Houston’s Greater Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens could soon be home to a combined 15 acres of solar farms over the next three years. These two neighborhoods have been suffering from industrial contamination and poor air quality for decades.
On Wednesday, Houston City Council voted to accept the $20 million grant from the EPA that the Houston Health Department wrote and submitted.
Dr. Loren Hopkins, the health department’s chief environmental science officer, said the goal is to provide neighbors with another way to power their homes during extreme weather events, such as flooding, hurricanes, freezing temperatures, or heat waves.
The solar farms are also meant to reduce emissions from traditional power sources, minimizing the area’s carbon footprint.
“The intent of this grant is to work on the environmental injustices that were done to the communities that live around contaminated areas. So it was written specifically for the neighborhood around the Union Pacific Railroad site and those cancer clusters there,” Hopkins said.