Even as Air Quality Improves, Black Houston Is Getting More Smog

By Willy Blackmore

Originally appeared in Word in Black

The record-high temperatures that baked Houston and surrounding Texas communities this summer did not only cause health problems directly related to the heat. Sweltering weather can increase smog too, and that was very much the case this year: the Houston area had its smoggiest summer since 2011, with the amount of ozone (the scientific name for smog) surpassing federal standards on 55 days in 2023. 

And according to a report released Thursday by the Environmental Integrity Project, Black and Brown Houstonians “were more likely to live where ozone reached the highest levels this summer and over the three years from 2021 to 2023.”

The maximum threshold for a healthy level of ozone is 70 ppb, a number that has been reduced over the years as it’s become better understood how smog affects public health, leading to asthma and other respiratory problems. But in Houston East this summer, a community that is 93% people of color, the smog level hit 110 ppb one day this summer. The overall average, which has long been too high, is tipping even higher there too. The average ozone level was 76 ppb between 2008 and 2010, and 80 ppb between 2021 and 2023. 

Like a number of other monitoring sites that recorded dangerously high levels of smog, Houston East sits near the Houston Ship Channel, where large oil tankers and other barges move in and out from the industrial part of the city heading to the Gulf of Mexico. According to the report, “at least 90 percent of those living within three miles of four of these monitors — Houston East, Clinton, Haden Road and Park Place — are people of color,” and those three other monitoring stations are also in neighborhoods adjacent to the channel.

There are plenty of other places around the greater Houston area where there are highly concentrated sources of ozone pollution: the Port of Houston, Interstate 610, and the Exxon refinery on the Baytown side of Galveston Bay. 

Because of the long history of forcing Black and Brown people to live in less desirable parts of cities, and the grim tradition that goes back to the days of redlining, the neighborhoods that abut these industrial and traffic-clogged areas are home to predominantly Black and Latinx populations. 

In addition to being predominantly non-white, these communities also tend to be poorer, on average, and often have a higher percentage of children under five than the average Texas neighborhood — and it’s young, developing lungs that are most susceptible to long-term damage caused by smog, including asthma and other chronic respiratory diseases.

“The Houston Health Department is very concerned about these high ozone levels,” Dr. Loren Hopkins, Chief Environmental Science Officer for the Houston Health Department, said in a release, “not only because they occur in environmental justice communities, but also because these same communities suffer from asthma attacks and cardiac arrest at higher rates than the rest of the city.”

But one crucial step to changing things was announced this week with the Environmental Protection Agency awarding nearly $500,000 to four Houston neighborhoods — Fifth Ward, Galena Park, Pleasantville, and Sunnyside — to help with their ongoing fight for clean air. The money will enable residents to monitor hazardous pollutants over the next three years.  

“This funding is a significant opportunity to advance climate justice and equity, generate essential data and equip communities and government leaders to work together toward cleaner, healthier air for everyone,” Grace Tee Lewis, a senior health scientist with the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement from the EPA.

Indeed, equipped with actual data on the toxins in the air, these communities will have ground-up information to demand action and change.

Meanwhile, in many cities around the country, including other parts of Houston, smog has been reduced greatly in recent decades, falling by 22% between 2000 and 2022. That progress has by no means been evenly felt in all communities, however. According to the report, “the data shows that people of color and those living on low incomes are more likely to be exposed to ozone concentrations that are higher, more persistent, and less likely to have improved since 2008.”