Mapping Houston's Garbage: The 1979 lawsuit that first challenged a landfill as racial discrimination

A 1979 study had discovered that all five city-owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Moreover, “Six out of eight city-owned incinerators were in black neighborhoods,” he recalled in a 2017 interview with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “And more than 80 percent of the garbage dumped in the city from the 1930s up to 1978 was being dumped in black neighborhoods. Black people only made up a quarter of Houston’s population at the time.”
Harriet A. Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste, 1208

My reflection: In 1979, the residents of Northwood Manor, a Black, middle-class, suburban neighborhood in northeast Houston, noticed construction going up nearby. According to a federal court, they were told, and believed, that it was going to be a shopping center or a steel mill.

It was a garbage landfill (Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp., 1979, n.5). By one account, 85 percent of the families there owned their homes (Bullard, Grist, 2006). The site sat about 1,700 feet from Smiley High School, a mostly Black school with no air conditioning (Bean).

The residents organized, gathered hundreds of signatures, and hired a lawyer, Linda McKeever Bullard. She understood the trap waiting for her. "They wanted us to argue the suitability of the site," she said later, "because we would have lost" (quoted in The Nation). Arguing about soil and drainage was the company's ground. She wanted to argue something bigger: that this landfill wasn't an accident, but part of a pattern. The case, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, became the first lawsuit in the country to challenge the siting of a waste facility as racial discrimination under civil rights law (Bullard, 2014).

To prove a pattern, she needed data. So she asked her husband, a young sociologist at Texas Southern University. "My wife asked me to collect data for a lawsuit she had filed," Robert Bullard remembered. "That's how I got dragged into this" (Grist).

Bullard and his graduate students went through city records and old microfiche. They stuck pushpins in a paper map of Houston, one for every city dump and incinerator going back to the 1920s (Bullard, 2014; The Nation). Houston matters here because it has no zoning, the rules most cities use to separate homes from factories and dumps. Without zoning, Bullard reasoned, you'd expect garbage sites to be scattered around. They weren't. All five city-owned landfills and six of the eight city-owned incinerators sat in Black neighborhoods, in a city that was only about a quarter Black (Grist; City of Houston, 1980 census). "In a city that does not have zoning," he said, "it meant that these were decisions made by individuals in government" (Grist).

The case went to Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, the first Black federal judge in Texas, who had been on the bench for only a few months. She heard eleven days of testimony. And she counted the city a different way.

The court used census tracts, the small areas the Census Bureau uses to report population, and it compared the whole city. By that measure, the share of waste sites in mostly minority tracts was almost exactly the share of minority tracts in Houston. The difference, the judge wrote, was "at best, only 0.3%" (Bean). The law also required something statistics alone couldn't provide. Under Supreme Court rulings from the 1970s, a civil rights claim like this needed proof of discriminatory intent, a deliberate purpose, not just a lopsided result (Washington v. Davis, 1976; Arlington Heights, 1977).

Judge McDonald didn't hide what she thought of the decision. "If this Court were TDH," she wrote, meaning the Texas Department of Health, "it might very well have denied this permit." She called the decision "unfortunate and insensitive." But she ruled that the residents hadn't shown it was motivated by purposeful discrimination, and she refused to stop the landfill (Bean). It was built. It is still operating (The Nation).

So who counted right?

Here the story gets more interesting than either side's version. In 1994, the legal scholar Vicki Been went back to Bullard's Houston sites with census data from the years each one was chosen. She found that about half of them had gone into areas that were disproportionately Black at the time. The other half hadn't. But after the dumps arrived, every landfill neighborhood became more Black and poorer, in some cases dramatically, as land and homes nearby lost value and the people who could leave did (Been, Yale Law Journal, 1994, pp. 1403–05). Siting and the housing market had worked together. Later national studies, following facilities over decades, found that disproportionate siting was the stronger force (Mohai & Saha, 2015). Houston looks like both at once.

The Digital Mind claim behind this issue says race, not chance, decided where Houston's waste went. "Not chance" holds up. Eleven of thirteen city facilities in the neighborhoods of a quarter of the population is not a coin toss. "Race decided" needs more care. The numbers show who got the dumps. They don't show anyone's motive, and the neighborhoods changed after the dumps arrived. The judge wasn't wrong that the evidence didn't prove intent. The law was asking the wrong question.

What I keep coming back to is the unit of measurement. Count by neighborhood, and you see a pattern. Count by census tract across a whole city, and the pattern can nearly disappear. Neither count is fake. But the choice of how to count decided the case, and nobody who lived next to the landfill got to make it.