Construction is under way in a city neighborhood already harmed by decades of air and water pollution.
by Katie Farthing
May 3, 2024
5:00 AM
Courtesy 350 Tacoma
The site of the Bridge Industrial warehouse project in South Tacoma, Washington. Critics of the plan to build the world’s eighth-largest warehouse fear that it will further compromise the quality of life for the community of 24,000, many of them low-income people of color.
A large wetlands area destined to be transformed into a warehouse zone has residents of a Tacoma, Washington, neighborhood up in arms. They fear that the 2.5 million-square-foot Bridge Industrial Project that has already broken ground in South Tacoma, an area that already houses food-processing, metalworking, general manufacturing, and plastics plants, will further compromise the quality of life for the community of 24,000, many of them low-income people of color.
It’s one more example of environmental racism that plagues American cities like Tacoma. Opponents of the construction claim that the zone will increase traffic congestion and air pollution in the area. Yet Tacoma city officials have heaped new industrial indignities on neighborhoods that have already endured decades of maltreatment at the hands of industrial interests.
“South Tacoma has the largest proportion of Black people [and] Pacific Islander people,” Haze Leviathan of the Climate Alliance of the South Sound (CASS), a local environmental organization that opposes the warehouse project, told The American Prospect. “They don’t care about people who aren’t rich and aren’t white and I think honestly the city is just fine putting [the project] in South Tacoma.”
Bunchy Carter of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party agrees. He says that by moving forward with Bridge Industrial, the city has “absolutely and positively infringed upon communities that have already been disenfranchised.”
Under Washington’s environmental regulations, the city had the authority to decide that an environmental impact survey under the state’s Environmental Policy Act was unnecessary.
Bridge Industrial, a private equity real estate company based in Chicago and active throughout the United States and Britain, partnered with Tacoma in 2021 to build its Bridge Point Tacoma 2MM warehouse complex on a delisted Superfund site. The firm has secured $413 million in loans to build out the site plans and lease the buildings, which are near the Port of Tacoma and Interstate 5, the region’s major north-south artery. No tenants for the warehouses have been announced. The city recently put up a ten-foot fence around one side of the future warehouse site to keep unhoused people out of the area.
Mega-projects like warehouses, particularly in the burgeoning logistics sector powering the internet economy, are often attractive property tax revenue sources for cities eager to supplement their finances.
The city could not provide an estimate of real estate tax revenues for the warehouse. “There’s no way to predict at this point what future property taxes will be generated by this project,” Shirley Schultz, a principal planner in Tacoma’s planning and development services, told The American Prospect. “That will depend on what gets built on the land and how many buildings go up.”
Under Washington’s environmental regulations, the city had the authority to decide that an environmental impact survey under the state’s Environmental Policy Act was unnecessary. Under the agreement with the city, Bridge Industrial must adhere to specific conditions limiting certain environmental impacts including removing invasive species, mitigating soil erosion, and adding new trees and other plantings, according to Schultz.
However, The News Tribune reported that the city did not address the Department of Ecology’s concerns about air quality and environmental justice issues posed by the plan. At the end of 2023, the department ordered Bridge Industrial to comply with additional air and water quality conditions. A state pollution control board hearing on air quality issues has also been scheduled for late November 2024. The area “ranks[s] 10 (out of 10) for health disparities, diesel exhaust, and proximity to heavy traffic roadways on [Washington state’s] Environmental Health Disparities Map,” according to the department’s order detailing those requirements.
“It’ll take time to get built out and I’m really excited to see what they do with the wetland and the stream that’s through there and the forest that needs to be restored,” Schultz says. But she was not surprised by the backlash from the community, adding, “I don’t know anybody that is excited about warehouses, because they’re not great.”
Before Europeans arrived, the ancestors of the Puyallup, Nisqually, Steilacoom, Squaxin, and Muckleshoot tribes lived in the marshes, oak woodlands, and prairies in the region. Today, only 9 percent of South Tacoma has tree coverage. Lacking the heat-absorbing benefits of a lush tree canopy, neighborhoods in this area can register temperatures up to 14 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North Tacoma.
The 1873 announcement that the Northern Pacific Railway planned to make South Tacoma the terminus for its transcontinental railroad signaled the area’s debut as a train operations area. By the late 19th century, other industrial activities including a landfill and waste oil processing joined the railroad operations. In the early 1980s, parts of South Tacoma, including the designated warehouse area, were designated as a Superfund cleanup site by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and were remediated to protect the aquifer and wetlands.
A 2023 Puget Sound Clean Air Agency study found that vehicle emissions are the main source of toxic emissions in the area. Due to the neighborhood’s proximity to the major freight transportation corridors, residents have some of the highest lung cancer and asthma risks in the metropolitan area. More than 10 percent of South Tacoma adults suffer from asthma.
Tacoma’s decision to build on an aquifer and to further compromise the health and well-being of local residents is municipal decision-making at its most insidious.
Local residents, particularly people whose homes border the facility and line the road into the site, will face the disruption of thousands of new vehicle trips through the zone. The agreement between the city and Bridge Industrial also specifies that the company must build a road to divert truck traffic from side and residential streets, as well as provide trucks with direct access to Interstate 5. The longer-term plans do not “meaningfully address the impact of so many trucks going in and out of the South Tacoma neighborhood every day,” says Leviathan.
CASS has not reached a decision about future legal action.
There are four wetlands, a stream, and a fish and wildlife conservation area on the site. (Under the company’s agreement with the city, the stream and wetland areas will be monitored during construction and for ten years after the construction ends.) Inexplicably, the buildings will be constructed over an aquifer recharge station, an underground layer of porous rock that collects rainwater. (According to the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, in the summer, the groundwater furnishes roughly 5 percent of Tacoma’s drinking water, with the potential to supply up to 40 percent if necessary.)
Earthjustice, a public-interest environmental law organization that appealed the construction permits on behalf of local organizations, has noted that “[p]aving over the aquifer will change the rate at which the aquifer is ‘recharged’ and could reduce the water level in the aquifer and cause the aquifer to pull in nearby contaminated groundwater. It could leave Tacoma with insufficient water supply or a contaminated water supply.”
Tacoma’s decision to build on an aquifer as the planet heats up and to further compromise the health and well-being of local residents is municipal decision-making at its most insidious. At a certain point, the impact on human beings can no longer be ignored. “It just goes further to exemplify what we’ve been saying about capitalism all along,” says Carter. “The bottom line will always mean more than the people.”
Construction began in early March. South Tacoma would host the world’s eighth-largest warehouse if the project is completed as currently planned.
Katie Farthing is an editorial intern at The American Prospect.
May 3, 2024
5:00 AM
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