For community built atop former landfill, a long wait for justice

Sheena Dedmond doesn’t invite company to her home in New Orleans’ Gordon Plaza subdivision anymore. Not her friends, not family, not anyone.

The five-bedroom house she inherited from her late mother has done more to, than for, their family, Ms. Dedmond says. 

Before her parents and others trickled into a then-new development in the late 1970s, this 95-acre site was home to the Agriculture Street Landfill. Homebuyers at the time were aware of the site’s history, but families like Ms. Dedmond’s received assurances of the development’s safety – and were placated by the allure of affordable property. 

For hopeful buyers, a majority of whom were Black, it was a path to economic mobility. 

But since then, those who call Gordon Plaza home have complained of chronic ailments that they say are due to toxins from the former landfill bubbling out of the earth. Ms. Dedmond, shaking her head, says she couldn’t bear the guilt of exposing others to the dangers she and neighbors – second families, who helped raise her – face. She doesn’t let her children play outside, out of fear of increasing their exposure to hazardous chemicals.

Now, after three decades of effort by residents including Ms. Dedmond – efforts that for years seemed fruitless – the lives of residents here at Gordon Plaza are poised to change. In June last year, New Orleans officials at last agreed to relocate residents of Gordon Plaza, where 58 of 67 homes remained occupied by owners or renters. The city set aside $35 million to buy out the homeowners.

For Gordon Plaza residents, their pending relocation represents long-awaited justice, even as the city’s action signals a wider trend of societal awareness of environmental inequities. Emotionally, the residents’ journey has been one of perseverance; legally, it’s an anomaly across a movement where such victories remain rare. 

“It’s been a lesson on how hard it is to realize environmental justice,” says Lauren Godshall, an attorney for Gordon Plaza residents and a clinical assistant professor at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. 

Solidarity got them here. Even as mayors and city council members – as well as state and federal policymakers – ignored or rebuffed their pleas for help, residents of Gordon Plaza persisted. They persisted as a presence at council meetings. They persisted as a voice in their city, louder and louder with each passing year. 

For years, nothing happened. Until it did – until council members like J.P. Morrell, who sponsored the move to create a city-funded relocation fund, were elected. New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who recently survived a controversial mayoral recall effort, has also made Gordon Plaza relocation efforts a key part of her platform. 

A symbol of wider U.S. challenges

Nationally, Gordon Plaza’s plight fits a legacy of discrimination and racism – and of the difficulties in meeting a legal burden of proof. A landmark 2007 report led by environmental justice pioneers Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright, among other researchers, found that 55% of the 9 million Americans living near hazardous sites were nonwhite, far above the share of the overall population. For low-income Black Americans, in particular, a 2017 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the risk of fatality from poor air quality due to pollution is three times greater than for the overall population.

The Agriculture Street Landfill opened back in 1909, roughly a century before these health discrepancies gained public attention. The site would collect at least half of all waste produced locally in those years – including pest control chemicals – until its mandated closure in 1957 following Louisiana’s ban on open-air landfills nearly a decade prior. In 1965, the landfill would reopen temporarily to accommodate Hurricane Betsy debris.

Social and political change was afoot across the United States by that time. Passage of federal legislation forcing Southern states to expand civil rights would soon broaden the scope of opportunity for marginalized Black populations. New Orleans officials began developing affordable properties, including what would become Gordon Plaza. Like Ms. Dedmond’s folks, many of the newly arriving families to the subdivision were first-time homebuyers.

In 1983, soil testing found potentially toxic materials at the proposed Robert R. Moton Elementary School nearby. 

A decade of additional soil testing would pass, and gradually, at first, murmurs among neighbors of others falling ill began. In that time, the elementary school opened in 1987 following the site’s remediation. However, after one of the school’s sewage lines ruptured a few years later, state and federal officials recorded further discovery of lead and other chemicals in the area. It then took until 1994 for the Environmental Protection Agency to declare Gordon Plaza and the surrounding area a federal Superfund site – only after a class-action lawsuit.

The federal government defines Superfund sites as abandoned industrial areas containing hazardous materials. The sites require long-term remediation and removal. Environmental regulators estimate that more than 21 million Americans live within a mile of a Superfund site. The proximity to Superfund sites has been linked to an increase in infant mortality rates, declining mental health levels, cancers, and more negative health effects, the Department of Housing and Urban Development says.

But Gordon Plaza’s dilemma is unique – the residents live on top of a Superfund site. 

“Superfund sites aren’t where human beings actually live,” except for this one, Ms. Godshall says. 

Struggles of motherhood

In 2012, Ms. Dedmond told her mother she was expecting her first child. She remembers her mother’s excitement at the news. 

But Ms. Dedmond’s mother also told her of the miscarried pregnancies she had experienced over the years. There had been seven. It happened often in their community, and women blamed the toxins beneath them.

By the end of 2012, as Ms. Dedmond was in the last trimester of her first pregnancy, her mother was experiencing new health challenges. 

“The day I went into labor, all I could think about was her,” as they were unable to experience that special moment together, Ms. Dedmond remembers. As Ms. Dedmond held her newborn daughter that day, she felt her heart breaking.

Nationwide movement toward legislation

The experience of Gordon Plaza reflects a wider pattern of discrimination in American housing, land use, and industrial siting, says Amy Laura Cahn, legal director for Taproot Earth and a former director of the Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law School. 

“Undoing those effects, it’s difficult to do,” Ms. Cahn says. “It shouldn’t be that difficult, but it has been for a number of reasons.”

Last year, Ms. Cahn testified before Congress in support of a proposed Environmental Justice for All Act. She argued that existing federal environmental regulations and laws – as well as the civil rights legislation that helped propel Ms. Dedmond’s family into land ownership in the South – are ill-equipped to protect from environmental inequities. 

“Our environmental laws are not designed to protect communities from the harm of those cumulative impacts,” Ms. Cahn says. For those hoping to address disparate impacts, “the right to go to court is only available to individuals and communities in instances of intentional discrimination.” But proving discrimination is a “heavy lift from an evidentiary perspective.”

On the shoulders of victims themselves rests the burden of proof. Medical experts say it takes time for diseases linked to toxic residential exposure to emerge. Connecting residents’ ailments to certain chemicals can take years, if not decades or generations, health officials say.  

Still, Ms. Cahn continues, leaders at state levels are guiding a way forward. In 2020, New Jersey enacted its consequential Environmental Justice Law requiring permitting applications for new facilities, or for facilities hoping to expand, to include an environmental justice impact statement aimed at protecting “overburdened communities.” Massachusetts legislators have also approved a law requiring a similar climate analysis that stresses measures of potential harm to communities. 

Federally, similar efforts are rising. 

The Environmental Justice for All Act supported by congressional Democrats would require that cumulative health impacts be considered in permitting decisions. Also among its features is the proposed overturning of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2001 Alexander v. Sandoval decision to allow private citizens and organizations to pursue legal remedy from discrimination.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency, under Biden-appointed Administrator Michael Regan, has sought to put new emphasis on addressing injustice – including a special focus on Louisiana and the industrial region not far from New Orleans that has become known as “cancer alley.” 

“There are compromises that have been made,” Ms. Cahn says of the Biden administration’s approach to environmental justice efforts so far. “But we’re seeing an administration that has been definitely more responsive to civil rights complaints.”

Hope for new beginnings 

The older of Ms. Dedmond’s two daughters is 11 years old now. The Residents of Gordon Plaza community action group is inching nearer to the eventual housing relocation. It promises new beginnings for those who lost the most and new uses for the site they leave behind. The city intends to someday convert the area into a 5-megawatt solar farm, according to its current plan.

Hurdles remain, however.

Late last year, after the city set aside relocation funding, its appointed property appraiser created a stir among Gordon Plaza residents. Property evaluations were far below replacement costs that researchers at Tulane University had recommended based on comparable homes unimpaired by toxins. Ms. Dedmond’s 2,800-square-foot, five-bedroom, four-bathroom home – one of the modest subdivision’s largest – was valued at $358,000. The lower the value, the more limited residents’ next options for housing are.  

Gordon Plaza received the first buyout offer letters from the city in early April. 

Residents didn’t disclose the amount and asked for additional funding. Ms. Dedmond intends to test her new home’s soil and is adamant that her daughters won’t grow up in a sickness-prone neighborhood.

Even as the long process continues, she remains hopeful. She understands the work that led to where their effort stands today. 

If it wasn’t for her community’s perseverance, Ms. Dedmond says, “we wouldn’t be here.”