More than 1.2 million Angelenos live within 1,000 feet of a freeway, an area known to experts as the ‘pollution zone,’ correlated to higher rates of a number of illnesses—but more people just keep moving in as fast as new freeway-adjacent development springs up.
An extensive investigation by the L.A. Times found that, in 2015, even after city officials had been alerted to the potential dangers of living next to one of our congested freeways, Los Angeles nonetheless issued building permits for 4,300 units of housing within 1,000 feet of the roadways, even sometimes allocating public funds to do so.
Research suggests that living within the pollution zone may raise an individual’s risk for a variety of conditions, including asthma, stroke, heart attack, lung cancer, birth defects, autism, childhood obesity and dementia.
And yet, in a city already hungry for more housing, many developers say that any regulation that would ban building new housing within the pollution zone would be impractical. There are so many freeways that it would rule out a lot of land that could potentially be made into homes.
“I take this stuff very seriously, but I also know that in looking for housing we have a very constricted city,” Mayor Garcetti told the Times at the ground-breaking of a new building near a freeway, while also noting that several of his own family members had contracted cancer while living within pollution zones.
Rather than rule out new development along traffic corridors, the Garcetti administration is looking into ways to encourage builders to look for design and architectural solutions to mitigate pollution risk and install air-filtration systems, as well as considering tailpipe emission controls which would cut down on the pollution at the source.
Want more? Sign up here to stay in the know.