Washington University School of Law's Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic recently released its updated Environmental Racism in St. Louis report. It cites major environmental hazards in the area, but researchers say there are multiple ways the community and local and state officials can work together to address them.
It's an update to a report that WashU researchers released in 2019 around environmental injustice. It looks at how disproportionately communities of color are harmed by environmental hazards in St. Louis and how they exacerbate health issues throughout the city.
The report focuses on environmental issues such as vacancy, childhood lead poisoning, asthma, air pollution, illegal trash dumping, food apartheid and housing and landlord-tenant relations.
"If we don't ensure that every single pocket of the city is resilient to something like a tornado or flooding, which we're going to see more of inevitably, or extreme heat, then it's going to hurt all of us," said Eric Conners, a postdoctoral fellow at the clinic. "This isn't a situation where we can turn a blind eye and say, 'Well, it's not my problem,' because it is all of our problems."
One key area, Conners said, that researchers saw change, both positive and negative, was childhood lead poisoning. According to the report, poisoning rates have increased over the years in majority-Black ZIP codes compared to majority-white ZIP codes, which should raise concern. However, Conners said this is mainly because legislation was passed in 2022 to help public schools test their drinking water. Also, in 2023, the state legislature passed a bill to widen lead screening requirements for children in Missouri.
Researchers acknowledge concerns about using children to test whether the city has a lead issue, but they recommend that the community be proactive and begin testing soil and fencing near schools, Conners said.
To address lead exposure, the report suggests city officials gather large amounts of data and release biennial reports on areas with the highest childhood lead poisoning risks. State and local officials should also provide free or subsidized point-of-use drinking water filters to low-income families with children under 6. It also recommends that city officials partner with institutions that can provide free soil testing to families in areas where children congregate.
St. Louis' air quality and how different pollutants are driving up health disparities between Black and white communities is another major concern for researchers. The 2019 Environmental Racism report showed that Black St. Louisans, especially children, suffered worse asthma outcomes than white St. Louisans, and today that racial disparity still exists. Research shows that high levels of air pollution, limited access to adequate healthcare and an aging housing stock are major factors in asthma-related illnesses. Researchers suggest that city officials can start reducing asthma and other breathing issues by requiring all school nurses in Missouri to complete comprehensive asthma training courses and invest in the federal government's Air Quality Flag Program.
Over the past few years, Metropolitan Congregations United has been monitoring St. Louis air quality to address health concerns and relay key information to organizations and leaders in the area.
The monitors have shown that there are more frequent unhealthy days for sensitive groups than there are good, moderate, very unhealthy or hazardous days over the past few years. However, DeMarco Davidson, MCU's executive director, is worried that in the months to come, there may be more very unhealthy and hazardous days due to climate change and because the city lost a substantial number of trees in the May 2025 tornado.
He said tackling the issues in WashU's recent report without substantial resources from federal and local governments is overwhelming and ultimately does not properly serve the public.
"Some of these issues are older and bigger than a few community leaders can actually handle," Davidson said.
Last year, the Trump administration canceled all Environmental Protection Agency-funded environmental justice grants and programs, affecting government-funded organizations that address environmental concerns. Davidson said these grants and programs were lifelines for St. Louis organizations, but he is hopeful that reports like these can make the case for why environmental justice reform is necessary.
"Many of our spaces have circular problems. They're not linear," he said. "I think anyone who's coming into these communities needs to understand that these issues have been going on, and some of these issues are also intentional."
Illegal dumping is another issue the report raises. It shows that in 2021, there were 11,336 dumping complaints, with another 10,072 in 2023. However, most of the complaints came from predominantly Black neighborhoods. Some ways researchers say they can improve include city officials adopting Philadelphia's "litter cabinet" and New Jersey's Clean Communities programming. One major way to help reduce illegal dumping, researchers say, is for officials to beautify vacant lots.
Conners said many of the environmental issues in the report intersect with one another, but if the city must put resources toward only one hazard, it should address its vacancy problem.
"They are magnets for things like illegal dumping and criminal activity," he said. "Vacancy is one of these issues that if there was a concerted effort to really deal with it, and I know that's so much easier said than done, but I think that it would have a downstream impact on a lot of these other issues."
According to the STL Vacancy Collaborative, there are over 24,000 vacant properties in the city, and over 80% of those are located in majority-Black communities. Wells-Goodfellow, Jeff-Vander-Lou and the Greater Ville neighborhoods house most of the city's vacant properties. Conners said the natural disaster was not something researchers prepared for prior to the report; however, it is not lost upon them that vacancy issues, along with other environmental issues, have become increasingly worse in the Black community after the May tornado.
"It's all kind of this big network of causation where you have preexisting issues with vacancy and access to health care, a tornado sweeps through and hits central St Louis and north St Louis, and we see a very disparate recovery in those two regions of the city," he said. "Today we're still kind of dealing with the fallout of that, and it's most likely going to exacerbate some of that inequality that we see."
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