Public housing near pollution in Alabama

In some ways, they couldn’t be more different. Gerica Cammack is a Black woman from Alabama; Floyd Kimball is a white man from rural Idaho. Yet they’re facing a similar ordeal. They’re both single parents, forced by difficult circumstances to live in government subsidized housing surrounded by pollution that is, or could be, poisoning their children. Like tens of thousands of people across the country, they live near, or on, some of the most toxic places in the nation. And the government has failed to protect them.

In 2019, Cammack moved into the Collegeville Center, a public housing complex in north Birmingham, Alabama. She knew that moving into the neighborhood came with risk. The complex sits near a bevy of industrial sites that produced steel and iron and spewed pollution over nearby residents for decades. She’d lived up the road years earlier and remembered how the fumes could be so overwhelming that the taste would linger in her mouth. But she was pregnant, homeless and grateful for the apartment, so it was a danger she had to face.

Little did she know that the Environmental Protection Agency had classified the area as a Superfund site, signifying that it was one of the most polluted places in the country.

More than 2,000 miles away, Kimball and his 4-year-old son live on a Superfund site as well. The federally subsidized apartment complex they moved into three years ago in Wallace, Idaho — after Kimball lost his job — sits on one of the largest Superfund sites in the country. Though pollution from heavy metal mining was documented decades ago, neither the local nor the federal government has moved people away from the dangerous conditions or sufficiently cleaned up the contamination. Meanwhile, many residents have been exposed to harmful amounts of lead. Kimball’s 4-year-old son hasn’t yet begun to speak.

Cammack, Kimball and their children are among the tens of thousands of people living in subsidized housing that’s right next to, or on top of, some of the nation’s most polluted sites, a yearlong investigation by APM Reports and The Intercept has found.

An EPA analysis obtained by APM Reports and The Intercept found that more than 9,000 federally subsidized properties — many with hundreds of apartments or townhouses — sit within a mile of Superfund sites. Those properties are in 480 cities in 49 states and territories. But even that is an undercount. The list of 9,000 properties doesn’t include several known subsidized-housing complexes within a mile of Superfund sites.

In most cases, the federal government has chosen not to relocate housing complexes near Superfund sites and made only piecemeal attempts to address the health threats. Housing officials often don’t inform people who move into these housing complexes that a Superfund site is nearby.

Neither the EPA nor the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the two federal agencies primarily responsible for protecting residents, regularly monitor the potential health threats to residents from nearby environmental pollution. In fact, some housing complexes near Superfund sites haven’t been tested for contamination in years, according to the APM Reports and Intercept investigation. Even when testing is conducted and dangerous contamination is found, the pollution isn’t always cleaned up.

As a result, thousands of residents continue to live in places that are potentially dangerous to their health.

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