In Houston’s Fifth Ward, Residents Fight for the Right to Breathe

In the Fifth Ward community, a historically Black neighborhood on Houston’s northeast side, there are reminders of the neighborhood’s roots in arts, music and politics around every corner. 

The community was settled by freedmen in the mid-1800’s and is home to a vibrant local art scene along Lyons Avenue. Fifth Ward also was home to not one but two influential Black members of Congress: Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland.

But for years, Fifth Ward families have wondered what’s in their air. 

Residents live with constant reminders of the heavy industrial activity running alongside and through their community: diesel trucks, metal recycling operations, railways and rumbling traffic along two major interstates that converge blocks from residential streets where kids play.

Despite Rollbacks, a Win

Now, for the first time, Fifth Ward – and nearby Pleasantville, another historically Black community less than five miles from the Houston Ship Channel – will have state-level data about what’s in the air they breathe every day. It’s an essential step to protect public health, and a remarkable win for long-time local advocates at a time when Black Americans stand to face the greatest health risks from the rollbacks of bedrock pollution protections at the federal level. 

“The air monitoring network in Pleasantville became the first community-led air monitoring network in the state of Texas, so to have access to regulatory data is a win for the health of Pleasantville residents,” said Bridgette Murray, founder and executive director for Achieving Community Tasks Successfully. 

Since returning to power last January, the Trump administration has rolled back essential environmental protections that keep all of us safe from the harms of pollution and extreme weather fueled by climate change. It has closed the agency’s environmental justice offices and clawed back millions of dollars intended to improve the health and well-being of people most harmed by pollution.

“I started my environmental justice work in Houston in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was president, and I have continued it under the next eight administrations,” said Dr. Robert Bullard, director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice. “Our justice movement will endure because it was not started by or funded with government dollars. Government may cancel our grants, but it cannot cancel our intergenerational movement.” 

And the administration has overturned the Endangerment Finding, EPA’s bedrock protection against planet-warming pollution. 

Black Americans Hit Harder

These actions put all of us at risk, but the harms will be felt most in communities of color, where people are exposed to more dirty air than in white communities, regardless of income level. This results in stark health disparities: Black children are eight times more likely to die from asthma than white children. 

The new air monitors in Fifth Ward and Pleasantville will measure levels of one of the deadliest types of air pollution: fine particulate matter, known as soot. 

Environmental justice communities know so well that fine particulate matter is linked to chronic health problems, like asthma and heart disease, and it puts people across Houston, the country and the world at greater risk of early death. Black Americans shoulder a higher burden of this pollution, and we stand to gain the most from stronger, more protective limits on particulate matter – limits the Trump administration is actively rolling back.

The first step to cleaning up our air, however, is to improve our understanding of what’s in it.

‘Focused on Educating Communities’

It took years of advocacy, led by nonprofits Coalition of Community Organizations in Fifth Ward and Achieving Community Tasks Successfully in Pleasantville, to get to this point. With support from the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University and Environmental Defense Fund, community leaders, including Rev. James Caldwell, founder and director of COCO, spearheaded a project to install their own air monitors to gather data to back up what they already know: that the air outside their homes, schools and houses of worship is dirty, and it’s harming the health of their residents. 

Caldwell says his organization “is focused on educating communities about the effects of air pollution, so our community air monitors provide the data we need to be strong advocates for the Fifth Ward community.”

Low-cost sensors help fill the gap in traditional air quality monitoring, but they can produce less accurate data. That’s why reference grade monitors are considered the gold standard: they’re precise, and the data collected at these monitors is often the basis for the regulatory decisions that impact all of us.

Work and Progress

Tireless efforts by these community leaders forged a unique partnership with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and regulators worked hand in hand with advocates to strategically place two state monitors where residents said they were needed most to measure pollution. 

And in two historically Black communities facing legacies of disinvestment and unequal protection under our environmental laws, this is progress. It’s an important step toward Houston families having the information needed to continue their advocacy for healthy, safe communities, free from the burdens of toxic pollution.  

We rely on federal agencies and resources to protect all of us, and especially our most vulnerable, yet those resources have become less effective. The new reference-grade monitors are a win for our communities, and we will continue fighting alongside our community partners for the right to breathe clean air. 

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