In Support of the Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance

June 26, 2025 / Blogs

Advocates gather in front of Chicago City Hall in April 2025 for the announcement of the Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance.

Reducing Chicago’s pollution exposure through zoning policy

The City of Chicago has the opportunity to reverse decades of discriminatory land use and development practices. The Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance (O2025-0016697) was introduced in City Council by Mayor Brandon Johnson in April this year. The passage of this ordinance will acknowledge the years of hard work by environmental justice advocates, alongside other community, civic, and government partners to address practices that place the burden of pollution on Black and Brown communities. Cumulative impacts are the combination of environmental, health and social stressors that people experience in their daily lives. Some communities are exposed to more stressors than others.

In 2022, a civil rights complaint triggered by the proposed move of the General Iron facility out of Lincoln Park and into the Southeast Side ultimately led to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) settlement that required a Cumulative Impacts Assessment. The Chicago Department of Public Health and the former Office of the Climate and Environmental Equity (now the Department of the Environment) worked on a 15-month process to develop Chicago’s first Cumulative Impact Assessment, a citywide project to provide data on how environmental burdens and other stressors vary in impact across the city. The Assessment was co-led and co-designed with the Environmental Equity Working Group, a City-established collaborative group of community representatives, environmental leaders, and local partners, including Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC).

The Cumulative Impact Assessment Summary Report was issued in 2023 with an Environmental Justice (EJ) Action Plan Report, following in 2024. The action plan report included dozens of specific, actionable policy changes that can be implemented based on current municipal codes and authorities. It made commitments to update zoning regulations for manufacturing, recycling, waste-related, and other intensive industrial uses. Visit here to learn more about the Cumulative Impacts work.

The ordinance is named after Hazel M. Johnson, an environmental activist from the far south side of Chicago. She was considered the “mother of environmental justice” through her work in addressing intersectional environmental and housing issues within the Chicago area. Despite her knowledge of the toxic pollutants in her community, she continued to live in Altgeld Gardens her entire life. She passed away in 2011 and is survived by her daughter, Cheryl Johnson, who continues Hazel M. Johnson’s environmental justice legacy.

MPC’s own Zoning and Land Use Assessment align with the results of the City’s Cumulative Impact Assessment and provided additional understanding of the relationship between pollution exposure and zoning. Our pollution exposure research has shown that pollution and manufacturing are correlated and areas with manufacturing have higher pollution, on average. Black and Latinx Chicagoans are more likely to live in neighborhoods zoned for heavier manufacturing – and manufacturing in general. Specifically, 29% of the land in Latinx Chicagoans’ neighborhoods and 23% of land in Black Chicagoans’ neighborhoods are zoned for manufacturing. This compares to only 5% and 8% of the land zoned this way in areas where most white and Asian Chicagoans live. Moreover, Latinx populations are exposed to more overall and air pollution specifically, as 50% of the population in the highest air pollution tracts are Latinx.

The evidence of environmental injustice demands city action. The Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impacts Ordinance is a powerful step in creating an overall healthier Chicago. By modifying the zoning process, the ordinance will reduce the amount of health-damaging pollution that residents across Chicago are exposed to. The ordinance would do this by:

Requiring intensive industrial facilities to conduct a cumulative impact study to assess potential environmental and health impacts.

Creating an Environmental Justice Advisory Board to review the results of the cumulative impact study.

Requiring additional review for permits for types of new and expanding intensive industrial facilities to ensure that they are safe for the health of communities and the environment.

Manufacturing is an important contributor to the Chicago economy and this ordinance would not ban industrial uses wholesale but would instead require a higher level of review and change zoning, permitting, and land use processes for specific industrial developments that have the highest potential for pollution. That means that a brewery or fabricator, along with most other businesses, would just go through the routine zoning and development process, but an asphalt plan or landfill will have an additional level of scrutiny. The goal is to reduce environmental exposure for the communities that are most burdened, and if passed in concert with City policies that promote and attract new sustainable industries, support job growth. The Hazel Johnson Cumulative Impact Ordinance is a necessary step towards advancing a more environmentally just, healthy, and economically dynamic Chicago.