At the end of 2015, a public record request revealed the officials at the DTSC who were in charge of coming to the determination that nothing needed to be done had concurrently been sending racist emails between themselves. Emails in which they used terms such as “injun,” “crackho hooker,” and “Hop Sing” were made public.
“Those were the people who oversaw this ‘no further action’ determination at Jordan Downs,” said Alexander Harnden, an attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which is part of the coalition that has been advocating for residents along with the LA Human Right to Housing Collective and Physicians for Social Responsibility. Harnden estimates that the Jordan Downs community is 70 percent Latino and 30 percent black.
The coalition decided to take matters into its own hands: members used an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer to test soil at 104 spots in Jordan Downs. “All of those came back very high,” Harnden noted. Specifically, over half of the samples showed lead levels above 80 ppm, with about a third of them above 100 ppm. The group found a sample at 346 ppm, more than four times higher than the state’s threshold of concern. The coalition also found high levels of arsenic — with many samples exceeding the state’s threshold — cadmium, mercury, and antimony.
If all of these toxins have been compacted into the soil over the years, there’s a risk that demolitions will disturb it and kick toxins up into the air. HACLA’s Scanlin characterized the coalition’s testing and subsequent results as “continued misinformation spread by unregulated tests conducted by the advocacy community.”
But advocates maintain that these results should be cause for concern. “Given that the housing authority is proposing to spend a billion dollars of public money, we think there’s definitely room in the budget to make sure all of the residents are safe,” Harnden said. “We’re not against the modernization of Jordan Downs… but they shouldn’t be forced to choose between that and protecting their children.”