ABSTRACT
Seventy percent of Superfund sites sit within one mile of a public or multifamily housing complex. Across the span of multiple generations, low-income and predominantly BIPOC individuals residing in federally assisted housing have disproportionately faced environmental inequities born of exposures to heavy metal contamination. This comparative case study examines two public housing communities displaced by the Superfund program: the 160-unit Washington Park Public Housing Project built in 1962 in Portsmouth, Virginia, and the 346-unit West Calumet Housing Complex built in 1972 in East Chicago, Indiana. Even as remediation processes effaced toxic heritage within these “reclaimed” landscapes (which were converted to industrial and commercial use), and in official state-crafted narratives about these places, toxic heritage has endured both in the embodied contamination of former residents and in their creative memorializations of and resistance against their displacement in unofficial heritage media and discourses. In addition to providing a dynamic framing of public memory for Superfund sites – where cleanup processes have predominantly advanced narratives of disremembering – toxic heritage has underscored the longue durée of embodied contamination after the remediation of former public housing sites.
