12 ms·

This is a pretty typical growth pattern. Industrial zone establishes and city is set far away in a safe area. City expands and resident need cheap housing. The

by kaiju0 5y ago

This is a pretty typical growth pattern. Industrial zone establishes and city is set far away in a safe area. City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work. People then see this and say they built industrial next to the poor people when the opposite occurred. Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong?

dd36 5y ago
Property rights. If the adjacent property is unsafe due to your actions, you should pay to fix the problem.
- parineum 5y ago
  If someone buys the adjacent property after you've made it unsafe without breaking any laws, who pays?
  - 8note 5y ago
    I'd say still you. That wasn't your property to make unsafe. If it's your own property that you've made unsafe, then sell it, I'd consider it on the buyer, unless you hid that it was unsafe
    - joe_the_user 5y ago
      If it's your own property that you've made unsafe, then sell it, I'd consider it on the buyer, unless you hid that it was unsafe. No one should be able to build houses or establish habitations on poisonous and polluted area. You can sell poisonous land to someone else but anyone owning poisonous land needs to take precautions to keep people off. It's like one should be able to sell spoiled food (to eat) or lead contaminated toys. Warning people here isn't enough because some people will be foolish or desperate.
  - likeclockwork 5y ago
    For someone to buy it someone has to sell it, no? The adjacent property is already owned and already being spoiled.
    - perryizgr8 5y ago
      Not necessarily. Maybe it is unclaimed land. I don't know how the law works in that case, but there's certainly nobody who "sells it".
lettergram 5y ago
Gonna have to side with city zoning being the wrong party here. It’s really the people who represent the tax base that should be protecting said tax base.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dontcare007 5y ago
  Yep, a failure on the part of the beaurocrats to deny the zoning changes.
  - throwaway5752 5y ago
    That completely lets the companies off the hook for dangerous and unnecessary pollution. Even if nobody was around, they should have an ethylene oxide scrubber. That is a major source of teratogenic emissions per the article. Also, it strikes me as extremely speculative on your part that this is a zoning issue. How do you know that these plants didn't shift product mixes or expand after there were established communities nearby, or that the companies provided incorrect information to regulators? Unless you want to fund armies of scientists for the regulator to validate the truth of claims made on submissions then you have to blame the companies that submit false data. That seems far more likely than your assumption.
    - lettergram 5y ago
      I’m responding to a post which mentioned zoning issues. Generally, this is an article about “sacrifice zones” - I’m confused. Putting zoning aside, companies have no motives outside of growth and profit. That’s why governments exist to protect the population they represent. From people, companies, foreign invaders, etc.
      - daniel-cussen 5y ago
        Not even profit these days, just growth. For-market-capitalization companies, profits are just to look good on the balance sheet, what you want is revenues, really.
dantheman 5y ago
It's the same when people move next to the airport and then complain about noise. In general this can be solved with an extension of property rights, the industrial zone/airport/music venue etc can own the rights to "pollute" the neighboring areas, much like buying air rights in a city. Then it's clear when you purchase / rent / what level of noise / pollution you can expect. This allows market forces to work, if after a certain time the city is bigger and that land is more valuable for quality housing then they can buy the rights from the polluter and shut it down.
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
  lmao this is so fucking stupid, “let’s NFT pollution then it’s poor people’s fault for not buying a seat at the dao for deciding what chemicals are in their air” Free market cultist are so weird
- convolvatron 5y ago
  aren't you assuming we spend the money to adequately track the problem and hold the correct people responsible? that's certainly not the case now in the US. maybe you can fix that by creating a market somehow?
- francisofascii 5y ago
  The right to pollute should never be granted in perpetuity. If anything, it should be a recurring cost that increases or decreases based on the how much polluting is occurring. That way the markets work in incentivizing less polluting.
  - LorenPechtel 5y ago
    Yup. For the most part I would like to see current pollution regulations tossed wholesale. Instead, put a price tag on each pollutant. The charge is applied at the point in the supply chain where the pollutant is created or extracted and is rebated to anyone who destroys the pollutant (although they may be charged for other pollutants created in the process.) Think of the oft-proposed carbon tax, just much, much broader.
unethical_ban 5y ago
As someone who grew up in the Clear Lake area of Houston in the 90s and 00s, I can tell you that the La Porte and Deer Park areas were bad, but weren't this bad. People lived in the surrounding areas before some of those plants ramped up. It isn't always one way or the other. As someone who is seeing more and more how irreversible so much of our environmental damage is these days, I am leaning on the plant owners being responsible, not the schoolchildren who are getting rolled a 1:20,000 chance of cancer. Perhaps, knowing how much pollution affects surrounding areas, we should force such chemical plants to purchase all the land around them that will be affected to a certain extent. Internalize the costs of their damage to the community, and prevent others from being exposed to it.
SinParadise 5y ago
The welfare of persons is always in the right.
deanCommie 5y ago
Who do you think is setting up these neighbourhoods? A lot of times it's the industrial companies as well looking to diversify their investments. But not always, let's not paint them with the same brush. Zoom out on the problem broader. Why are industrial companies polluting land that they don't own? Well, because this was all established in an age when we considered pollution out of sight and out of mind. If it's not an oil barrel lying in a ditch, but some happy vapor going out into the atmosphere, who cares? So the lack of government regulation of pollution on land not owned by the companies is the problem. In 21st century sensibilities about externalities, an industrial plant should not be able to pollute land it doesn't own. And if there is no way to avoid that, the government should set it up as an isolation zone not zoned for residential, and force the company to price that into their economics. By the way this is what the rest of the developed world does. The US, with it's obsession with profits, and deregulation, and "letting the free market" decide doesn't, and now has the worst correlation between health outcomes and socioeconomic class of any developed country.
vineyardmike 5y ago
> Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong? Yeah, if your industrial process causes cancer you need to re-engineer the process to be safer and polluting less, even if you were there first.
- chrismeller 5y ago
  Sorry, but that seems a bit ignorant. A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts. I’m not saying this is good, but by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house.
  - belltaco 5y ago
    It's more like installing a catalytic converter on your car. Or adding a muffler. The article says the factory does not have an ethylene oxide scrubber installed.
  - dd36 5y ago
    If your car is damaging property that’s not yours, then absolutely!
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    There is a difference between a person driving a car, and a factory spewing off a criminally high level of carcinogenic chemicals. > A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts And we should stop and fix that. Why do we accept this as ok? > by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house. My logic says we should phase out cars that we know kill people. Maybe build cars that use a new, less-polluting method of pollution. Like EV! We solved this issue with cars, maybe Exxon should solve their issue with petroleum.
    - sseagull 5y ago
      > A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts And we should stop and fix that. Why do we accept this as ok? Of course. But it is not always easy. You can’t always wave your hand and make non-harmful alternatives. Sometimes it is due to incentives, but also sometimes it is really just chemistry or physics. See the “tin whisker” phenomenon when they took lead out of solder.
woodruffw 5y ago
> City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work. In cities like Mobile, Alabama, the opposite is usually true[1]: people already lived in those areas, but companies (and local governments) don't consider their health sufficiently important. I'll leave it up to you to infer why that is. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/26/africatown-site-of-last-us-slave-ship-arrival-sues-over-factorys-pollution https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/26/africatown-s...
- kube-system 5y ago
  Agreed. It's the same market forces, though, just in reverse. Industrial businesses don't want to buy land at Park Avenue prices.
  - mazamats 5y ago
    > Who is right and who is wrong? In Alabama it would the industrial sector that is in the wrong. Nobody wants to pay for more expensive land, but we should force them to via regulation if they are going to spread cancer in the air.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      Looking at the outcome of economic effects with "right and wrong" isn't really a helpful measurement. We should force them, not because they are "wrong" but because the economic incentives deliver an outcome that is undesirable.
      - wholinator2 5y ago
        Agreed, but I don't see how "economic incentives" and "undesirable outcomes" isn't just a different way of saying right and wrong.
        kube-system 5y ago
makotech222 5y ago
[dead]
boringg 5y ago
I think they way you described was a bit harsh. That said this is a serious challenge for industry that have large footprints and health risks to the community. In the electric markets there are lots of power plants that were originally far from communities but then housing spread and fell into the catchment areas. Going forward wouldn't it make sense to zone an entire area to not be allowed to build for residential purposes (essentially a buffer around the industrial zones)? It feels like its a grey area of responsibility etc. For industrial processes that are known to be highly toxic it would fall on the industrials but as we find out more information around toxicity and impacts (which it feels like more is coming to light all the time) it will require some deft navigating.
- pirate787 5y ago
  You're underestimating the ruthless disregard most large industrial producers have for the communities where they locate. These companies are led by sociopaths and fools.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
> Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people ... Who is right and who is wrong? Are you suggesting that this question is somehow hard to answer? I don't think it is.
pirate787 5y ago
The largest new industrial facility in West Virginia, Rockwool in Ranson, is permitted as a top ten polluter for formaldehyde in the entire United States and was built 1,300 feet from an existing elementary school just last year.
- refurb 5y ago
  Top 10 polluter tells me nothing. Is it over the allowable limit or not?
joe_the_user 5y ago
Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong? This argument confuses policy and morality and somehow implies we should ignore both. Morally, if you spew chemicals you know are going to cause significant excess deaths, you will have to live with yourself and myself and many people will think little of you. Legality, if you spew an otherwise unknown chemical that you happen to know is quite toxic, you'll be liable. If you stay with EPA guidelines but happen to know this is going to kill or injure significant number, you only have public perceptions and your own conscious to answer for. Policy wise, the EPA should impose regulations that make all neighborhoods reasonably safe. Moreover, I suggest structuring the regulation process to incentivize creating compliant processes rather than in terms of after-the-fact punishments. (I've heard a variety of contrasts between the US and Europe, where despite the US very "pro-capitalist", the regulatory paradigm is entirely adversarial).
hhaha88 5y ago
Why debate right and wrong and not simply make it an engineering problem to let people work on? Why not make that our political discourse? We stop the world at work to solve problems in revenue generation. Somehow this has to be mired in political speak. Letting figurative power thrive while squashing people is good business.
stonemetal12 5y ago
I would still blame the industrial zone in this case. If it is unsafe to live within 5 miles of the plant they should own all land within 5 miles of the plant.

by kaiju0 5y ago

dd36 5y ago

Property rights. If the adjacent property is unsafe due to your actions, you should pay to fix the problem.

parineum 5y ago
If someone buys the adjacent property after you've made it unsafe without breaking any laws, who pays?
- 8note 5y ago
  I'd say still you. That wasn't your property to make unsafe. If it's your own property that you've made unsafe, then sell it, I'd consider it on the buyer, unless you hid that it was unsafe
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    If it's your own property that you've made unsafe, then sell it, I'd consider it on the buyer, unless you hid that it was unsafe. No one should be able to build houses or establish habitations on poisonous and polluted area. You can sell poisonous land to someone else but anyone owning poisonous land needs to take precautions to keep people off. It's like one should be able to sell spoiled food (to eat) or lead contaminated toys. Warning people here isn't enough because some people will be foolish or desperate.
- likeclockwork 5y ago
  For someone to buy it someone has to sell it, no? The adjacent property is already owned and already being spoiled.
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    Not necessarily. Maybe it is unclaimed land. I don't know how the law works in that case, but there's certainly nobody who "sells it".

lettergram 5y ago

Gonna have to side with city zoning being the wrong party here. It’s really the people who represent the tax base that should be protecting said tax base.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dontcare007 5y ago
Yep, a failure on the part of the beaurocrats to deny the zoning changes.
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  That completely lets the companies off the hook for dangerous and unnecessary pollution. Even if nobody was around, they should have an ethylene oxide scrubber. That is a major source of teratogenic emissions per the article. Also, it strikes me as extremely speculative on your part that this is a zoning issue. How do you know that these plants didn't shift product mixes or expand after there were established communities nearby, or that the companies provided incorrect information to regulators? Unless you want to fund armies of scientists for the regulator to validate the truth of claims made on submissions then you have to blame the companies that submit false data. That seems far more likely than your assumption.
  - lettergram 5y ago
    I’m responding to a post which mentioned zoning issues. Generally, this is an article about “sacrifice zones” - I’m confused. Putting zoning aside, companies have no motives outside of growth and profit. That’s why governments exist to protect the population they represent. From people, companies, foreign invaders, etc.
    - daniel-cussen 5y ago
      Not even profit these days, just growth. For-market-capitalization companies, profits are just to look good on the balance sheet, what you want is revenues, really.

dantheman 5y ago

It's the same when people move next to the airport and then complain about noise. In general this can be solved with an extension of property rights, the industrial zone/airport/music venue etc can own the rights to "pollute" the neighboring areas, much like buying air rights in a city. Then it's clear when you purchase / rent / what level of noise / pollution you can expect. This allows market forces to work, if after a certain time the city is bigger and that land is more valuable for quality housing then they can buy the rights from the polluter and shut it down.

toiletfuneral 5y ago
lmao this is so fucking stupid, “let’s NFT pollution then it’s poor people’s fault for not buying a seat at the dao for deciding what chemicals are in their air” Free market cultist are so weird
convolvatron 5y ago
aren't you assuming we spend the money to adequately track the problem and hold the correct people responsible? that's certainly not the case now in the US. maybe you can fix that by creating a market somehow?
francisofascii 5y ago
The right to pollute should never be granted in perpetuity. If anything, it should be a recurring cost that increases or decreases based on the how much polluting is occurring. That way the markets work in incentivizing less polluting.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  Yup. For the most part I would like to see current pollution regulations tossed wholesale. Instead, put a price tag on each pollutant. The charge is applied at the point in the supply chain where the pollutant is created or extracted and is rebated to anyone who destroys the pollutant (although they may be charged for other pollutants created in the process.) Think of the oft-proposed carbon tax, just much, much broader.

unethical_ban 5y ago

As someone who grew up in the Clear Lake area of Houston in the 90s and 00s, I can tell you that the La Porte and Deer Park areas were bad, but weren't this bad. People lived in the surrounding areas before some of those plants ramped up. It isn't always one way or the other. As someone who is seeing more and more how irreversible so much of our environmental damage is these days, I am leaning on the plant owners being responsible, not the schoolchildren who are getting rolled a 1:20,000 chance of cancer. Perhaps, knowing how much pollution affects surrounding areas, we should force such chemical plants to purchase all the land around them that will be affected to a certain extent. Internalize the costs of their damage to the community, and prevent others from being exposed to it.

SinParadise 5y ago

The welfare of persons is always in the right.

deanCommie 5y ago

Who do you think is setting up these neighbourhoods? A lot of times it's the industrial companies as well looking to diversify their investments. But not always, let's not paint them with the same brush. Zoom out on the problem broader. Why are industrial companies polluting land that they don't own? Well, because this was all established in an age when we considered pollution out of sight and out of mind. If it's not an oil barrel lying in a ditch, but some happy vapor going out into the atmosphere, who cares? So the lack of government regulation of pollution on land not owned by the companies is the problem. In 21st century sensibilities about externalities, an industrial plant should not be able to pollute land it doesn't own. And if there is no way to avoid that, the government should set it up as an isolation zone not zoned for residential, and force the company to price that into their economics. By the way this is what the rest of the developed world does. The US, with it's obsession with profits, and deregulation, and "letting the free market" decide doesn't, and now has the worst correlation between health outcomes and socioeconomic class of any developed country.

vineyardmike 5y ago

> Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong? Yeah, if your industrial process causes cancer you need to re-engineer the process to be safer and polluting less, even if you were there first.

chrismeller 5y ago
Sorry, but that seems a bit ignorant. A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts. I’m not saying this is good, but by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house.
- belltaco 5y ago
  It's more like installing a catalytic converter on your car. Or adding a muffler. The article says the factory does not have an ethylene oxide scrubber installed.
- dd36 5y ago
  If your car is damaging property that’s not yours, then absolutely!
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  There is a difference between a person driving a car, and a factory spewing off a criminally high level of carcinogenic chemicals. > A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts And we should stop and fix that. Why do we accept this as ok? > by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house. My logic says we should phase out cars that we know kill people. Maybe build cars that use a new, less-polluting method of pollution. Like EV! We solved this issue with cars, maybe Exxon should solve their issue with petroleum.
  - sseagull 5y ago
    > A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts And we should stop and fix that. Why do we accept this as ok? Of course. But it is not always easy. You can’t always wave your hand and make non-harmful alternatives. Sometimes it is due to incentives, but also sometimes it is really just chemistry or physics. See the “tin whisker” phenomenon when they took lead out of solder.

woodruffw 5y ago

> City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work. In cities like Mobile, Alabama, the opposite is usually true[1]: people already lived in those areas, but companies (and local governments) don't consider their health sufficiently important. I'll leave it up to you to infer why that is. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/26/africatown-site-of-last-us-slave-ship-arrival-sues-over-factorys-pollution https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/26/africatown-s...

kube-system 5y ago
Agreed. It's the same market forces, though, just in reverse. Industrial businesses don't want to buy land at Park Avenue prices.
- mazamats 5y ago
  > Who is right and who is wrong? In Alabama it would the industrial sector that is in the wrong. Nobody wants to pay for more expensive land, but we should force them to via regulation if they are going to spread cancer in the air.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    Looking at the outcome of economic effects with "right and wrong" isn't really a helpful measurement. We should force them, not because they are "wrong" but because the economic incentives deliver an outcome that is undesirable.
    - wholinator2 5y ago
      Agreed, but I don't see how "economic incentives" and "undesirable outcomes" isn't just a different way of saying right and wrong.
      - kube-system 5y ago

makotech222 5y ago

[dead]

boringg 5y ago

I think they way you described was a bit harsh. That said this is a serious challenge for industry that have large footprints and health risks to the community. In the electric markets there are lots of power plants that were originally far from communities but then housing spread and fell into the catchment areas. Going forward wouldn't it make sense to zone an entire area to not be allowed to build for residential purposes (essentially a buffer around the industrial zones)? It feels like its a grey area of responsibility etc. For industrial processes that are known to be highly toxic it would fall on the industrials but as we find out more information around toxicity and impacts (which it feels like more is coming to light all the time) it will require some deft navigating.

pirate787 5y ago
You're underestimating the ruthless disregard most large industrial producers have for the communities where they locate. These companies are led by sociopaths and fools.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

> Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people ... Who is right and who is wrong? Are you suggesting that this question is somehow hard to answer? I don't think it is.

pirate787 5y ago

The largest new industrial facility in West Virginia, Rockwool in Ranson, is permitted as a top ten polluter for formaldehyde in the entire United States and was built 1,300 feet from an existing elementary school just last year.

refurb 5y ago
Top 10 polluter tells me nothing. Is it over the allowable limit or not?

joe_the_user 5y ago

Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong? This argument confuses policy and morality and somehow implies we should ignore both. Morally, if you spew chemicals you know are going to cause significant excess deaths, you will have to live with yourself and myself and many people will think little of you. Legality, if you spew an otherwise unknown chemical that you happen to know is quite toxic, you'll be liable. If you stay with EPA guidelines but happen to know this is going to kill or injure significant number, you only have public perceptions and your own conscious to answer for. Policy wise, the EPA should impose regulations that make all neighborhoods reasonably safe. Moreover, I suggest structuring the regulation process to incentivize creating compliant processes rather than in terms of after-the-fact punishments. (I've heard a variety of contrasts between the US and Europe, where despite the US very "pro-capitalist", the regulatory paradigm is entirely adversarial).

hhaha88 5y ago

Why debate right and wrong and not simply make it an engineering problem to let people work on? Why not make that our political discourse? We stop the world at work to solve problems in revenue generation. Somehow this has to be mired in political speak. Letting figurative power thrive while squashing people is good business.

stonemetal12 5y ago

I would still blame the industrial zone in this case. If it is unsafe to live within 5 miles of the plant they should own all land within 5 miles of the plant.