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The 20-mile corridor is among the most heavily industrialized stretches in the country. It slices through poor Latino and black neighborhoods where an estimated 100,000 people live. Scattered among those neighborhoods are eight public housing projects that are home to some 4,000 families – about half the city’s public housing.

The corridor begins near downtown and the William Mead housing project. William Mead, completed in 1943, includes a large playground that authorities say was unwittingly built on a toxic waste dump.

A resident told the Los Angeles Housing Authority in a 1993 letter that three of his brothers and six of his friends who used the playground had died of cancer.

In 1996, scientists discovered lead, arsenic and cancer-causing chemicals in the playground’s soil. Authorities

Los Angeles, California slideshow

fenced it off. A cleanup has begun. More than 400 families live at William Mead; 98 percent are minority.

From downtown, the corridor arcs south skirting the industrial enclave of Vernon.

Vernon has tens of thousands of workers but fewer than 200 residents. It is home to lead smelters, chrome-plating shops, rendering plants, metal foundries, metal-plating shops and hazardous-waste processors.

Vernon is bordered on the north by Estrada Courts, one of the most toxic housing projects in California. More than 400 families live there; 99 percent are minority.

Don J. Smith, the executive director of the Los Angeles Housing Authority, said his agency has never examined the impact of toxic air emissions on public housing along the Alameda Corridor.

"I am always concerned about these issues," he said. "I will have the environmental people look into that."

The Dallas Morning News found that one of every two minority families in public housing in California lives within approximately one mile of factories that report toxic air emissions to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; among white families in public housing, the ratio is one in 10.

No overall limit

The government regulates most toxic chemical emissions individually, and there is no federal limit on a community’s overall levels of such pollution.

Lamarque Peña, a resident at Estrada Courts, is less concerned with the legality of the air pollution in her community than its effects on her children.

"My children, my husband and I have severe asthma. The problems began once we moved here," said Ms. Peña, president of the project’s resident management corporation. "I believe it’s because we live in a toxic back yard. You don’t see these factories in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica."

Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous county, has almost 900,000 manufacturing jobs – more than any other county in the country.

Mr. Smith said the area’s air pollution affects everyone.

But not equally, according to scholars. They have found that the area’s toxic air pollution is disproportionately

concentrated in minority neighborhoods, which also is where most minority public housing is located.

Another study found that Latinos were twice as likely as whites to live near factories that produce toxic air pollution.

Dr. Manuel Pastor Jr., an economist at the University of California at Santa Cruz and one of the authors, said the 1999 study also found a strong correlation between race and the severity of toxic air emissions.

"The more dangerous the release, the more that is associated with the percent minority in that neighborhood," he said. "Any way you cut it, race still matters."

Ernest Walker alerted authorities years ago to a pattern of toxic danger he saw at William Mead.

In 1993, Mr. Walker wrote a letter to Elke Rolfes, the project manager. Mr. Walker said three of his four brothers and six of his friends who used the project’s playground died of cancer. Mr. Walker asked officials to warn children.

"This cancer coincidence is too high to assume to be isolated incidents," he wrote.

Ms. Rolfes said she reported the problem to her superiors but they ignored her. She protested that the housing authority "was not doing anything about the conditions, thereby subjecting residents to health hazards and potentially incurable diseased conditions," according to a lawsuit she filed in 1999.

Ms. Rolfes said her bosses then transferred her to another project.

Mr. Smith said the transfer had nothing to do with her protests.

In 1995, the housing authority and the state Department of Toxic Substances Control began investigating conditions at William Mead. Researchers found arsenic and lead in the soil of the playground along with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a common byproduct of oil refineries known to cause cancer.

A cleanup is expected to be completed by year’s end.

At Estrada Courts, mothers who help run the housing project say they face toxic dangers daily.

Their project borders the town of Vernon, home to almost 600 manufacturers. Its official motto: "Exclusively Industrial."

The News interviewed seven women who serve on the project’s resident management council. Six said one of more family members had severe asthma. Several said their children suffer violent coughing attacks, nosebleeds and intense headaches.

All said air pollution is the problem.

No comprehensive study

Carmen Barrera said her family has been irreparably harmed.

She moved to Estrada Courts 16 years ago. A year later, she gave birth to Alma, her daughter. Alma has a congenital heart defect that has required seven operations.

"No one in my family had heart problems before," she said. "The pollution caused this."

Researchers have not done a comprehensive health study of Los Angeles public housing residents to see whether their illnesses are related to air pollution. But two recent government-funded studies examined potential toxic exposures along the Alameda Corridor.

The first reported that the northern portion of the Alameda Corridor – where the public housing is concentrated – constitutes less than 1 percent of Los Angeles County but accounts for almost 20 percent of its toxic air emissions.

The 1998 study by the nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment found a "severe concentration" of environmental hazards, including toxic waste processors, Superfund sites, leaking underground storage tanks and factories with toxic air emissions. The federal National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences funded the study.

The state agency that monitors air pollution in Los Angeles released a yearlong study in 1999 that found that cancer risks from breathing toxic air pollution were particularly high for residents along the Alameda Corridor.

Agency’s actions

Bill Kelly, a spokesman for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, said the agency has since embarked on a broad range of steps to lower toxic emissions and provide medical aid to those suffering from asthma and other respiratory problems.

Meanwhile, the housing authority has spent $126 million in recent years to rebuild public housing along the

Detailed map of Alamada Corridor in Los Angeles, California

Alameda Corridor.

Mr. Smith said he is concerned but cannot disperse the projects.

"I would rather build them in a different area, but I almost have no choice other than to rebuild it in these communities," he said. "There is an affordable-housing crisis in California.’’

Mr. Smith said there are 170,000 people in Los Angeles on the waiting list for subsidized housing.

In one corridor neighborhood, poor children attend classes in a school built on top of a toxic dump.

Jefferson Middle School serves 2,000 children, mostly minorities. It was built in 1995 on top of a site that contained hexavalent chromium – a known carcinogen – at levels five times higher than allowed by law and groundwater contamination at levels 60,000 times above California’s minimum health standards, according to state audit reports.

Angelo Bellomo, director of environmental health and safety for the Los Angeles Unified School District, said officials cleaned the school land once and plan a second cleanup later this year

Carlos Porras, who has spent years organizing minority communities in Los Angeles to fight toxic threats, said federal and local officials must address the problems caused by concentrating poor minority families in toxic neighborhoods.

"They’ve turned minority communities into toxic prisons," said Mr. Porras, a member of the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. "They must find a way to undo the damage."