Northeast Brentwood is home to a city garbage-truck fleet with its accompanying stench, a paving operation that patches up streets and bridges across the city, a giant recycling center that also carries a jolting odor of garbage, a construction company where cloudy asphalt material is showered into huge trucks, and numerous auto repair facilities.
Nearly half the land zoned for industrial use in D.C. is within Ward 5, where Brentwood sits.
“When you factor in the cumulative effect of those things, it is piling on in a community comprised largely of people of color at a time when we should be fighting these things as a government,” said D.C. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), who represents the neighborhood.
After the project is completed in about two years, hundreds of buses will join the heavy trucks that roar down the 1600 block of W Street NE every 10 minutes. The terminal will operate between 4 a.m. and 7 p.m.
At a council meeting Tuesday, McDuffie introduced an amendment to freeze the final $4.5 million for the contractor building the terminal, but it was quickly voted down.
Like McDuffie, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission that oversees Brentwood is adamantly opposed to more industrial development.
“It’s like: ‘Throw it into the Black community. They won’t say anything. They don’t matter,’ ” said Darlene Oliver, a member of the commission. “But we do.”
As she read a permit tacked to the abandoned building the terminal will replace at 1601 W Street, Stefania Slabyj worried about the project’s scale. Hundreds of buses will be stored, maintained, washed, fueled and dispatched. Trainees would learn to drive there.
“This is the dumping ground for the District,” Slabyj said. “Why are three of OSSE’s four bus terminals in Ward 5?”
Brentwood’s battle with pollution is familiar to Black, Brown and Indigenous communities across the United States.
For decades, dating to the early 20th century, federal and municipal zoning regulations have set polluting industries near the doorsteps of underprivileged groups. The practice goes by several names: environmental justice, environmental injustice and environmental racism.
While these communities produce far less pollution than White Americans, they suffer from its effects disproportionately. The particulate-matter pollution they face has been linked to health impacts such as asthma, respiratory illness, lung disease and heart ailments that have made people of color more at risk of hospitalization and death during the coronavirus pandemic.
Advocates fighting zoning that targets these communities have mostly worked in the shadows until this year, when President Biden — citing the coronavirus — made the issue a top priority for his administration. Biden gave advocates a voice in his climate policy and pledged that 40 percent of infrastructure and renewable investments would go to their communities.
Christina Grant, D.C.’s acting state superintendent of education, said in a statement that she takes the concerns of residents in Brentwood seriously. “We are committed to being good neighbors through the construction of this new terminal and beyond,” Grant said.
Grant’s office noted that the terminal will replace one that already exists on New York Avenue NE in Ward 5. The explanation included a report showing the support of the city council’s Committee of the Whole. “Delaying the W Street renovations is not an option,” the committee’s report said.
The committee said the land, purchased by the city five years ago, “was already commercially zoned. Thus, while neighbors have concerns about a commercial enterprise at this location, this land has been zoned for just such” a purpose.
The rationale underscored what environmental-justice activists have said for years: Sites that disperse toxins and pollution are zoned in and around underprivileged communities.
“I think all too often people think, ‘Oh, this government is run primarily by Black people and therefore the things that are done should help Black people,’ ” said McDuffie, who, like Bowser, is African American. “The reality is that the Black folks who started running this government around the 1960s inherited a system that is inherently racist.”
Bowser’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Residents worry that school-bus emissions can threaten their health, based on studies that say bus exhaust is among the most toxic of vehicle emissions on American roads — dirtier than fumes from a tractor trailer.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, diesel exhaust from school buses is “carcinogenic to humans” and contains significant levels of particulate matter that “can lodge deep into the lungs and heart and are linked to premature death, aggravated asthma, and decreased lung function.”
The city’s school-bus fleet uses regular unleaded gas, the state superintendent’s office said. Grant’s office said the school system is exploring an option to replace its fleet with electric buses starting in 2024.
They won’t come anytime soon. According to a city capital improvement plan considering the purchase, only a small percentage of electric buses would be available nine years from now. A majority of the fleet is not expected to be replaced until 2050.
When the city denied the community’s request for a collective environmental impact assessment, it said the bus fleet’s reliance on regular gas and the promise of electric vehicles made it unnecessary. Instead, it conducted two tightly focused studies — an air-quality analysis of a terminal that has yet to operate and an analysis of its potential impact on area traffic.
The decision angered McDuffie. “What they’re referring to is the singular impact of this project, and what they must absolutely look at are the cumulative effects of all the various uses in and around that site, which are governmental and private,” he said.
McDuffie said he voiced his objections to Bowser and council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D). “The mayor has the power and authority to stop or delay this project, and she could do that today,” McDuffie said.
At her house on W Street, Marilyn Johnson said she has watched people move onto commercial property in her neighborhood since she was 13. Now, at age 70, with a granddaughter who “suffers terribly from asthma,” Johnson wants to know when enough is enough.
“This is a residential area, and they’ve got these companies coming in that are not fit for residential,” she said. “There’s the fumes that would be coming from the buses. And the rush hour — Lord, that would be a complete disaster, because it already is.”
Although Brentwood has been historically zoned for industrial use, further back, it was once viewed as a favorable place to live.
In the 1930s and 1940s, when it was completely White, it was protected by the Home Owners’ Loan Corp., a now-defunct government-sponsored corporation created after the Great Depression to stabilize the housing market. The group used restrictive housing covenants to exclude African Americans, according to “Mapping Segregation in D.C.,” a study by Sarah Shoenfeld for the D.C. Policy Center.
“The appeal of these homes is very good, and these areas should maintain their present character and degree of desirability for approximately 10 years on the average and in some cases even longer,” an assessment by the corporation said.
The loan corporation was not as kind to Ivy City and Trinidad, neighboring communities south of Brentwood. It called them “the lowest grade of residential area in the Washington Metropolitan Area. These areas definitely do not include sections originally intended for white occupancy and now occupied by negroes.”
After racial covenants were struck down by a federal court in 1948 and a wave of African Americans started moving into Brentwood, so did heavy industry.
Urged by constituents who felt they were deluged by polluters, McDuffie proposed an industrial land transformation project to reverse the trend after he was first elected in 2012. The plan was aimed at transforming 1,000 industrial acres into cleaner development, such as tech companies and shops, but progress has been slow.
The city planning department has targeted some areas in Ward 5 for affordable housing and shops, but Brentwood remains so heavily industrialized that a small park sits next to a smelly garbage-truck fleet.
Residents started fighting the school-bus terminal as soon as they learned about it, at a meeting of the local ANC in 2019.
They reached out to activists who had fought off the attempt by then-Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) to convert a vacant school in Ivy City into a commercial passenger-bus depot in 2012.
In that case, the activists conducted their own environmental assessment and eventually sued. A D.C. Superior Court judge expressed concern over their claim that the city failed to study pollution impacts in an area where many residents suffer from respiratory problems.
Inspired by that victory, Brentwood residents tried to use Ivy City’s playbook. But instead of enlisting an expert to conduct their own air-quality assessment, as Ivy City activists did, Brentwood residents asked the city Department of Energy and Environment for an analysis.
Stephen Ours, chief of air-quality permitting for the department, said it was unnecessary. A particulate-matter analysis is required only when large numbers of diesel vehicles are expected, he said. Ours repeated the school system’s promise to phase out gas vehicles by the middle of the century.
“What about now?” Johnson said.
McDuffie said he is “certainly frustrated and upset by the proposal, because it is yet another example of government maintaining the status quo and doing the same thing over and over again, despite the glaring environmental-justice [issue] that exists throughout Ward 5.”
Tony Nelson, 65, said he has lived in his house across from the paving company all his life. Employees of the company park on the street, denying spaces for residents, who are sometimes forced to park blocks away, he said.
“I’m not happy, but where else am I going to go?” he said. “I don’t want to be run out of my own neighborhood that I was born and raised in.”
