Thread by @MesMitch

'We’re just waiting to die': the black residents living on top of a toxic landfill site

In the 1980s, black New Orleanians were encouraged to buy houses built by the city on top of a toxic landfill. Three decades later it is one of Louisiana’s worst cancer hotspots, but residents of Gordon Plaza are still fighting to be relocated

In 1988, Jesse Perkins was 27 years old and trying to get his piece of the American dream.With savings from his job at New Orleans’ sewage and water board, he purchased his first home in Gordon Plaza, a newly built subdivision in the city’s Desire neighborhood.

The modest single-family home was one of dozens developed by the city’s housing authority, built with the help of federal funds, and marketed as affordable housing to African Americans starting to rise into the city’s middle class.

Perkins planned to live there with his mother and, hopefully, one day pass it on to his future children. Now, he said, “I wouldn’t give it to a dog”.

Like other residents who bought in Gordon Plaza in the 80s and early 90s,

Perkins says he had no idea his house was built on top of a toxic dump.

“It’s gone from the American dream to a nightmare,” said Perkins, now 68. In his backyard, a giant orange tree grows, but he can’t eat any of its fruit.

After chemical drums and other detritus started literally popping out of front yards, the EPA began testing the soil in the 1980s. The land was rich in arsenic, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and had extremely high levels of lead, among other powerful

toxins left behind by the Agriculture Street landfill. All told, about 150 contaminants have been found in the soil, 49 of which are known carcinogens In 1994 the area – including Gordon Plaza, an elementary school, a public housing development called Press Park apartments

and a senior housing complex – was declared a Superfund site (a US federal government program designed to fund the clean-up of toxic wastes).

“Sometimes I think it’s criminal,” said Perkins. “How can you treat human beings like this?”

‘The fight for our lives’
For 50 years, from 1909 to 1958, the city’s medical, municipal and industrial waste was sent here to be incinerated and sprayed with now banned pesticides. In the late 90s city officials started planning low-income housing developments here.

The ground beneath their feet
Marilyn Amar doesn’t like to go outside. She keeps the windows and doors at her tidy Gordon Plaza home closed, dusts every day and changes the air vents “constantly”. A friend takes care of her lawn so she doesn’t have to be exposed to the dust,

soil and fumes from her yard that she believes caused her breast cancer. “God bless him,” she says.The 69-year-old New Orleans native has been here for decades. In the 1970s, she lived in the Press Park apartments – a neighboring public housing site,

also built on the landfill, that was ordered closed after Katrina and the last abandoned remnants of which were finally demolished by the city last year.

Generational trauma
Sheena Dedmond, 35 is sitting on her plush, champagne-colored couch, once owned by her mother

Her mother died of cancer her father was diagnosed with a brain tumor and she has watched nearly everyone on her block either get cancer or suffer from other disease