Community Input and Contamination Policy in Chicago

Waste contamination from industrial sites or landfills poses a significant public health threat, and yet the public is often kept out of the loop, knowing of neither the hazards present nor remediation proposed at a site. Furthermore, studies from the field of environmental justice have found hazardous waste to be concentrated in low-income and majority-minority neighborhoods. Expanded public participation policies have been proposed as a solution to both the transparency and distribution challenges of hazardous waste management. In this paper, I leverage historical analysis centered on Chicago, as well as a review of empirical studies of public participation policies, to evaluate the merits of community centered approaches to tackling Chicago’s Brownfield crisis. I find that, in general, public participation policies tend to suffer from inequitable access and a lack of responsiveness. With these pitfalls in mind, I propose a Brownfield policy for Chicago which combines community grant provisions similar to those of the federal Superfund program with citizen complaint channels similar to those in place for the Clean Air Act.