New Orleans      One of the great songs about urban life and poverty was written by Louisiana and Arkansas bred, alternative country singer, Lucinda Williams, named the “East Side of Town.”  I use a piece of a verse from the song (thanks, Lucinda!) at the tail end of every one of my weekly radio shows.  She sings,

But you ain’t see nothin’ yet
I ‘ll show you things you’ve never seen and you won’t forget
You wanna see how the other half lives
You wanna see how we get around
Why don’t you come visit on the east side of town

She nails the propositions and pretensions of people who think they know about poverty, hard times, mean dogs, and more, but have never been on the east side of town.

For her and for me, maybe it’s a metaphor for every neglected neighborhood in every city and community around the world, but maybe there’s more to it than that.  A math and data guy for the Washington Post makes the claim that globally it is way more often to find lower income communities on the east side of town than in any other direction, including south, which some might have chosen.  Particularly in Europe and England, but true is so many other places, it has to do with the way the wind blows and moves pollution in a city.  Where there was industrial concentration, this meant moving bad air east, and leaving lower income families living in its wake, linking industrial pollution and its footprint permanently to urban poverty.

This is not just in merry old England or Paris, but in the US.  The columnist found that,

When you simply split America’s metropolitan areas into East-West or North-South halves and see which has higher poverty rates according to Census Bureau data, East tops the list 25 percent more often than its nearest competitor, South.

Downwind means downgraded housing and other infrastructure.  Admittedly, this is more often the case for the east side in older cities in the US, rather than in the west, but the facts are the facts.

Here’s another thing to think about beside just the geography based on the compass.  I read a book a couple of months ago, called Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser.  The book was a combination of personal reflection interspersed with the trajectory of various well-known US serial killers.  Normally, this would not be my kind of read, but there was a unique and powerful throughline to the work.  Fraser’s thesis, perhaps circumstantial, was that a huge amount of this had to do with pollution and these eventual killers living down wind, particularly where lead and other heavy metals were part of their daily diet.  Personally, she was from Tacoma where this had been a problem for decades.   Fraser isn’t a scientist or data cruncher, but her book was powerful, and the effects of lead poisoning on children and others is well established and pernicious.

This isn’t an argument about nature or nurture, but if, as Lucinda sings, you do visit the east sides or town or any lower income neighborhoods, the impacts of pollution and neglect are permanent and too often predict the future.  Fraser has a point.  Ignore all of this and the consequences could be fatal.