December 11, 2024
Quantifying Hazards – The Broadsheet

City Hall Environmental Databases Paint a Mixed Picture of Lower Manhattan

A range of indicators about metrics such as air quality and tree cover show the area south of Canal Street lags behind Manhattan and the City as a whole in numerous ways. The City’s Environmental Health and Data Portal divides these benchmarks into broad categories, such as Outdoor Air and Health, Climate Health, Housing Health, and Active Design.

In the Outdoor Air and Health category, the community scores dramatically worse than the five boroughs as a whole on three kinds of heating fuel emissions. For sulfur dioxide, Downtown registers 8.3 tons per square kilometer, which is more than double the corresponding metric (3.5) for the City overall. For nitrous oxide, the local measure of 142.8 is more than five times worse that benchmark for the City in its entirety (27.4). And for fine particulates (pieces of soot measuring 2.5 micrometers or smaller — about one-thirtieth the diameter of a strand of human hair), the community measures 1.2, compared with 0.5 for all of New York City. Lower Manhattan also ranks worse than the City as a whole (but only marginally so) for three major air pollutants: fine particulates, black carbon, and nitrogen dioxide. The Outdoor Air and Health category also measures local vehicular congestion, and documents that cars passing through Lower Manhattan drive 116.7 million miles per year for each square mile of local space, while all traffic (including trucks) score only slightly more moderately, at 112.3 million miles. The analogous measures for the City overall are 54.9 million miles for cars and 59.6 million miles for all vehicles.

In terms of Climate Health, which measures climate-related hazards, vulnerability, and health impacts, Lower Manhattan generally compares well to other NYC neighborhoods, but scores worse in two criteria: secondhand smoke (7.0 percent of Downtown households are estimated to pose this risk, as opposed to 4.9 percent for the City overall) and vegetative cover (meaning grass and trees, which blanket 24 percent of the community, compared with 38 percent for the five boroughs generally).

For Housing Health, Downtown scores worse than the larger City in three areas: heat hospitalizations (the local metric of 2.2 persons per 100,000 population is slightly worse than the City’s figure of 1.6); the rate of carbon monoxide incidents (the community’s rate rate of 8.7 per 10,000 dwellings is almost ten times the 0.9 proportion for all of New York); and the proportion of homes that are not smoke free: 25.5 for Lower Manhattan, alongside 22.9 for the five boroughs.

Gauged by Active Design (which includes physical activity), Lower Manhattan scores better than or equivalent to the rest of the City in every category save three. Tree shade (as distinct from tree and grass cover, above) covers only 14 percent of local land area, compared to the 21 percent average for all communities. The percentage of local adults who report seeing rats or mice outdoors is 60.3, rather than the City-wide tally of 34 percent. And while 81.6 percent of Downtown adults judge their neighborhood to be safe from crime, this is lower than the City’s overall rate of 85.5 percent.

In a related development, State Senator Brian Kavanagh is sponsoring the Lead Paint Right to Know Act, a bill that (if enacted) would require the disclosure of lead-based paint test reports in all real estate transactions, in order to prevent properties that have not been previously tested from being transferred to new owners without knowledge of potential hazards. The measure would additionally create a new lead inspection registry overseen by the State Department of Health. At its October 22 meeting, Community Board 1 passed a resolution urging the ratification of this bill.

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