Tacoma is known for putting environmental justice on the map. It was also one of the first cities in Washington state to declare a climate emergency. Yet many people who live in Grit City question the seriousness of city leaders on these topics.
South Tacoma is the city’s most racially diverse and lowest income area. It’s also where Bellevue, Wash.-based Bridge Industrial is planning to build a huge new warehouse complex, on nearly 150 acres of vacant land. And it’s where certain activists seem to never give up – even when they’ve lost a big appeal before city bureaucrats.
Rallying support
Earlier this fall, about 60 community members gathered under a large tree at Oakland Madrona Park. They held banners, chanted, listened to speeches and shared snacks.
It felt like everyone on the left side of the political spectrum was there: Raging Grannies, immigrants’ rights activists, a Waterkeeper, a Black Panther, an Earth Ministry reverend and several students who were just looking for a way to help the neighborhood and take action against climate change.
They set their sights on one goal: getting in the way of what they like to call a “mega-warehouse.” The plan is actually for four big warehouse buildings and driveways that will cover the equivalent of about 50 football fields of what is now open space.
“We’re going to block this warehouse, we’re not going to let this happen!” exclaimed 30-year-old Gemini Gnull, who goes by a different name professionally.
She’s a co-founder of the newly-formed Climate Alliance of the South Sound, which she calls a working-class community organization.
“We are trying to build a movement that's reflective of Tacoma and involves all of the people who are going to be impacted by this,” she said.
“And so, necessarily, that's going to include like old people, young people, Black people, Indigenous people, people of all walks of life.”
She led chants of “hey-hey, ho-ho, this warehouse has got to go” to get the crowd going, apologizing for a hoarse voice because she had joined a picket line the day before.
The most immediate concern for the neighborhood is the traffic this new facility is expected to create. Activists say the potential for hundreds of diesel trucks driving through neighborhood streets will spew even more diesel and gas fumes in an area of Tacoma that is already overburdened.
Despite those concerns, the city approved the project without requiring a complete study of its environmental or health consequences.
This grassroots coalition is pointing to Tacoma’s approval of the project as environmental racism.
“I happen to live within the neighborhood that is within the direct vicinity…and will be most highly impacted by the construction of these mega-warehouses, as do thousands of other low-income families that are mostly minorities,” said Ovunayo X, speaking at the rally in September. He said he’s the chief of staff of the Black Panther Party of Washington.
“The construction affects temperature and the climate with far-reaching impacts,” he said.
It’s pretty easy to make the case for this concern, after the heat dome two years ago that killed at least 138 people in Washington. Almost 1 in 5 of those deaths was in Pierce County, and eight of them were in Tacoma.
The city has already documented how fewer trees and more pavement make South Tacoma as much as 14 degrees hotter than more affluent parts of town.
“By cutting down the trees and other plants that reduce the heat in the area that cleanses the oxygen,” he said. “You also increase the risk to medically fragile people within direct and surrounding areas, by allowing increased carcinogenic chemicals to accumulate in an area that already has high exposure levels.’
After his speech and several others, about half of the 60 people gathered received a brief lesson on doorbelling, then fanned out across the neighborhood to spread the word.
“So when you go up to someone's house, you can be looking at the script,” Gnull explained to others, pointing to a script on one of about a dozen clipboards the group distributed.
“And then if you want to show them a map, you can just flip this down and be like, 'Look at this giant space – it’s huge!'”
City moving forward
Despite those efforts and a pro-bono appeal brought on behalf of the opponents by the environmental law firm Earthjustice, Tacoma’s Hearing Examiner upheld the permit in early October and did not require additional health studies.
No one from Bridge Industrial made themselves available for interviews.
But the new head of the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, Andrea Reay, agreed to meet.
“There is not a lot of undeveloped land available anywhere, quite frankly, in the state of Washington, you know, for manufacturing, for advanced manufacturing, for industrial use. And so that's one of the reasons why, you know, it went at such a, such a premium,” she said.
In a parking lot owned by Tacoma Public Utilities, Reay talked while standing on a staircase where you can see most of the Bridge Industrial site. It’s so big you have to really crane your neck to see all of it.
Reay said there used to be an airfield in the middle and some disposal sites for contaminated soils, from Tacoma’s superfund cleanup areas. She said Bridge Industrial’s idea to put warehouses there will have the lightest footprint possible, while creating jobs for the area and keeping the economy healthy.
“We can't make it into a park. Again, we talked a little bit about the environmental remediation, we talked about how it’s zoned for heavy industrial, it's not zoned for recreation, it is not zoned, you know, for residential. It is zoned for heavy industrial,” she said.
With the state aiming to double its manufacturing workforce, even if they could change the zoning, she doesn’t think they should. She said no one knows yet who will lease the space once the warehouses are built, so it’s hard to say how much traffic they’d really cause in the neighborhood.
Reay hopes that biodiesel and electric trucks will mitigate any concerns about additional air pollution. She added that in the course of the appeal, Bridge Industrial agreed to add trees to the site and leave some large ones standing.
Opponents not giving up
That’s not enough to appease the steadfast opposition to the project. Gnull, of the Climate Alliance of the South Sound, is still leading the charge against it, despite the lost appeal.
Bubbly, energetic and determined as ever, Gnull also lives in the neighborhood. In her living room, above a red and black poster of communist leaders from Lenin to Mao, there’s a framed photo of her mother.
“This is deeply personal to me,” Gnull said. “My mom passed away in 2019 because she was hit by a car crossing the street in front of her house.”
“This is no laughing matter or small thing to be increasing traffic around like, schools and residential areas and crosswalks, you know. People die from this.”
Gnull helped stop a planned methanol plant in Tacoma in 2016, when she was 22. She said community activists in Tacoma have learned from that fight as well as from their failure to stop a terminal for liquified natural gas at Tacoma’s port in 2019.
She said they’ll drop banners, they’ll picket, they’ll lobby and mobilize.
“We're going to do everything within our power to make this a nightmare for Bridge Industrial, so that they know that they cannot just come into a neighborhood and put in a mega-warehouse,” Gnull said.
The city and its backers say since it’s not yet clear who will occupy the facilities once they’re built, a full environmental and health review isn’t needed. However, that goes against advice from local, state and federal agencies, who all submitted letters to the hearing examiner, urging compliance with the state’s new environmental justice law.
Additional review and legal challenges could come once future tenants, whoever they are, start moving into the space.
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