2024 Fall Issue of Urban Land - 58

ULI PRIZE FOR VISIONARIES IN URBAN DEVELOPMENT
locally unwanted land uses in
Black and brown communities.
UL: What was the outcome of
the case, and what does discrimination
look like today?
Bullard: We lost the case in
court, [but] I asked the question,
" Is this just Houston? Is
this just the South? " That's
how I expanded the study in
Houston and started to [work
on] Dumping in Dixie, taking
a systems approach to look at
what's happening in the South.
As I discovered, this [discrimination
is not happening just
in] Houston.
That discrimination that
Dr. Robert Bullard at a protest rally in Kettleman City, California in 1992.
were made by [the] city
council and mayor. They were
all white and, in most cases,
white men [who] decided to
put these garbage dumps in
Black neighborhoods. Judson
Robinson Jr. became the first
African American to serve
on the Houston city council
in 1971. Ironically, the first
major crisis he faced on the
city council involved a cityowned
landfill in a northeast
Houston Black neighborhood.
And then, [once] the
laws changed in 1976-when
the Environmental Protection
Agency came along-and then
the regulations for controlling
unlined landfills . . . you got
the Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act [RCRA]
that regulated landfills [and]
meant that you had to line
the landfills, and you had to
be regulated, et cetera. So, the
old pattern [set in the 1930s]
set the precedent and set the
tone for the new pattern. Over
the decades, white elected
officials used Not in My Backyard
[NIMBY] practices as a
protectionist device to keep
solid waste facilities out of
their neighborhoods and, at
the same time, deployed racist
Place in Blacks' Back Yard
[PIBBY] policies and practices
to systematically target Black
neighborhoods for garbage
dumps, landfills, and incinerators.
UL:
How did things change
after the lawsuit?
Bullard: After the lawsuit,
not a single Type 1 [Subtitle
D] landfill that's licensed to
receive municipal garbage has
been sited in the city of Houston,
so it had an impact. But if
you look at what's happening
nationally, the same pattern
continues in terms of Black
and brown communities getting
more than their fair share
of landfills, incinerators, and
other kinds of what we call
" locally unwanted land uses, "
or LULUs. This pattern holds
true, in cities with or without
zoning. The same community
that we looked at in Houston
in our 1979 study-the [place]
that had the most landfills . . .
garbage dumps, these are the
same neighborhoods that that
have been denied infrastructure.
They're more likely to
flood. [These] neighborhoods
are more likely not [to] have
parks or green space. They're
urban heat islands and pollution
" hot spots. "
These same neighborhoods
are more likely to have other
[forms of] polluting, so racism
and redlining went hand in
hand [with] denying Black
communities . . . equal protection
under the law. And as
the Hispanic population grew,
over the years, in Houston, we
found that that same pattern
matched with the [one faced
by the] Black community in
terms of expansion of these
occurred beginning in the
'30s, in terms of the redlining,
extended into the '70s with
the landfills, and . . . now, with
the 2020s, with [inadequate
infrastructure] flooding, the
communities that get hit the
hardest, in terms of power
outages, winter freezes, and
the extent to which they are
impacted disproportionately . .
. . I have maps to show [those
things].
UL: How did you develop this
new brand of sociology?
Bullard: I was trying to pattern
my work after [that of] a
famous . . . Black sociologist,
W.E.B. Du Bois. In other words,
you do the study, but then the
study [doesn't just] sit on the
shelf. The study is supposed
to do something else, and . . .
I call that " kick-ass sociology, "
and one of the most famous
" kick-ass sociologists " was Du
Bois.
And so, you take the study,
and you lift it up. Having
the data, having the science,
having the facts is not enough
to win in a court. That means
I've got to go gather additional
information to show that
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URBAN LAND FALL 202 4
DR. ROBER T BULL ARD AND THE BULL ARD CENTER F OR ENVIRONMENT AL JUS TICE
2024 Fall Issue of Urban Land

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