Smog Affects Poor, Young, Nonwhite the Most : Research: Air pollution tends to be worst in low-income area of Southern California, economists claim. Youths suffer playing outdoors.

The poor, the young and the nonwhite suffer the most from Southern California’s smog, mainly because they live in low-income areas where pollution tends to be worst, according to two Cal State Fullerton economists.

By correlating pollution levels across Orange, Los Angeles, and most of Riverside and San Bernardino counties with age, ethnic and income statistics for 13 million area residents, researchers found a striking overlap between the smoggiest areas and those with the largest concentration of poor, minority residents, particularly Latinos.

Because children play outdoors more than their elders, the ill health effects fall disproportionately on the young in these areas, the researchers concluded in the new study commissioned by the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

“It is very much a function of geography: Lower-cost housing tends to be in smoggier areas, and poor people tend to live where there is lower-cost housing,” said Jane V. Hall, who co-authored the study with Victor Brajer. Both are environmental and natural resource economists at the Fullerton university.

If the $25,000 computer-modeling study seems to state the obvious, it is the first time anyone has crunched census figures with smog data to explore the socioeconomic impacts of air pollution, AQMD officials said.

As the agency steps up its historic--and controversial--program to clean the nation’s worst air by the year 2010, the study also gives supporters a new counterpunch to critics of the expensive plan: that the poor, minorities and children will be its greatest beneficiaries.

“We’ve got to wake up and smell the coffee because this is part of the social unrest we’ve been watching on TV for the last week,” said Tim Little, executive director of the Coalition for Clean Air, a Santa Monica-based environmental group, in a reference to the rioting that followed acquittals in the Rodney G. King beating trial.

“We can’t as a society be poisoning off large numbers of our inner-city residents. This is toxic discrimination, and it’s just as real as all the other forms of discrimination,” Little said.

Although smog may be heavy in some wealthy enclaves such as San Marino, people at the high end of the economic spectrum tend to live in predominantly Anglo areas such as coastal and southern Orange County, Malibu and West Los Angeles, where the air is generally cleaner, researchers found.

There are smog-prone pockets within those areas, however.

“We know that Riverside and San Bernardino get clobbered by smog. But there are also parts of Orange County that are heavily polluted--parts of Anaheim, parts of Fullerton,” Hall said.

Nor are these concerns exclusive to traditional inner-city areas, said Dr. Howard Waitzkin, an internal medicine specialist who runs UC Irvine’s North Orange County Community Clinic in Anaheim, where the number of patients with chronic asthma and other respiratory diseases is on the rise.

“It’s clear that one of the problems Orange County suffers from is that the people who live along the very rich coastline turn their backs on problems in their own back yard a few miles to the north,” Waitzkin said.

“It’s a real breakdown in our society, and if it continues, we’ll probably see events in Orange County like we did in Los Angeles. . . . The problems are just as severe here. Worse in a way, because there is no accessible county-supported primary care system.”

The health effects study, published last month in the journal Contemporary Policy Issues, did not tally specific ailments among sample population groups.

“But we know from medical literature that everybody has the same kind of health effects when exposed to certain levels of pollutants,” Hall said. “People have more frequent days on which their eyes are irritated; they miss more days of work; their kids might miss school. And we know from the research that there is a slightly increased risk of dying younger than they otherwise would.”

The study examined the pollutants ozone, the main ingredient in smog, and air-born particulate matter of 10 micrometers or less collected by AQMD monitoring stations for each of the basin’s 31 regions in 1989. They compared that data with 1990 census figures on each district’s median income, education level, ethnic breakdown and the percentage of children under 18.

Ozone is a gas created when nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons emitted by cars and industry react in sunlight. It can scar the lungs and is especially harmful to children, the elderly and people with chronic respiratory diseases. (The federal health standard is 12.0 parts of ozone per hundred million parts of air, or p.p.h.m.)

The highest daily average of ozone--12.01 p.p.h.m.--was recorded in the Glendora area at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains where pollutants carried by prevailing winds are trapped. The lowest was the Lennox area of southwestern Los Angeles County with 4.13 p.p.h.m.

Hall and Brajer next looked at the 1990 census data for each area’s median income and education level, ethnic breakdown and the percentage of children under 18. Neither Glendora nor Lennox appeared to fit the study findings because Glendora is 68% Anglo with a fairly high median income of $34,436. Lennox has a median income of $29,887 and an Anglo population of 32%.

But the study shows that the broad middle range of districts did have large numbers of poor, minorities and young children.

Orange County’s five reporting stations ranked in the bottom half of the ozone list. La Habra led the way at 19th with 7.58 p.p.h.m.; Anaheim was 22nd with 6.29 p.p.h.m.; El Toro was 24th with 6.19 p.p.h.m.; Costa Mesa was 28th with 5.38 p.p.h.m., and Los Alamitos was 29th with 4.83 p.p.h.m.

Particulate matter, or p.m.10, refers to suspended particles of dust or sand, products of combustion or even manufacturing. They are only slightly larger than a single red blood cell and can lodge in the lungs, causing respiratory problems, even premature death among those with chronic lung disease. They also can be carriers of carcinogenic and toxic material.

For p.m.10, the Rubidoux region northeast of Norco had the highest counts of 91.4 micrograms per cubic meter of air. (The state standard is 50 micrograms per cubic meter.) The Lake Gregory area in northern San Bernardino County had the lowest, 32.43 micrograms per cubic meter.

La Habra also posted the highest levels of particulates in Orange County, ranking 14th overall with 60.03 micrograms per cubic meter. The others ranked in the bottom third with average readings ranging from 51.4 in Los Alamitos to 40.65 for the El Toro area, which includes all of southern and eastern Orange County.

La Habra, as the smoggiest region in the county, doesn’t fit the pattern of other areas. It has an Anglo majority of 68% and a median income of $39,916. But the Anaheim area, which ranked just a bit below La Habra in ozone, has the lowest median income of $32,408 and an Anglo population of 48%. And El Toro, one of the least polluted areas in the basin has the highest median income of the basin at $42,277 and an Anglo population of nearly 81%.

Taken together, “the results show that relatively younger, poorer, black or Hispanic residents suffer from worse air quality than do adults, those with incomes in the top 40% (above $45,000 a year), and Anglo or Asian residents,” the researchers wrote.

“As you clean up the basin, ultimately the winners could be the nonwhites, the young and the poor,” Brajer said. “Even a program that might be a little more expensive, if it has this positive distributional effect on social groups, might be deemed beneficial.”

UC Irvine professor Robert F. Phalen, however, wonders about the effect on the poor and minorities of the AQMD’s sweeping, $4.8-billion-a-year air quality plan, which for the first time has brought regulation down to the level of the back-yard barbecue, the local hair salon and neighborhood dry cleaner.

“I’m very concerned that the economic impact could be a more serious blow to the poor than to people who have a lot more money,” said Phalen, an expert in air toxics and the director of the air pollution health effects laboratory at UCI’s College of Medicine.

“The poor are usually the first to get hit when the cost of something goes up, like the cost of an automobile, the cost of purchasing electrical power, the cost of buying manufactured goods,” he added. “If the gasoline automobile was banned and you could only buy an electric-powered car and the cheapest cost $40,000, what would that do to people who earn less than $10,000 a year?”

Critics of the regulations have said they will mean a loss of more than 55,000 jobs in the basin. But a watershed 1989 study by Hall and a team of researchers concluded that the health benefits of cleaner air would save the Southland $9.4 billion a year in health care costs, leaving a net dollar gain over the costs of the program.

If the poor and children are the ones who suffer most from smog, their care is ultimately paid for by the average taxpayer, said Michael T. Kleinman, a UCI associate professor of community and environmental medicine and one of Hall’s collaborators on the earlier study.

“People who become sick, especially if they are poor, become a burden on everybody else in society,” Kleinman said. “Not because they want to be, but because they can’t afford the care. . . . So we pay for it regardless. If we pay the money to clean up the air, we get back the benefit of having healthier people.”

Business interests dispute the $9.4-billion health savings and have said the figure is less than half that amount. Some have argued that the plan could cost each household $1,600 a year. The AQMD places the price tag closer to $300 a year, but offset by health savings.