The Refinery Explosion In Southwest Philadelphia, community members were accustomed to stuffing towels and blankets under their doors to keep the stench of chemicals out of their houses. Mere blocks away from the old Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) plant, the largest oil refinery on the East Coast, the neighborhood had been plagued by birth complications, […]
Community Benefit Agreements, or CBAs, are contracts between community-based organizations and developers that establish developers’ commitments to provide a range of benefits related to a proposed project. Meaningful CBAs, with substantive goals, transparent negotiation, and measures of accountability, can be used to address environmental impacts, educational gaps, housing insecurity, and other pressing issues in communities […]
New Jerusalem, located on the west side of North Philadelphia, is a residential addiction recovery community run by Medical Mission Sisters. In the 1990s, the non-denominational organization took over vacant lots and turned them into fruit and vegetable gardens. The gardens serve as a local and fresh food source for the community as well as […]
Eastwick is a neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia. In the 1950s, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority condemned and seized more than 2,500 acres of land in Eastwick by eminent domain.
Community gardeners in South Kensington claim right to land they have stewarded for 29 years by adverse possession. Members of the Philadelphia Catholic Worker, a longstanding South Kensington community-based organization, filed litigation in order to establish its ownership and gain.
In Hazelton, Pa., a developer was given a permit to fill a contaminated and abandoned mine site with over 2 million tons of unstudied waste material. Starting in 2010, the Law Center represented Save Us From Future Environmental Risks (SUFFER), a community group of concerned Hazleton citizens fighting to protect the environmental health of their community.
Hunting Park, a low-income, largely minority neighborhood in North Philadelphia, has long been home to a disproportionate number of polluters. The Law Center first partnered with Hunting Park residents in 1986 when a company planned to open a facility to treat toxic wastes in the middle of the neighborhood. We provided legal and technical assistance, and we helped the community secure additional safeguards and citizen oversight of the facility’s emissions.
For many years, environmental risks in our workplaces and our communities were kept secret, often revealed only in cases of catastrophes that caused irreparable harm to workers or community members.
Since the 1970s, the predominantly minority community in Harrisburg, Pa., has housed the municipal incinerator that serves the entire largely white county around Harrisburg. The incinerator, closed in 2002, for years emitted dioxins at a rate 150 times higher than other incinerators in the state.
Like the City of Chester in Pennsylvania and many other low-income, minority communities, Camden, New Jersey contains a huge number of high-level polluters. The 90%-minority city is home to a regional incinerator, a regional sewage treatment plant, and multiple Superfund sites.
