Did big expectations doom the tiny house movement?

Table Of Content

• FOR ALL AVAILABLE BEERS, PLEASE SEE BELOW
• Become a Food Vendor
• How the legacy of former industrial sites pollutes American cities today
• California communities are fighting the last battery recycling plant in the West — and its toxic legacy
• Why the climate movement doesn’t talk about polar bears anymore
• Levity Brewing Review – Beer, Food, & Trail Access in Indiana, PA

While the U.S. has a national Clean Water Act and a Clean Air Act, there’s no federal Clean Soil Act to address soil contamination comprehensively. Further, at the local level, not enough is done by public health care agencies to proactively pinpoint hot spots of soil lead contamination by using existing childhood blood lead level data, Mielke said. Before construction was first supposed to begin on the redevelopment project in 2011, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, or DTSC, conducted environmental assessments of the site. Tests showed that lead soil contamination around Jordan Downs was at 22,000 parts per million, or ppm — 275 times higher than state limits. The soil also came back with actionable levels of the cancer-causing toxins arsenic, cadmium, and polychlorinated biphenyls.

A pizza passport, a Titanic-themed dinner, and more Pittsburgh food news - PGH City Paper

A pizza passport, a Titanic-themed dinner, and more Pittsburgh food news.

Posted: Tue, 27 Feb 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

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The east side of the town became a distribution hub for agricultural goods and a burgeoning manufacturing center, with working-class neighborhoods built along the railroad tracks. Located on the easternmost edge of Santa Ana, Logan was often overlooked when it came to city services. While the city’s strictly residential tract home neighborhoods had ample backyards and wide, paved streets, these were largely absent in Logan and other working-class Latino barrios in the industrial sections of town. Neighborhood residents relied on ingenuity to make neighborhood improvements — for example, covering Logan Street with apricot pits in the early 20th century to tamp the dust and cover holes in the road.

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In response to a request for comment from Grist, CalGEM head Uduak-Joe Ntuk pointed to the agency’s new public health mandate and to several actions to bring its policies in line with California’s climate change goals. “CalGEM has instituted a new rigorous conflict of interest policy for all staff, embarked on racial justice training, increased transparency with new online data portals, and instituted the most rigorous review and approval of permits in the nation,” he said. Yet oil played a major role in the state’s development, and oil money is entangled in California’s political system. That’s particularly true in Los Angeles, the city where the state’s oil boom first took off.

How the legacy of former industrial sites pollutes American cities today

This is a place where drinking buddies become lifelong friends, and regulars become family. 467 defeated, the most realistic pathway open at the state level to institute setbacks appears to be through CalGEM. The agency was known as the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources, or DOGGR, until 2019. That summer, DOGGR became embroiled in scandal when it came to light that regulators were issuing permits for risky drilling projects without reviewing them first and that they held stock in the very companies they were supposed to be regulating.

Delta water has transformed the arid Southland into the state’s population center and the nation’s produce aisle. But it has done so at the cost of pushing the West Coast’s largest estuary to the brink of collapse; last year the drought finally prompted regulators to eliminate most Central Valley water deliveries. PM2.5 is far smaller than the width of a human hair and can lead to health problems ranging from cancer, reproductive ailments, and mental health problems to premature death. The report found that gas-powered lawn equipment belched 21,800 tons of PM2.5 in 2020 — an  amount equivalent to the pollution from 234 million typical cars over the course of a year. In the United States, a person’s home is usually their most valuable financial asset.

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Then, in the early 1930s, the barrio petitioned the city to pave its two primary thoroughfares, Logan and Stafford streets, but was forced to raise the money to cover the cost. The residents ultimately celebrated the paving of their roads with a street dance. You couldn’t shake a stick at your Facebook feed without hitting a shared photo of some wee storybook cottage tucked away in a forest grove. Mueller categorizes the phenomenon of the tiny-house social media craze under a very “millennial” way of posting — one that leans heavily on perfection and idealization, in contrast with Gen Z’s ostensibly more unfiltered approach. But for all the hubbub, tiny houses never really entered the mainstream realm of homeownership. Instead, they entered the province of tourists seeking a brief decampment to a smaller-scale, climate-friendly lifestyle.

How mobile homes can fight climate change. - Grist

How mobile homes can fight climate change..

Posted: Tue, 02 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Despite California’s reputation as an environmentally friendly state, neighborhood drilling is a distinctly Californian phenomenon. Most oil-producing states — including Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and even Texas — have regulations dictating how close to homes, schools, and sometimes hospitals that oil wells are allowed to operate. This buffer zone between oil wells and the areas where people live is known as a setback.

Why the climate movement doesn’t talk about polar bears anymore

They’ve given six-figure sums to every California governor since Republican Pete Wilson. Then they gave $221,000 to his replacement, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has called them “some of my dearest, dearest friends.” The $150,000 they’ve sprinkled on Jerry Brown since 2010 might not seem like a lot by comparison, but no other individual donor has given more. The Resnicks also have chipped in another $250,000 to support Brown’s pet ballot measure to fund education. Two years later, with a federal judge now restricting Delta pumping for the sake of the smelt, the Resnicks began raising their concerns with friends in Washington. Their first big purchase as a couple, in 1979, was Teleflora, a flower delivery company that Lynda revitalized by pioneering the “flowers in a gift” concept — blooms wilt, but the cut-glass vase and teddy bear live on. In 1985, they acquired the Franklin Mint, which at the time mainly sold commemorative coins and medallions.

Levity Brewing Review – Beer, Food, & Trail Access in Indiana, PA

People were so invested in the war effort, Elkin said, the oil companies got what they wanted. Hernandez is one of millions of Californians affected by neighborhood drilling — the practice of exploring for oil right in the middle of communities, next to the places where people live, study, and seek medical care. The phenomenon disproportionately impacts low-income communities and communities of color, and creates an environmental health nightmare for those living in its shadow. “A lot of the folks around there, once their houses were condemned, they had no alternative — so they had to move,” said Romero. His father was one of the few residents fortunate enough to be able to renovate his home without a loan after he became the first Latino to get a job paving roads with the city’s public works department, a job that paid him a higher wage than most of his neighbors.

So in addition to working to make Logan more residential, local activists must also battle to ensure that nuisance businesses comply with existing regulations. The city may have heard their calls to change the “business-as-usual” approach in recent decades, but ultimately, those who live there now still pay the price for the decades that it was an industrial hotspot. The cohesiveness of the neighborhood was hard to duplicate, and it’s why children who grew up in Logan, like Joe Andrade, often returned.

Using data from CalGEM, the California Department of Education, and the California Health and Human Services department, Grist analyzed the number of oil wells near schools to help understand the impact that setbacks for oil and gas wells might have on frontline communities. The 601 soil samples tested with the XRF analyzer in the field had an average margin of error of 18 parts per million. Grist discarded any soil tests with incomplete scans, which could be caused by any disruptions that produced a movement of the XRF analyzer during analysis. In 1994, residents rose up to oppose a car salvage yard that had proposed opening near the Interstate 5 freeway. The last thing residents wanted was more noise and more traffic, they argued at the time. “The important thing about the barrios is they became very specific sites of commerce and culture and family life, and are really thought of as a really positive space in those days,” said Haas, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Grist is the only award-winning newsroom focused on exploring equitable solutions to climate change. Instead, we rely on our readers to pitch in what they can so that we can continue bringing you our solution-based climate news. In studies of communities living near urban oil wells in Los Angeles, Johnston found that participants living closer to an oil well had impaired lung function and higher rates of asthma than those living farther away — making it quite literally harder to breathe. Living near oil and gas development, in general, has also been linked to preterm births and other adverse reproductive outcomes, as well as a host of other health problems, including higher rates of cancer and heart disease. In 2015, a report authored by the California Council on Science and Technology, a nonprofit that advises the state’s government, concluded that drilling posed health risks to communities living nearby and recommended the development of “science-based” setbacks.