The legacy of redlining in Fresno isn’t just linked to housing access. It also has deadly effects on air quality and preterm birth.
People living in substandard housing, a problem tied to redlining, are more likely to be exposed to wildfire smoke. This exposure can hurt pregnant people and the children they carry.
As climate change increases the intensity of wildfires in California, more people are losing their homes and facing long-term displacement and instability.
Researchers and those who work with disaster victims said there is insufficient government assistance to help the most vulnerable wildfire survivors find housing. There also isn’t enough housing to accommodate California’s swelling population of wildfire refugees.
Columbia Journalism Investigations in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity and Type Investigations spent a year digging into the growing need for climate relocation across the United States.
Little organized government assistance exists for preventing the loss of homes and lives before a disaster, the investigation revealed — and there is no comprehensive focus on helping people escape untenable situations.
California is often held up as a model for climate policy, environmental legislation, and pollution regulation, but those standards are rarely reflected in frontline communities.
Since 2000, more than 16 million pounds of toxic chemicals, primarily hydrogen cyanide, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, have been spewed into Wilmington’s air from industrial sites in the city, according to the EPA. Community survey data shows dramatically higher rates of cancer, asthma and anxiety and depression in Wilmington, compared to national data.
Across California, organizations are working on anti-violence solutions to improve outcomes for parents and their babies. Efforts include working with physicians to better detect and help pregnant people who are experiencing abuse.
Women are more than twice as likely to die from homicide during pregnancy and the year following childbirth than from hypertensive disorders, hemorrhage and infection.
The waters in Clear Lake, the second largest in California, shelter a treacherous occupant — potentially toxic blooms of cyanobacteria. The harmful algal blooms are a threat to public health, recreation, and the local economy.
For the 18 public water systems that draw from the lake the noxious blooms are something else: an operating hazard that is complicating their treatment processes and increasing the cost of providing clean water in one of the state’s poorest counties.
Seven years ago, after the fish died, Sarah Ryan decided she couldn’t wait any longer for help. California was in the depths of its worst drought in the last millennium and its ecosystems were gasping. For Ryan, the fish kill in Clear Lake, the state’s second largest and the centerpiece of Lake County, was the last straw.
Ryan is the environmental director for Big Valley Rancheria. She and others raised alarms for several years about increasingly dire blooms of toxic cyanobacteria.
Tens of thousands of Mexican and Central American immigrants in California speak Mixteco and other indigenous languages.
Despite laws requiring medical facilities to offer interpretation, indigenous patients often have no information in their language as they try to navigate virus-related medical care.
The need for mental health services has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing pressure on California’s already beset mental health care system.
Yet one source of funding that could potentially help counties meet the demand for mental health care remains underused more than a year after the California Health Report first drew attention to the issue. The funding benefits the mental health care program that serves a third of Californians.
Even driven therapists face major hurdles navigating the fractured U.S. health care system. The end result is that they have less time to actually provide mental health care, at a time when therapists are needed more than ever.
Statewide statistics, as well as reports from providers and patients, suggest that insurance companies create hurdles to mental health care. Clients still struggle to get equal access to therapy. Therapists still struggle to get equal pay.