Flooding, heat islands, air pollution, and landslides are all problems in Cincinnati. But the health and financial risks associated with them aren't spread evenly across the city, a new study says.
The research from Housing Opportunities Made Equal suggests those hazards tend to concentrate in parts of town home to people of color and those with disabilities.
HOME Research and Policy Coordinator Clementine Deck says the fair housing organization's report compared data about where minority communities and people with disabilities live with maps showing air pollution concentrations, locations that tend to get hotter during warm months, and places that experience floods and landslides more often.
Those hazards have costs often not considered, like increased utility bills to deal with hotter-than-average temperatures caused by lots of pavement and a lack of greenspace.
"A heat island is a good indicator that you're going to spend more money on energy," Deck says. "A lot of communities of color live in the same places that have heat islands, and part of that is due to historical redlining."
What the report found
The study shows places like Roselawn, Bond Hill, Avondale, and communities along the lower Mill Creek Valley suffer from extreme heat in the summer. Those neighborhoods also are predominantly home to people of color and have high concentrations of residents with disabilities.
Those higher utility bills impact people every month. Other environmental costs are longer term. Air pollution can cause health problems like asthma that can result in years of added health care expenses.
Some of the same communities struggling with the heat island effect — Avondale, North and South Fairmount, Lower Price Hill — also have high air pollution levels and high levels of asthma and other respiratory problems.
In other communities home to large numbers of people of color and those with disabilities, floods and landslides are the big hazards. Those can cause permanent financial problems if they damage a home that isn't fully insured.
"If a landslide happens and takes out the foundations of your home, you're losing generations of wealth in some cases," Deck says.
Deck points out these problems aren't existing independently, either. Air pollution and the heat island effect can exacerbate each other. And in doing so, they can cause more severe respiratory distress among residents.
"These all kind of wrap and tie together," Deck says. "They can individually do things, but all at the same time, they build and compound on each other unless you're working to address them in a proactive sense."
Are there any solutions?
Environmental groups and the city of Cincinnati have made efforts to address some of these factors. Some neighborhoods have put together climate resiliency plans that call for more greenspace, better mitigation of flood and sewage overflow risks, and more. Other organizations have worked on making housing for low-income people more energy efficient — though that work is now in question due to cuts to federal programs that fund it.
You can read HOME's study and the data it pulls from on the organization's website.
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