‘Pollution everywhere’: how one-click shopping is creating Amazon warehouse towns
Three generations of Arah Parker’s family have lived in her pleasant, yellow-hued home, where there used to be a clear view of the San Gabriel mountains from the kitchen window. There used to be – until the country’s hunger for online shopping swallowed the neighborhood. Four massive Amazon warehouses – ranging from 500,000 to nearly 900,000 sq ft – now surround this historically Black community, as do distribution centers for Target, Under Armour, Monster Energy and Keeco textiles. Her home is now boxed in on three sides by concrete block buildings and the quiet road out front has been paved into a four-lane expressway rumbling with delivery trucks. To feed the one-click, one-day delivery demands of the nation, new warehouses are opening quickly, often in Black and brown neighborhoods. They sometimes chew up entire suburban blocks and communities in the process, crowding roadways with delivery trucks and vans and air space with cargo planes, clouding the air with more poll...