The 19th century sanitary movement aimed to improve public health through miasma theory, focusing on cleanliness, fresh air, and pure water. Sanitary surveys were used to collect data on living conditions and disease and death rates. The Progressive era saw the development of doctrines and practices in municipal administration and city planning, influenced by political corruption. Professionalism emerged because of the division between public health and city planning. The germ theory of disease played a significant role in public health research and intervention. Zoning matters emerged in the late 19th century, becoming a significant aspect of New York City’s planning and government. The classification of areas was influenced by politics and class relations, with economic factors leading to the rise of zoning in New York City.

Four primarily minority and low-income communities in New York City: Sunset Park and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, West Harlem in Manhattan, and the South Bronx in the late 1980s and 1990s. These neighborhoods share racial and poverty demographics, housing stock, and zoning designations, as well as social and political histories as centers for working-class waterfront employment and municipal neglect (or in some cases, active destruction by state policies such as highway building). Historically central to the economic activity of the industrial city, each neighborhood has faced a rough transition to economic marginality in the recent past. Hurt by the decline of manufacturing and constrained by zoning designations that concentrate noxious polluting facilities in specific neighborhoods, these communities are characterized by high rates of despair (high levels of unemployment, disease, exposure to environmental pollutants as well as low levels of income, home ownership and education), an excess concentration of noxious facilities, and a lack of environmental benefits such as open space. During the 1980s and 1990s, a few environmental justice campaigns emerged in response to proposals to site or expand noxious facilities in predominantly low-income areas and communities of color. These facilities were for sanitary or environmental services, including incinerators (medical waste and municipal), sludge and sewage treatment plants, solid waste transfer stations, and power plants.

Activists in New York City’s communities of color have come to ask why their neighborhoods are, in their words, “targeted” and treated as environmental “sacrifice zones,” contributing to epidemic rates of asthma and other environmentally influenced diseases. In response, corporations and government agencies (at the local and state levels) have generally brushed aside community assertions about environmental racism and injustices by framing these claims exclusively through the prism of discriminatory intent. The rising prevalence of asthma among minority populations over the last 20 years is a major motivating factor in environmental justice movements in New York City and throughout the country. Government agencies and companies have mostly ignored community charges of environmental injustice and racism because they see these concerns through the lens of discrimination. Asthma, particularly childhood asthma, was an important organizing issue in the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition’s campaign against the Bronx-Lebanon medical waste incinerator, West Harlem Environmental Action’s campaign against the North River sewage treatment Plant, El Puente’s activism against the Brooklyn Navy Yard incinerator, and organizing against the proposed sludge treatment plant in Sunset Park. Combating fatigo, as asthma is known in Spanish, became a way of life for many low-income youth of color and a defining feature of environmental justice activism in the 1980s and 1990s(Sze, 2006).

Children of color in low-income neighborhoods have shown the highest increase in rates of asthma in recent years, and the racial disparity has grown steadily since 1980. Childhood asthma has been a growing issue in New York City since the 1980s and 1990s, with over 4.8 million children under 18 having it (Sze 2004).Their health risks is a result of increasing scientific evidence indicating that children are more susceptible to the effects of environmental pollution than adults because of fundamental differences in their physiology, metabolism, absorption, and exposure patterns.