An E-Commerce Warehouse Boom Imperils Communities of Color. Here’s How to Protect Them.
While most New Yorkers have never heard of a “last-mile” warehouse, odds are you likely relied on one the last time you ordered something online. A delivery truck driver dropped off that Halloween costume, desk lamp, pair of shoes, or anything else you can imagine to your apartment just hours after you hit “submit order,” in what was one of the hundreds of deliveries made in the hour since the truck departed the Amazon warehouse a few miles away in Brooklyn or the Bronx.
While e-commerce giants were already making record profits leading up to 2020, the onset of Covid-19 catapulted the sector’s revenues into the stratosphere as consumer demand for online goods increased by over 33 percent nationwide in one year. It’s estimated that delivery trucks now drop off more than 2.4 million packages every day in New York City alone.
Amazon, UPS, FedEx, and others have been spending billions of dollars gobbling up properties across New York City and converting them into logistics and distribution warehouses strategically located in or near residential neighborhoods to reduce delivery times and fulfill same-day or next-day guarantees.
While the “last-mile” in e-commerce denotes the short journey from such a warehouse to the customer’s doorstep, the environmental and public health impacts of these trips linger long after the package is delivered.
Since the pandemic, New York City’s lower-income Black and Latinx neighborhoods have become the last-mile epicenter: At least six facilities are being developed in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Red Hook neighborhoods, in addition to others in the South Bronx and Queens.
Architectural firm Gensler notes that last-mile warehouses are optimally situated within nine miles of a retailer’s customer base, so competition is stiff to set up operations in densely populated urban neighborhoods with easy highway access for delivery trucks. These neighborhoods are predominantly Black and Latinx as a result of the construction of the National Highway System in the 1950s, which tore through communities of color without their consent.
While e-commerce companies regularly highlight the influx of local jobs that their warehouses create, they neglect to disclose the dangerous environmental, public health, and safety conditions that these operations impose upon their employees and the communities in which they operate.
Large diesel-powered delivery trucks spew pollutants like particulate matter into the air as they zoom down narrow residential corridors day and night, worsening asthma rates and traffic congestion. New last-mile facilities sited in five New York City community districts are in high-traffic communities of color, which will drastically increase pollution levels in neighborhoods that already face disproportionate environmental and public health burdens. The Bronx’s Longwood and Melrose neighborhoods have the highest asthma rates in the city, while Red Hook’s concentrations of particulate matter are almost triple the city average.
Unless last-mile warehouses are subject to increased public health regulations, New York’s low-income communities of color will continue to breathe dirtier air than their white and wealthier neighbors.
At the root of the problem is the ambiguity surrounding how these warehouses are classified under the City’s Zoning Resolution text. Last-mile warehouses are not explicitly defined under City zoning law, so the Department of City Planning treats them as generic warehouses that can be constructed “as-of-right” in manufacturing and certain commercial districts. “As-of-right” means that as long as the warehouse meets the City’s existing requirements, no additional public input process or environmental review is required for the developer to be issued a permit and begin construction.
But last-mile warehouses have a sizably greater impact on air quality, land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and traffic congestion than a traditional warehouse: they take up three times as much logistics space on average and require significantly higher numbers of truck trips for the staggering volume of deliveries generated by e-commerce.
Environmental justice and public health advocates including El Puente and Earthjustice have now come together as the Last-Mile Coalition. We’re urging the City Planning Commission to amend the text of the Zoning Resolution to adopt more stringent regulations for last-mile trucking facilities.
These include instituting safeguards against clustering of these facilities in specific neighborhoods, and would also provide protections for schools, parks, public housing, and other land uses that are threatened by a status quo that allows unmitigated development directly adjacent to such sensitive areas. Perhaps as important, the proposed updates would finally provide communities an opportunity to evaluate a new facility’s public health and environmental impacts.
New York City needs to take a hard look at modernizing its land use policies in order to achieve its racial equity and environmental justice goals, especially as it lags behind jurisdictions across New York State that have already done so.
E-commerce has fundamentally transformed the way goods are delivered in our society, and last-mile warehouses are going to be long-term tenants in New York City for decades to come. But there needs to be a balance between the need for these facilities in the chain of commerce and our communities’ need for clean air and safe streets. By updating zoning regulations to require that developers explicitly disclose how their facilities will not worsen air pollution and traffic congestion, and by prioritizing the use of waterways, railways, bikes, and electric vehicles to deliver goods, we can better achieve that balance.
Rami Dinnawi is the environmental justice coordinator for El Puente, a community human rights institution based in Williamsburg and Bushwick. Alok Disa is a senior research and policy analyst at Earthjustice’s northeast regional office in New York City. The Last-Mile Coalition is made up of The New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, The Point CDC, UPROSE, El Puente, Earthjustice, Red Hook Initiative, and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.
Photo by: Marco Verch