Wildfires are choking the air across the Bay Area. But while people fearing blackened skies are rushing to buy masks and air filtration systems, low-income communities and communities of color suffer unhealthy air year-round.
An effort led by the California Air Resources Board to improve air in those communities is now expanding into San Francisco, accelerated in response to the worsening air from the lightning-sparked wildfires.
Brightline Defense, an environmental nonprofit, is leading the San Francisco effort to install air-quality sensors near single-room occupancy hotels and to survey residents on their health in collaboration with SRO hotel tenants, themselves.
Gail Seagraves lives in one of those SRO hotels in the Tenderloin, on Turk Street. She says tenants there live on the margins and are often “invisible.”
“We have to fight for every single thing,” Seagraves said. “This is really exciting for us that tenants are involved, and someone wants to listen to them.”
“It just makes us feel like somebody cares,” she said.
The Community Air Protection Program is an effort to measure and improve poor air quality in disadvantaged communities statewide, ranging from East Lost Angeles to South Central Fresno, established by Assembly Bill 617 in 2017.
In the Bay Area, the program is also in Richmond and West Oakland, the latter of which resulted in an October 2019 “action plan” that identified diesel from the Port of Oakland and particulates from nearby waste treatment facilities as sources of air pollution in disadvantaged communities. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District provides technical assistance to those efforts.
Those communities suffer higher rates of asthma and bad cardiovascular health, the report noted. Air quality data collected in West Oakland led to recommendations like moving the Port of Oakland’s truck operations to zero-emissions by 2035 and to fund cleaner tugboat engines.
