Hazardous waste sites, stress, and neighborhood quality in USA

Seven neighborhoods adjacent to hazardous waste were surveyed. The authors found that respondents did not rate their neighborhoods as highly as Americans as a whole, but, like most Americans, they did rate their present neighborhood better, or the same as, their previous one. The adjacent hazardous waste site was mentioned as distressing more often than any other neighborhood characteristic. Yet in four of the seven neighborhoods, dilapidated buildings and streets, odors and smoke from sewage treatment plants and factories, noise from trains and traffic congestion, or another neighborhood characteristic was mentioned as more stressful than the hazardous waste site. It is argued that govemment needs to be more aggressive about understanding community viewpoints before proposing multi-million dollar hazardous waste remediation plans that could be resisted by a community.