Joseph Tomaras woke up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe.

“I started coughing nonstop for about an hour, wheezing,” said Tomaras. “I wasn’t able to catch my breath.”

This was the first asthma attack Tomaras had had in months. Since June 2021, Tomaras had been commuting for work to East Harlem and feared the air quality there would lead to a resurgence of asthma. They (Tomaras uses they/them pronouns) previously lived in New York City for about ten years before relocating to Maine in 2011. There were multiple reasons for leaving, and asthma was one of them.

Now based in Orange County, New York, and working uptown three days a week as a grant manager at Getting Out and Staying Out, a social services agency for formerly incarcerated young people, Tomaras is concerned about environmental health risks. And other New Yorkers are too.

East Harlem North, along with Mott Haven in the Bronx, are two of the city’s worst neighborhoods for air quality. With documented studies showing higher asthma rates in these areas, local leaders and environmental agencies are demanding that the city address the sources of pollution. But eliminating the problem is more than complicated; it’s also controversial. In many cases, highways and power plants were constructed years ago near poor communities of color.

East Harlem North, where Tomaras works, has asthma hospitalization rates that are more than double the rate of New York City as a whole. In Mott Haven, asthma hospitalizations are more than triple the citywide rate.

“We connected that this issue with asthma was also because of the poor infrastructure that we have in the community,” said Ismael Diaz-Tolentino, an environmental justice coordinator at El Puente, a human rights organization located in South Williamsburg in Brooklyn.

Asthma rates in Williamsburg as a whole are lower than the rates in New York City, but Diaz-Tolentino says that when El Puente mapped out the air quality in the community, results showed it was worse closer to the expressways.

New York City currently measures air quality by neighborhood to test if the air quality across the city meets safety standards. But in the summer of 2020, Aclima, an environmental tech company, completed a study that measured invisible toxic particles in the air, block by block. It found that air quality varies significantly block-by-block and, similarly to El Puente’s findings, toxins were typically worse closer to expressways.

El Puente is currently advocating to close a street entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge that runs through a playground in the community. The non-profit is also advocating for more community gardens and green spaces in the neighborhood to offset air pollution.

“The people that we connect with, that we hear from, are mostly people of color,” said Diaz-Tolentino, about those struggling with asthma, adding that El Puente identified heightened asthma rates in their community as early as the 1990s.

The history of environmental racism traces back to infrastructure established by the urban planner Robert Moses, where many expressways were built through existing communities of color. As evidenced by well-sourced biographies and archives, Moses intentionally constructed highways through areas of the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn where Black and Brown people mostly lived, separated from more affluent white communities that were largely shielded from the health hazards from pollution.

“In the community, most of the people don’t really know that the air is toxic,” said Diaz-Tolentino, adding that El Puente is focusing on awareness and education about air quality.

“We want to make sure that everyone in the community has basic knowledge of what’s going on, why our air is toxic, and what we need to be safe,” he said.

Jules Rivera, who lived in the South Bronx near the Cross Bronx and Major Deegan Expressways as a child, was diagnosed with asthma as a baby. Her mother told her that she turned blue in her crib and had to be rushed to the hospital. She blames her asthma on environmental racism and credits her mother, a nurse, for knowing the signs.

“There’s a certain shame that comes with being the sick kid. I hated feeling like the sick kid,” said Rivera. She now lives in southern California, where she is an illustrator for environmentalism comic Mark Trail.

“It’s just kind of always in the background noise of your life,” she said of her ongoing asthma.

Tomaras has also braced for the possibility of further dealing with asthma in adulthood.

“I’m not experiencing as much of the environmental impact as I would if I were going regularly into Manhattan,” said Tomaras. But concern lingers.

“With climate change, there’s going to be even more contributors to air quality issues, and I think it’s important that people know more about it.”