building a diverse, multi-sector coalition and undertaking extensive stakeholder education about the problem and proposed policy solutions – inside and outside of City Hall – the Collaborative waged a strategic and comprehensive campaign that left no stone unturned.