Understanding Hunt’s Point, Bronx’s Asthma Alley… by Brian Abate

Over the past few years Red Hook has seen the opening of two Amazon warehouses that have brought more trucks to our mixed-use neighborhoods. Many of those who are concerned about increased truck traffic point to high rates of asthma.

In this series we will look at what the science says about asthma, our environment and similar circumstances elsewhere. We will also look to see how technology is working to allow us to live safely among industry in the future.

We start with a look at Mott Haven and Hunts Point, an area in the Bronx home to both low income neighborhoods as well as an active shipping and receiving industry. It is known among healthcare professionals as “Asthma Alley.”

Those neighborhoods have some of the worst air pollution levels in the city. Former State Senator Jeffrey Klein used the term to describe its asthma rates back in 2005. According to a 2019 article in The Guardian, residents “need asthma hospitalizations at five times the national average and at rates 21 times higher than other NYC neighborhoods.”

Mott Haven is 97 percent black and Hispanic while Hunts Point is 98 percent black and Hispanic. Evidently, much of the pollution comes from truck traffic.

Around 57 percent of trucks that visit the Hunts Point meat and produce markets come from outside the city,” according to a Department of Transportation study reported in a Healthline story.

In addition to tractor trailers that bring goods to the market, smaller vehicles take food and other merchandise to outlets in all the five boroughs.

In a January, 2022 article about the importance of trees, the Mott Haven Herald, a monthly newspaper,  stated “The Bronx had the highest percentage of children up to 12 years old who have been diagnosed with asthma, according to New York City Child Health’s 2015 Emotional Wellness and Development Survey. With Mott Haven known as ‘Asthma Alley’ and more than 12 percent of adults in Hunts Point living with asthma, the South Bronx has one of the highest rates of asthma in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Part of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district includes the Bronx and she has spoken out about the high asthma rates in the borough, tweeting, “The Bronx having one of the highest child asthma rates isn’t an accident. It’s a structural failure to care, and treat these communities fairly.”

One of the best ways to combat air pollution is by going greener and simply planting trees.

“Mott Haven showed a 2.97 percent increase in tree canopy between 2010 and 2017, and Hunts Point had a 2.16 percent growth, as a result of new trees planted and younger trees becoming older,” according to a report published by The Nature Conservancy. “The citywide average is 1.72 percent.”

“Urban forests help absorb air pollution,” said Mike Treglia, lead scientist for the Cities Program with The Nature Conservancy in New York and co-author of the report.  “The US Department of Agriculture’s forest service estimated in 2010 that 17,000 health impacts or health effects from air pollution have been avoided as a result of the urban forest,” Treglia said.

Planting more trees is great for the environment, and should help with outdoor pollution but the problem is more and more traffic coming into “Asthma Alley,” even as trees are being planted.

Mold and cockroaches

Another local publication, the Hunts Point Express, wrote about a Bronx clinic’s asthma management  and prevention plan. “At Urban Health Plan, our intent is on managing asthma. We mainly focus on indoor interventions; there’s not much we can do about outdoor triggers,” said Dr. Acklema Mohammad, head of the pediatrics department. “But the patients who live in apartments that have mold growing inside and deal with cockroaches, we can help.”

Mold has long been a problem in public housing, and both vermin and cockroach infestations are mediated less in lower income households, partly because of the nature of low income housing as well a lack of means to take care of these problems privately.

A local institution, the Red Hook Initiative, published a study about mold in 2016 where they reported: “The decision to develop a survey on NYCHA residents’ experience with mold in their homes came from an urgent community call for action.

In 2009 RHI partnered with a team of graduate students from Hunter College to develop a report on the health of Red Hook residents. The Red Hook Community Health Assessment found 40% of respondents at some point had mold in their apartments. Of those who claimed they have asthma, 33% had mold in their apartments.

The report also found disproportionate rates of asthma in public housing as compared to private homes in the 11231 zip code.”

“Within a city, the air is more likely to contain ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter, the five components used by the Environmental Protection Agency to create the Air Quality Index,” according to a Healthline story. “Outdoor air pollutants have in turn been shown to impair the effectiveness of asthma medication…

“While 9.2 percent of New York students overall were identified as having asthma, that number rose to 15.5 percent of 4 and 5-year-old Bronx children, according to a 2009 study,” which was conducted by multiple doctors.

“In the Bronx’s ‘Asthma Alley,’ children with asthma miss about 25 percent more school than their non-asthmatic peers, and the hospitalization rate is 2.5 times the City average,” according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC.)

Stress, anxiety, and depression are also well-known causes of asthma. It’s a terrible cycle because often those under the most stress are the same people who are living in low income polluted areas and have to deal with mold and vermin in their homes. On top of that, living with asthma is another cause of stress that only makes matters worse. Hunts Point also has the third-highest rate of tobacco retailers in the city and of course tobacco is another well-known cause of breathing problems.

A 2010 feature in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found that while asthma rates are rising throughout the United States, when examining multiple studies comparing “the prevalence of asthma in urban and adjacent rural areas, all found lower asthma prevalence in rural areas… Self-reported asthma is 3.6 percent urban, 1.3 percent rural.”

Additionally, a CDC report showed that 14.1 percent of adults have asthma in New York City, while just 9.5 percent of adults have asthma in the entire state. Factors like indoor pollutants and the stress/anxiety that poverty can cause should be similar in both New York City and rural parts of the state but outdoor pollutants like trucks are a much bigger problem in all cities.

It’s ironic that often the poorest people in cities (who leave the smallest climate footprints because of their use of public transportation rather than cars, and less vacation travel) are the ones who have to live in some of the most polluted conditions in the country.

This is reflected in a macro way with the world in general. Often, third world countries with the lowest carbon footprint suffer disproportionately from developed countries with the highest.

This in a nutshell is a definition of Environmental Justice. Karen Blondel is a local community activist and president of the Red Hook West Tenants Association. She has been a fighter for environmental justice since before Sandy.

In October 2018, she, along with other activists from public housing and the Fifth Avenue Committee, an affordable housing non-profit where she was then employed, authored an article in the magazine City Limits where it was written:

On October 22nd, we marked the sixth anniversary since Superstorm Sandy hit NYC. Local Sandy-impacted public housing developments in Red Hook and Gowanus are still waiting for new boiler replacements and repairs. Mold conditions in these buildings were greatly exacerbated by the Storm. NYCHA failed to satisfy the settlement conditions of the 2014 lawsuit Baez v. NYCHA to remediate mold in its apartments. To address this failure, they launched the Mold Busters pilot program last year, with Wyckoff Gardens and neighboring Warren Street houses as part of the pilot. Unfortunately, for some of residents, the remedy has been worse than the problem, as the anti-mold paint triggered acute asthma episodes necessitating hospitalization of residents in buildings where the program was implemented.

Brian Abate