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A recent NYU study found that children in the South Bronx suffer from astronomical asthma rates: in one Hunt’s Point elementary school, one in four children showed symptoms of the respiratory disease. The study attributed the frequency of asthma to the maze of highways and truck routes that traverse the area.
Another likely culprit not mentioned in the study's press release: the seven MTA and privately owned bus depots in the Harlem/South Bronx area. Most of the buses going in and out of these depots run on diesel engines, which emit particulates that are particularly harmful for the lungs. For the past decade, Harlem non-profit WE ACT has been raising awareness about cleaner bus fuels and campaigning against the siting of bus depots in the area. But for all the attention WE ACT and other environmental justice advocates have brought to these issues, it doesn't take a 5-year study to figure out that the problem of unequal distribution of environmental burdens remains.
Click here for an enlarged map
Adam Brock, Gothamist's mapper-in-residence, is a GIS specialist at the Pratt Center for Community Development, and a Sustainable Design student at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
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Not to say that the link to bus exhaust is impossible or anything, but one thing that jumps right out from the map is that the areas with the highest asthma rates also are among the city's poorest neighborhoods (as has been amply documented elsewhere).
Given the principle that the simplest explanation is usually correct, I would suggest that it's much more likely that living in poverty causes asthma than that bus depots are the culprit.
so poor and so black
Peter, you've left out a crucial middle step. Are you saying that it's the simple absence of cash that causes asthma? No. Living in poverty causes asthma, yes, but it's because kids in poverty are far more exposed to the triggers that often cause asthma than kids in middle or high income neighborhoods. Living in crumbling buildings full of vermin and roaches; increased exposure to exhaust from trucking routes, bus depots, etc; the proximity to sewage treatment facilities; lack of access to good health care; etc, that cause asthma--and these are all things that kids in Harlem have to deal with on a much worse level than kids in the West Village.
The reason kids in these neighborhoods have the highest rates of asthma is because they are exposed to all these factors, and they are exposed to these factors because they are poor. Do you think the UES or the West Village, neighborhoods with much more money and political clout, would stand for a bus depot in their neighborhood? There is nothing inherent in being poor that causes asthma. It's the increased risk factors that are correlated with poverty, like living near bus depots, that cause asthma.
It's not poverty --> asthma. It's poverty --> increased risk factors --> asthma.
MPH -
Of all the poverty-related factors that cause increased asthma rates, the proximity of bus depots is surely a very minor one. The map bears that out: while there is a cluster of depots and asthma in Harlem, the South Bronx has plenty of asthma but no depots.
I stongly suspect that living in crowded, unclean, vermin-infested housing is a much bigger factor.
"Of all the poverty-related factors that cause increased asthma rates, the proximity of bus
depots is surely a very minor one."
Hey asshole-
The air that one breathes everyday/ all day has more than a minor effect on residents. I hope they put a waste-transfer station in your neighborhood.
The South Bronx doesn't need bus depots.
It has every major highway in NY cutting through it, including The Sheridan Expressway, which is a big road for trucks to idle on.
You should watch some of these kids just try to get up four flights in an elementary school before you bring your smug presumptuousness to light.
I've always been suprised that more of Lower Manhattan (Chinatown/LES) and Southern Williamsburg doesn't show up with higher rates of childhood asthma. There is an abundance of many of the contributing factors - high traffic, expressways and major bridges, as well as an older housing stock, and poverty (lack of medical care).
For that matter, why doesn't Flushing or Sunset Park show up higher on this map?
it's those 25 cent colored fruity drinks that those kids buy in the south bronx bodegas that cause asthma. They did a study and those poor people keep drinking that crap. I remember when I was a kid on the LES and drank one of those one day and had trouble breathing for a whole week.
Steve-
Like everything in NY, I believe it has to with Real Estate. Perhaps the ginormous corporation that purchases the South Bx for gentification wants this mess to be cleaned up on the government dime before buying anmd selling it. I hear yuppies hate asthma...
The Burg has 400% higher asthma rates than elsewhere in the city:
http://www.drummajorinstitute.org/library/article.php?ID=6427
Hey Miquekl,
Dude, I'll keep this nice and simple so you can understand it with your left-tail-of-the-Bell-Curve I.Q. score. If you take a gander at a map of the South Bronx you'll see that the Cross Bronx, Deegan and Bruckner/Sheridan form a rough circle. The area inside this circle - the heart of the South Bronx - is several square miles in size and probably has at least a quarter-million inhabitants. It's also got sky-high asthma rates. Now, the funny thing is, the expressways with all their smelly truck traffic form the perimeter of the circle. They don't "cut through" the South Bronx, as you claim. Most of the area within the circle, in other words the main part of the South Bronx, is geographically isolated from the expressways and their traffic, sometimes by two or three miles. Yet kids are getting asthma at this enormous rate.
It's called 'Tropical Fantasy' and it's killing our children...
those drinks contain a crazy amount of Yellow Dye no. 5 which is a huge trigger of asthma. It's virtually drinking articial coloring with citric acid, sucrose and water.
i got one of those prickly allergy tests once and the allergist told me that roaches were the #1 cause of asthma for city kids.
that is beyond gross.
Another question then for the polite pontificators - how come the Rockaways have a cluster of asthma? It seems that would be a clear indicator of a poor urban "tropical fantasy" environment, beyond MTA bus yards. There aren't huge highways there, although JFK is nearby.
Another question then for the polite pontificators - how come the Rockaways have a cluster of asthma? It seems that would be a clear indicator of a poor urban "tropical fantasy" environment, beyond MTA bus yards. There aren't huge highways there, although JFK is nearby.
Note that there aren't any of the red "poverty dots" in the shaded part of the Rockways. As best I can tell, it's the Arverne/Edgemere area, which while fairly poor is also sparsely populated. Given a low enough population a relatively few cases of childhood asthma requiring hospitalization might cause the area to become shaded.
In other words, you really need a larger total population to draw statistically valid conclusions.
I live in the South Bronx and heard that FedEx wants to put a huge depot down the street from the waste management facility. Eek! I moved to the area in March and immediately felt the affects of the pollution. anyway, just an observation.
If you lived in Jersey for a few
years you could build a tolerance
to these pollutants...and save money!
Simple:
Your last point required some analysis, so you should be able to answer this:
Are you really trying to say that there is no correlation between kids developing asthma and living in a community NEAR three highways and seven bus depots. No correlation? There just poor.
2-3 miles, whatever. Don't play semantics. Wind sweeps the pollution from those trucks and busses over that entire landmass. Go back to suffolk, or whatever douchebags call Long Island to seem less hillbilly.