The Climate Gap: Inequalities in How Climate Change Hurts Americans & How to Close the Gap
By Rachel Morello Frosch, Manuel Pastor, Jim Sadd, and Seth Shonkoff
May 2009

By now, virtually all Americans concur that climate change is real, and could pose devastating consequences for our nation and our children. Equally real is the “Climate Gap” – the sometimes hidden and often-unequal impact climate change will have on people of color and the poor in the United States.

This report helps to document the Climate Gap, connecting the dots between research on heat waves, air quality, and other challenges associated with climate change. But we do more than point out an urgent problem; we also explore how we might best combine efforts to both solve climate change and close the Climate Gap — including an appendix focused on California’s global warming policy and a special accompanying analysis of the federal-level American Clean Energy Security Act.

Download the report
Executive Summary
Full Report: fast download web version / high quality version
Working Analysis of Waxman-Markey
California Fact Sheet
National Fact Sheet
Press Release

Justice in the Air: Tracking Toxic Pollution from America's Industries and Companies to Our States, Cities, and Neighborhoods
By Michael Ash, James K. Boyce, Grace Chang, Manuel Pastor, Justin Scoggins, and Jennifer Tran[Ash, Boyce, and Chang are from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Pastor, Scoggins, and Tran are from the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) at the University of Southern California]
April 2009

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With climate change threatening our way of life, dirty air triggering asthma, and industrial pollutants causing cancer, the nation is more motivated than ever before to take a hard look at the problems we face and seek new approaches that can better secure the future of the planet and save lives.

This report contributes to that lofty goal. In it, we go beyond tracking the country’s biggest industrial polluters. And we go beyond saying which regions have the dirtiest air. While important, that's been done before.

Instead, this study is one of the first to track, which states and metropolitan areas have the biggest gap between the health risk from toxic pollution faced by people of color and the poor compared to their proportion of the population. The results confirm what many Americans of color and low-income Americans have known for a long time: clean air is not necessarily an equal opportunity affair.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of our research is a list of the industrial companies whose pollution has the most disproportionate impacts on minority or low-income neighborhoods. Many companies are aware of their impacts on communities and the environment, and many have adopted strategies for becoming better corporate citizens. This report aims to contribute to these efforts by presenting a new measure of responsible corporate performance: whether a company does particularly unequal harm to its disadvantaged neighbors.

To develop this measure, we take data from the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI) model, a computer-based screening tool developed by EPA that takes emissions listed in the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) and runs them through a series of toxicity factors and an air model to determine the resulting potential health risk. We add to those outcomes an analysis of the demographics of the neighborhoods that are most affected -- and then track back to establish the corporate ownership of the plants in the TRI/RSEI.

To address the disparity issue by state, city, and neighborhood, we offer a series of recommendations, including defending and extending the right-to-know, linking modeling and monitoring, shifting pollution standards to assess cumulative impacts, and encouraging community, shareholder and consumer activism.

We hope that this report contributes to a broader conversation about our environmental challenges and will be of use to those activists, policy makers, and companies who are working daily to protect the environmental health and well-being of all Americans.

Banking on LA
By Manuel Pastor
March 2009

We are pleased to announce the release of a new report from USCs Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE). Banking on LA, a synthesis of several research efforts with a special lens applied to Los Angeles, offers a vision of how a recommitment to providing full banking services in lower-income neighborhoods could create pathways from poverty, rebuild the middle class and strengthen the region.

Being poor is hard enough; being poor and unbanked is worse. Forced to turn to payday lenders, check cashers, and other high-cost financial services, hard-working families see their income depleted and their wealth sapped. In areas like Southeast L.A., non-traditional financial services outnumber bank branches fivefold and Latinos and African Americans are significantly overrepresented in the unbanked population even within the city’s low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

Why the mismatch? On the one hand, banks often do not see the potential in low-income communities, partly because traditional methods of evaluating local markets do not fully take into account population density and informal economic activity. On the other, low-income consumers do not always see the banks, partly because branches are scarcer but also because fewer people in their social networks have banking accounts and banks do not always successfully publicize starter accounts.

Los Angeles has just formally kicked off its own Bank on LA initiative to address these issues. With the country’s largest unbanked population, the City is working with banks and community groups to publicize accounts, provide financial literacy classes, and create the opportunity for low-income individuals to save and accumulate for themselves and their children. The effort will be tracked with an extensive monitoring system to see exactly what difference it can make. For more information, go to http://www.bankonla.com.

We thank the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Wallis Annenberg Fund for Leadership and Innovation, at the Liberty Hill Foundation, for providing funds for this and the other research pieces related to the Bank on LA effort.

Download the report
web version
high quality version

Making Change: How Social Movements Work - and How to Support Them
By Manuel Pastor and Rhonda Ortiz
March 2009

Social movements are a hidden underpinning of the American story. Using the tools of relationship-building, community mobilization, and symbolic protest, they have helped bring us civil rights, labor protections, and even a healthier environment, sparking people’s aspirations, imaginations, and actions for a better nation.

Why then has funding of these movements been difficult to obtain and sustain? Some suggest that funders often want more immediate and measurable outcomes – moving a nation to live up to its promise is important but hard to quantify. And yet in recent years, there has been renewed philanthropic interest and openness to investing in social movements, community organizing and policy change, and an understanding that this will require a new level of patience and a new set of relationships with grantees.

This document seeks to provide a guidepost to both funders and the field by detailing what makes for a successful social movement, what capacities need to be developed, and what funding opportunities might exist.

The document itself comes from a different model of funder-grantee relationships. The paper from which this Executive Summary draws was initially requested by The California Endowment as its leaders were thinking through the connection between place-based comprehensive change and state-level policy in the Golden State. Thinking that the connection between the two might be social movements and community organizing, TCE commissioned us, the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE), to do a series of interviews with leading organizers – and asked us to write something that would make sense to these activists as well as foundation leaders.

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Executive Summary
Full Report

Immigrant Integration in Los Angeles: Strategic Directions for Funders
By Manuel Pastor and Rhonda Ortiz
January 2009

The Program for Environmental and Regional Equity and the Center for the Study o Immigrant Immigration on Tuesday released their report, Immigrant Integration in Los Angeles: Strategic Directions for Funders, which stresses how foreign-born and native-born Angelenos can work together for a stronger region. In Los Angeles County, one third of our residents are immigrants, nearly half of our workforce is foreign-born, and two-thirds of those under 18 are the children of immigrants, 90 percent of which are U.S. born. Immigrant integration can be defined as improved economic mobility for, enhanced civic participation by, and receiving society openness to immigrants.

"Southern California's social stability and economic prosperity is directly tied to what happens to our immigrant workers, families and children, said Antonia Hernández president and CEO of the California Community Foundation. We're in this together. So it is in our mutual interest and obligations to help our immigrant neighbors integrate into society...We are investing not just in their future, but in Southern California's as well." Immigrants by their residence add to the local economy, by their labor add to the workforce, and by their background add to the Los Angeles global ties. The report outlines specific strategies to:

• Increase opportunities for economic mobility for immigrants, their families and their communities,
• Enhance opportunities for civic participation by immigrants, and
• Foster openness in society towards immigrants and their families.
  

PERE created the report using both demographic data and collective input from immigrants rights advocates, business and workforce development leaders, planners and government agencies, funders, labor unions, and community builders. The California Community Foundation funded the project.

PERE is a research unit headed by Professor Manuel Pastor and part of the USC Center for Sustainable Cities. The Program conducts research and facilitates discussions on issues of environmental justice, regional inclusion and immigrant integration. PERE conducts high-quality research that is relevant to public policy concerns and that reaches to those directly affected communities that most need to be engaged in the discussion. In general, we seek and support direct collaborations with community-based organizations in research and other activities, trying to forge a new model of how university and community can work together for the common good.

The Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) headed by Dowell Myers and Manuel Pastor has as its mission to remake the narrative for understanding, and the dialogue for shaping, immigrant integration in America. Our intent is to identify and evaluate the mutual benefits of immigrant integration for the native-born and immigrants and to study the pace of the ongoing transformation in different locations, not only in the past and present but projected into the future. CSII thus brings together three emphases: scholarship that draws on academic theory and rigorous research, data that provides information structured to highlight the process of immigrant integration over time, and engagement that seeks to create new dialogues with government, community organizers, business and civic leaders, immigrants and the voting public.

Download the report
Full Report

News about the report
Foundation aims to help L.A. immigrants
The California Community Foundation plans a campaign to help L.A. immigrants become more active citizens by helping them learn English, improve job skills and increase civic participation.
By Teresa Watanabe
Los Angeles Times
February 10, 2009

State of the Region: Growth, Equity, and Inclusion in the BayArea
By Manuel Pastor, Rhonda Ortiz, Jennifer Tran, Justin Scoggins, and Vanessa Carter
December 2008

For the last decade, regional business and civic groups has been crafting indices to get a handle on the progress of their metropolitan areas. Many of these indices dwell on innovation and business investment but pay scant attention to issues of inclusion and equity. But making social equity a sidebar rather than a key part of the main show is exactly wrong: the latest research has shown that those metros that make more progress on reducing poverty, segregation, and inequality actually grow faster and stronger.

Because we think that keeping fairness in mind is important for our national and regional economic recovery and because our concern has long been for those fairing the least well, we have been working with Urban Habitat and others to create a regional index focused primarily on inclusion and equity. After all, if we can include all of us, we can meet our challenges; if we can bridge the Bay, we can build the Bay together.

The challenges may seem daunting but the opportunities to work and grow together are there. While gentrification threatens the region, the Bay Area is also home to groups on the cutting edge of equitable and inclusionary smart growth policies. While new leaders need to step up to the plate, organizations like Urban Habitat and Working Partnerships have been busy training residents in leadership and policy development. And while the economy is problematic, community groups have made great strides in securing community benefits agreements, advocating for living wages, and supporting the unionization of workers – and more efforts are needed to refashion education, integrate immigrants, and provide innovative re-entry programs for those that have become caught up in the criminal justice system.

Ten years ago, the Social Equity Caucus (SEC) was founded with a simple set of core ideas – that the region was where the action was, that inclusion was key to metropolitan success, and that to do this right, you needed to include the organized voice and policy ideas of those social justice advocates and community leaders closest to the ground. On this anniversary of the founding of the SEC, it is our hope that this document and the data we offer will help advocates as they continue their work to build a more prosperous, more inclusive and more sustainable Bay Area.

Learn more about the Social Equity Caucus (SEC) and the first ever State of the Region event.

Download the executive summary here.

Affiliated Publications

Cumulative Impacts in East Oakland: Findings from a Community-Based Mapping Study
Communities for a Better Environment
September 2008

The report was put together by Communities for a Better Environment and other partners, the California Air Resources Board, Manuel Pastor of the University of Southern California's Program for Environmental and Regional Equity; James Sadd, Associate Professor of Environmental Science at Occidental College; and Rachel Morello-Frosch, who is currently at UC-Berkeley and was formerly an Assistant Professor at the Center for Environmental Studies and the Department of Community Health at Brown University.

The study addresses the environmental effects of toxic pollution, such as idling diesel trucks and pollution from auto-shop repairs and chemical companies.

News about the report
Uneasy Breathing -- Air Pollution in Oakland
By Jane Kay
San Francisco Chronicle
September 23, 2008

Oakland residents test neighborhood air quality
By Alan Wang
ABC 7
Monday, September 22, 2008

OAKLAND: Study Says Industry Causes Health Problems in East Oakland
OAKLAND (BCN)
Monday, September 22, 2008

Groups convene to address environmental concerns in East Oakland
By Kamika Dunlap
Oakland Tribune
Article Launched:09/18/2008 05:11:27 PM PDT