Argent Materials’ facility at 85th Avenue and San Leandro Street in east Oakland is an industrial site that has drawn air-quality complaints from nearby residents, on Nov. 14, 2025. (CBE does not own this image, all credits to El Tímpano)
by Vanessa G. Sánchez
December 12, 2025
“Welcome to El Tímpano’s Weekly Dispatch. I’m Vanessa G. Sánchez, senior health equity reporter.
Last month, I joined Communities for a Better Environment, an environmental justice nonprofit, for a walking tour in deep East Oakland, a part of the city that has been disproportionately impacted by air pollution.
The tour started at the public library on 81st Avenue, and was designed for city employees and members of the public who want to learn more about the needs of this community, which is located in an industrial area where diesel truck fumes drift and thin dust coats the air. Industrial development has pushed into these residential areas for decades. Factories with long records of environmental violations have shut down – most recently in 2022 – only for new ones to take their place.
Every block we walked carried the fingerprint of decades of industrial activity and the chronic underinvestment meant to remediate it. We passed Acorn Woodland Elementary and the Tassafaronga Recreation Center, adjacent to the only real patch of green serving more than three neighborhoods. By the time we reached the Cosmopolitan Baptist Church on 85th Avenue, standing a few blocks from an asbestos recycling plant, my throat started to itch and to gradually swallow, the way it does in the early Spring when allergy season hits. I was there for only a few hours, but for those who live here, this is what the air feels like every day.
‘We have many seniors who are suffering from asthma and other serious respiratory issues,’ Mercedes D., who lived in this neighborhood for decades, told me as we walked past a row of parked diesel trucks, their engines idling so loud we had to raise our voices to hear each other. Mercedes contracted asthma in this neighborhood a few years after she moved from Mexico. Her son, who attended Acorn Woodland, would nosebleed and have severe headaches, she said, but for a long time she and other parents didn’t know what was driving these symptoms.
‘It took years for us to know that the playground in the school and the environment in general were polluted,’ said Mercedes, who learned about these environmental issues after becoming a CBE member…”