In one of her last acts before leaving office, Mayor Lori Lightfoot backed down from her previous tough stance and agreed to a deal Friday to settle an investigation by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development that found City Hall effectively has engaged for years in environmental racism.

Under the three-year, binding agreement with the Biden administration, Lightfoot pledged City Hall will reform its planning, zoning and land-use practices.

That follows a HUD investigation that determined the city of Chicago discriminates against its residents by helping arrange for polluting businesses to move to low-income communities of color such as the Southeast Side sometimes from wealthier, heavily white communities including Lincoln Park.

The “voluntary compliance agreement” is the result of a civil rights complaint over a Southeast Side scrap-metal operation. That complaint by community groups led to the HUD investigatin.

Last year, HUD investigators accused the city of intentionally steering polluters to neighborhoods already overburdened with pollution and threatened to withhold tens of millions of dollars a year in federall funding if the city doesn’t change its practices. 

City departments — including those involved with planning and zoning, development, transportation, buildings and housing — will be required to produce an “environmental justice action plan” by Sept. 1 outlining how City Hall will take steps to protect neighborhoods from “burdens associated with intensive industrial and transportation uses.”

Environmental justice is broadly defined as protecting low-income communities suffering from poor air quality and other health hazards associated with being inundated with a disproportionate level of pollution. It recognizes that these areas historically have felt the brunt of dirty industry.

Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times file

Lightfoot, who had revealed some of the details in an executive order Wednesday, also pledged that the city will complete a citywide assessment of environmental and health impacts on neighborhoods that already have poor air quality and other pollution and that the findings from the research will be used to craft reforms.

The aim of that assessment is to “describe how environmental burdens, health conditions and social stressors vary across Chicago and identify neighborhoods that experience the greatest cumulative impacts” from pollution, according to the agreement.

The pact also requires the city to engage with people in affected communities with a goal of introducing an ordinance that will have to be approved by Chicago City Council.

Brett Chase’s reporting on the environment and public health is made possible by a grant from The Chicago Community Trust.