Author(s)

Andrew Hansong ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Horace Mann Upper School, 231 West 246th Street, Bronx, New York 10471, United States

Corresponding Author

Andrew Hansong

ABSTRACT

Exposure to air pollution and the associated health burdens in major U.S. cities present a differentiated structure that cannot be explained by a single income gradient. Nationwide, approximately 170,000 deaths per year are attributed to NO₂ exposure, with non-Hispanic Black populations experiencing about 47% higher attributable mortality rates than the national average. Paradoxically, NO₂ concentrations are higher in high-income counties, and racial disparities in exposure persist within every income group, indicating that class and race are not interchangeable explanatory variables. Data from the 2024 Air Quality Report further quantify this rupture: people of color represent 41.6% of the U.S. population but account for 52% of residents in counties failing at least one air quality metric; in counties failing all three metrics, they represent 63%. This distribution pattern is not a product of pollution randomly settling, but rather the ongoing operation in contemporary urban fabrics of spatial hierarchies encoded by 20th-century redlining policies. Longitudinal studies in Boston, Nashville, and Detroit find that historically redlined census tracts still have higher proportions of Black residents, higher poverty rates, and greater social vulnerability indices; NO₂ exposure disparities persist in Boston and have even widened in Nashville. This article focuses on major U.S. cities to examine the group distribution characteristics of health burdens from urban air pollution, trace the historical and structural mechanisms of environmental inequality, and assess the capabilities and limitations of current exposure assessment methods and policy instruments in identifying and rectifying these inequalities.

KEYWORDS

Urban air pollution; Environmental inequality; Public health

CITE THIS PAPER

Andrew Hansong. The Impact of Urban Air Pollution on Public Health and Environmental Inequality: Evidence from Major U.S. Cities. Environment, Resource and Ecology Journal (2026). Vol. 10, No.1, 122-127. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/erej.2026.100116.

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