Alexandra Castro grew up loving Southwest Detroit. The 24-year-old Springwells resident cherishes the neighborhood’s culture, small businesses, and tight-knit community. But as she got older, she started paying closer attention to something harder to love.
“This past year I had the worst case of seasonal allergies I have ever experienced. I had severe congestion, eczema, and a runny nose for over a month,” Castro said. “It decreased my quality of life and made me miserable.”
Castro isn’t alone in noticing the toll. Within a 3-mile radius of the church where the Springdale-Woodmere block club meets, residents are exposed to 58 sources of air pollution, according to Planet Detroit’s air quality tracker, which pulls from Environmental Protection Agency data. Four of those facilities carry high priority air quality violations. One has a recent violation. Fifty-three are listed as compliant, but compliant doesn’t mean clean. It means they’re meeting minimum legal requirements while still pumping pollutants into the same air that Castro and her neighbors breathe every day.
That’s the core problem Southwest Detroit residents and environmental advocates have been pushing officials to address: not any single smokestack, but the combined effect of dozens of them. The concept has a name. It’s called cumulative impact.
What cumulative impact actually means
The EPA defines cumulative impacts as “the totality of exposures to combinations of chemical and nonchemical stressors and their effects on health, well-being, and quality of life outcomes.” In plain terms, it means the harm people face isn’t just from one facility or one pollutant. It’s from all of them at once, layered on top of each other, day after day, in communities that also contend with lower incomes, less political power, and fewer healthcare resources.
Southwest Detroit has prioritized industry for decades. The tradeoff has always fallen heaviest on the people who live there, not the companies permitted to operate there. Residents share their neighborhoods with truck freight corridors, a steel-related coke operation on Zug Island, and dozens of other industrial facilities that sit within walking distance of homes, schools, parks, and churches.
Donald Spurr, 78, is a Southwest Detroit resident who survived both throat cancer and lung cancer. With Donald Trump rolling back federal environmental protections and issuing pollution exemptions to facilities including DTE Energy’s EES Coke Battery on Zug Island, Spurr is asking a question that’s gotten harder to answer: when will it get better?
Michigan’s permitting system and its gap
Right now, Michigan’s permitting system looks at pollution sources one at a time. When a company applies to the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, known as EGLE, for a permit to operate a facility, the agency evaluates whether that specific facility’s emissions meet legal thresholds. It does not evaluate what those emissions mean for a neighborhood already absorbing pollution from 57 other sources.
In a statement, EGLE spokesperson Josef Stephens acknowledged the limitation directly: the state currently cannot use a cumulative impact analysis to deny a permit. Even if EGLE wanted to weigh the regional health burden on a community like Springwells, the existing legal framework doesn’t give them the authority to factor that into a permitting decision.
That gap is precisely what legislators are trying to close.
The legislation
State Rep. Donavan McKinney and Sen. Stephanie Chang, both Detroit Democrats, introduced the Protecting Overburdened Communities Act in July 2025. The bill would require EGLE to consider the total regional health impact of multiple pollution sources when issuing permits. That means industrial facilities, truck traffic, and other emission contributors in a given area would all factor into whether a new or renewed permit gets approved.
The practical effect would be significant. A facility that might pass muster on its own could face stricter scrutiny, or denial, if it’s proposing to add pollution load to a community already carrying more than its share. Southwest Detroit, under that framework, would look very different on paper than it does today.
Chang has been a consistent voice on environmental justice issues in the Legislature. McKinney represents a district that includes parts of Southwest Detroit and has personal and constituent stakes in the outcome. The bill reflects a broader shift in how environmental advocates, public health researchers, and some regulators have started thinking about pollution: not as a series of isolated permits, but as a system of decisions that compound over time in specific places and on specific populations.
The bill’s path through the Legislature hasn’t been fast. As of spring 2026, it remains in committee, and the political environment at both the state and federal level has complicated the push for stronger environmental regulation. The Trump administration’s direction on environmental enforcement has emboldened industrial interests and made federal backing for stricter state-level standards less likely.
Fifty-eight sources and counting
The numbers are worth sitting with. Fifty-eight pollution sources within three miles of one neighborhood meeting spot. Four of them in active violation. And those are only the facilities tracked in the EPA’s enforcement and compliance database under the Clean Air Act. They don’t capture every diesel truck idling on a freight route, every unpermitted emission, or every source that falls outside the Clean Air Act’s regulatory reach.
For Castro, the numbers translate into a month-plus of congestion, eczema, and misery. For Spurr, they translate into a cancer survival story that he’s still living in a neighborhood that hasn’t changed enough since his diagnosis. For families with children at Southwest Detroit schools, they translate into inhalers in backpacks and sick days stacking up.
Cumulative impact research consistently shows that communities of color and low-income communities face disproportionate pollution burdens. Southwest Detroit fits that pattern. The area is majority Latino and Black, with household incomes well below the city median. The facilities permitted to operate there have benefited for decades from a regulatory system that evaluated each permit in isolation, never adding up the total cost imposed on the people nearby.
What residents want
The block clubs and community organizations active in Southwest Detroit have been clear in their demands. They want EGLE to have the authority, and the obligation, to say no to new pollution permits in already-burdened areas. They want the state to require health impact assessments that account for cumulative exposure, not just single-source emission rates. And they want enforcement that actually reduces harm, not just paperwork compliance.
The Protecting Overburdened Communities Act would move the regulatory needle in that direction. Whether it passes, and whether EGLE would implement it aggressively, are separate questions.
Environmental advocates tracking the bill point out that even well-intentioned legislation can stall at the implementation stage. Regulatory agencies need resources, clear mandates, and political will to execute meaningful cumulative impact reviews. EGLE has faced budget pressures and staffing constraints. And the federal posture under the current administration has created uncertainty about how much the EPA will support, rather than undermine, state-level environmental justice efforts.
The stakes of doing nothing
The argument for the status quo is essentially that the current system works because most facilities are in compliance. The argument against is standing right there in Southwest Detroit.
Castro isn’t asking for an abstract policy victory. She’s asking to get through a spring without a month of suffering that she ties directly to where she lives. Spurr isn’t asking for a regulatory framework discussion. He’s asking whether the community where he survived cancer is actually going to get cleaner before he dies.
The Protecting Overburdened Communities Act represents a structural attempt to answer those questions with something more than a permit approval and a compliance checkbox. Whether the Michigan Legislature gives it a floor vote, and whether Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signs it, will say something concrete about who Michigan’s regulatory system is actually built to protect.
In Southwest Detroit, residents already know the answer to that question under the current rules. They’ve been living it for decades.
