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When Betty Foster-Pinkley’s mom passed away in 2010, she took over responsibility for the family house in the East Hills.
The house she and her six siblings grew up in is at the bottom of Dornbush Street. With a slope of 32 degrees, Dornbush is the second steepest street in Pittsburgh and the eighth steepest in the entire country.
During Pittsburgh’s record rainfalls in 2018 and 2019, rainwater flooded Foster-Pinkley’s basement. Her water heater, furnace, air conditioners and some mementos from her children and grandchildren were damaged. She had to pay about $3,000 for replacements and repairs out of her own pocket because it was a natural flood, not a broken pipe that her home insurance would cover.
The flooding seems worse than when she was a kid, she said. “I remember it flooding, but not as bad as it’s been flooding.”
“It’s a white water rapid when it rains there,” said Michael Hiller, the assistant director of UpstreamPgh*, an environmental nonprofit that used to be called The Nine Mile Run Watershed Association.
Later this summer, UpstreamPgh is planning to start construction on a large rain garden in the empty lots across the street from Foster-Pinkley’s home. The $190,000 project is designed to capture a half-million gallons of rain per year and limit the flooding in front of her house. Hiller said UpstreamPgh only has the resources to take on about two of these big projects every year, with the money it gets from grants, donors and its paid work.
And it wasn’t a coincidence that it chose Dornbush.
Equity mapping
Last summer, UpstreamPgh completed a study of the Nine Mile Run watershed, layering a series of environmental, health and demographic data points to figure out where in the watershed they should prioritize new projects. The Dornbush project is one of the first projects that is being prioritized as a result of that study.
UpstreamPgh’s effort is part of a new trend among local environmental nonprofits and city agencies to map out where the area’s environmental problems intersect with the human needs that environmental solutions could address.
Two years ago, the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy created a plan for a new parks tax that would prioritize spending on major renovations according to who lived in the neighborhood as much as the conditions of the parks. The proposal prioritized major greenspace improvements in communities with high poverty, health problems and violent crime. Although the proposal ran into controversy at Pittsburgh City Council, the city is now collecting the tax money and outgoing Mayor Bill Peduto has endorsed the conservancy’s plan for how to spend it.
The Negley Run Task Force, a group that is promoting large-scale landscaping projects to capture rain in neighborhoods like Larimer and Lincoln-Lemington-Belmar, commissioned its own mapping study this year. The task force has identified tens of millions of dollars in potential projects, though it likely won’t be able to attract the funding to do them all at once.
John Stephens, who chairs the Negley Run Task Force, said the reason he wanted to identify where the inequity is concentrated is because stormwater projects have multiple benefits beyond removing sewage and preventing flooding. For example, trees can make it cooler for residents in the summer, increase home values and clean the air for kids who have asthma. Without these equity studies, he said, projects could be built where people complain the loudest rather than where there is the most need.
Next year, UpstreamPgh plans to spend nearly $600,000 through a state grant to capture rain and install landscaping at two parking lots in Wilkinsburg, another project that will improve one of the micro-neighborhoods they identified as having the greatest need. It will be the group’s largest project since its stream restoration in Frick Park, said Brenda Smith, UpstreamPgh’s executive director.
“A lot of the environmental movement over the years has focused on things that are not the aspects of ecological restoration that matter most to people in low-income communities,” she said.
When UpstreamPgh goes into communities like Wilkinsburg and East Hills, Smith said, they often focus their conversations on things like the air quality benefit the community will receive, rather than the benefit to the water quality of the stream in Frick Park.
“For poor people who don’t get to go to the park very often, it’s not at the top of their agenda,” she said. “But if their kids have asthma, having good air quality is.”
To help promote more mapping, Penn State’s Sustainability Institute offered a class in May titled, “Hidden Burdens: Using mapping to address PA’s environmental justice.”
Natural disasters that are likely to get worse with climate change, such as flooding, exacerbate existing inequalities, said Carolyn Kousky, the executive director of the Wharton Risk Center at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s because low-income families often don’t have the savings, credit or insurance to help them weather storm damage. Even when there is federal disaster aid, it provides only a tiny portion of the payouts that insurance typically does, she said.
The location of the city’s stormwater projects could be one of the most competitive areas of investment in the coming decades as the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority [ALCOSAN] and the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority [PWSA] spend hundreds of millions of dollars to address stormwater challenges. Nine Mile Run is just one of several watersheds with more rainwater problems than there are currently resources to address.
ALCOSAN looks at how it can best remove sewage overflows from the rivers, not at how its projects will specifically help nearby residents. But the new stormwater plan PWSA is developing will look at the broader impact.
Tony Igwe, who joined PWSA in February to manage its growing list of stormwater projects, said the authority is looking into using equity and environmental justice measures. In April, PWSA proposed implementing a stormwater fee that would provide about $6 or $7 million per year for projects like this. It would cost the average residential customer about $6 per month starting next year.
Igwe said this could increase to as much as $24 million each year to help address rainwater challenges but the yearly rate increases will have to be approved by the Pennsylvania Utilities Commission. Although the state Rep. Ed Gainey, Pittsburgh’s presumptive mayor-elect, has opposed these increases, Igwe said he thinks they’re inevitable.
“I don’t know that you can avoid having a plan and putting together projects to start helping people,” he said.
Dornbush need
By some measures, Foster-Pinkley’s neighborhood is doing OK. The hillsides nearby are green, and it remains much cooler there in the summer than in many flatter treeless parts of Homewood or Wilkinsburg. Although there is some pollution from cars on Frankstown Avenue, overall the air there is pretty clean, according to the UpstreamPgh study last summer.
“So that was something we weren’t necessarily expecting to see, that these lower-income areas were going to be scoring well in any of the categories, but they did,” Hiller said.
But by other measures, the neighborhood has fallen behind. It was among the worst areas in the watershed for obesity, childhood asthma and the percentage of people without health insurance. And it also scored low for “social vulnerability,” a public health measure that combines income, race, age and housing status. When all the factors were added up, Dornbush’s census tract had the highest need of all 29 census tracts within the Nine Mile Run watershed, according to UpstreamPgh’s “equity index.”
UpstreamPgh also looked for places where there were vacant lots, school or city-owned parks with nearby flooding or sewage overflow problems, then found the areas where these environmental challenges overlapped with human ones. It then identified 10 small areas, typically only a few blocks long, where they have begun to look for projects.
During a neighborhood canvas last year, UpstreamPgh’s director of community outreach offered Foster-Pinkley a free rain barrel and learned about the flooding issues at her house. In October, the nonprofit built a rain garden in her back yard to help funnel water away from her basement. Foster-Pinkley asked if the new project across the street could include some green space where her five grandchildren could go and play because the rain garden now covers her backyard. UpstreamPgh added green space.
Follow-up conservations with neighbors are a critical part of UpstreamPgh’s plans for improving these areas. It’s a way to give communities some control over the nonprofit’s roughly $1 million annual budget, Hiller said.
“It’s easy to say that $1 million is our organization’s money, but really it’s intended to provide benefits for the watershed we serve and the people who live in it,” he said. “It is basically a way of giving the power — money is power — you give that power to the community: ‘Here is the money; tell us how you want to see it spent.’”