DENVER — A research study out of the University of Colorado Boulder found minority communities as well as those with lower household incomes are more likely to live in neighborhoods where facilities are emitting bad odors.
"We wanted to see where odor complaints were being logged in the city and what that distribution looked like in relation to where facilities that potentially emitted, you know, malodorous compounds were located," said Priyanka deSouza, an assistant professor with the University of Colorado Denver and one of the authors of the study.
"The inverted L in Denver is the part of the city where we have a majority low-income, non-white, sort of social, socio-economic makeup, the complaints were actually much more diffuse across the city, and in fact, we saw a much higher number of complaints in rapidly gentrifying areas," she added.
DeSouza told Denver7 one of the takeaways from the research study was the number of complaints filed with the City of Denver over bad odor and where the facilities are located, did not overlap.
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"The complaints were really in gentrifying areas like the Highlands, while, as I said, the facilities that potentially emit these odorous compounds were in completely different neighborhoods," deSouza said.
For Harmony Cummings, whose spent years working in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, the odors emitted by nearby facilities are undeniable.
"Here the smells are, many are associated with pollution," Cummings said. "You can definitely smell the Purina the strongest."
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"As you continue to walk up the bridge and throughout the neighborhoods, you're going to experience several different industrial smells, odors, an asphalt kind of smell, even when the train comes by, a diesel kind of smell, the smell of the highway," she added. "There's a layering of all these different kind of smells."
DeSouza said the research team worked closely with Denver's Department of Public Health and Environment (DDPHE), using data it collected to try and make sense of what was going on when it comes with odor in Denver.
"They were mainly complaints made via 311, but they were also complaints directly made via the DDPHE website," she said.
She said the fact neighborhoods like Elyria-Swansea didn't have as many odor complaints as others could be due to several factors.
"One is residents in these neighborhoods may have made feel powerless, may have felt disenfranchised by the city because their complaints and concerns were unanswered for so long, and therefore they were not complaining," deSouza said.
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"It could be that residents moving into rapidly gentrifying areas were unused to Denver's smell, and therefore, because of this sort of difference in smells, were complaining more, as opposed to residents who've lived in neighborhoods for a very long time, and were sort of used to this," she added.
Ultimately, deSouza said the research study shows more outreach needs to be done by Denver's Department of Public Health and Environment to get more residents in neighborhoods, like Elyria-Swansea, to complain about odor so that DDPHE can take more stringent action on facilities located there.
"Our study shows that they need to do more to convince neighborhoods that it is worthwhile complaining," she said.
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