All the contemporary media pieces paired with this reading are heartbreaking! In response to Fonzy’s first question, an obvious answer is factories and over-industrialized areas. The HuffPost article on the Martin family in Maywood describes the amalgam of toxic industrial centers situated throughout the family’s tiny, but densely packed community, and the lack of any investigation by officials into the health problems caused and perpetuated by these factories. As Avila comments, and Fonzy notes for us, the community of Maywood, like other low-income minority communities, does not have the time nor the money to fight for better living conditions the way Jane Jacobs and other middle class white women did when they won battles against infrastructural invasions. While Freeways are built through minority communities because their low income nature gets them branded as “blights”, over-industrialization seems to work in reverse: industrialized areas draw families low on the economic totem pole who need the jobs, and then proceed to wreak havoc on their lives and further devalue their communities.
I also found it interesting that, congruent with Avila’s examples, the person we see fighting against invasive city projects in Fonzy’s media piece is a female who considers the safety of her family to be her main reason for activism.

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