Dollar stores, diesel fumes and food sovereignty in Chicago’s frontline communities
- Written by Sofia Caracci
- Edited by Ruby Russell
- Illustration by Ludi Leiva
In communities shaped by redlining and disinvestment, the only places to shop are often dollar stores – stocked with plastic goods that have crossed oceans on container ships and rolled across states on eighteen-wheelers. These journeys are long, carbon-heavy, and almost invisible, but their impact is felt from Guangdong to Chicago, from the global climate to the human body.
The sky hangs heavy, steel-gray and unwilling to shift. I’ve taken a break from repotting tomato seedlings, hoping to snag a few last-minute gardening supplies from my local Dollar Tree. Mud clings to my shoes from my quiet, grimy trek beneath a dripping underpass, across an oversized parking lot, cracked at the edges and pulsing with the low idle of diesel trucks.
This is 60608, a zip code carved by freight tracks and smokestacks. Rail lines stitch together old factories and new warehouses. Diesel fumes settle on window screens. Industry built this place, from the Union Stock Yards, established in 1865 and once the heart of America’s meatpacking empire, to the steel mills, tanneries, and chemical plants that have defined Chicago’s South and West Sides. Even after the Stock Yards closed in 1971, the land didn’t go quiet. Its infrastructure was simply repurposed: rail lines, warehouses, and industrial parks took the place of slaughterhouses, keeping the engines of production and pollution running in new forms.
When you pick up a $1-plastic item from a dollar store shelf, you’re not just paying for the product; you’re stepping into a climate footprint that spans continents.
Inside the Dollar Store, fluorescent lights buzz faintly overhead. The air smells like warmed plastic and synthetic citrus. There are aisles of shrink-wrapped snacks, knockoff cosmetics, brittle toys, and cleaning supplies. These mass-produced goods cost little to buy, but much to sustain. When you pick up a $1-plastic item from a dollar store shelf, you’re not just paying for the product; you’re stepping into a climate footprint that spans continents. Around 22% of global emissions stem from products made for export. The emissions embedded in manufacturing and transport may remain out of sight and out of mind, but this is a business propped up by fossil-fueled logistics that carry real environmental and human costs.
The hidden cost of a cheap deal
I walk out of the store with a few tomato cages in hand. The tag says “Made in Hebei, China”, a clue not just to geography, but to a vast supply chain. In my fingers, I feel the cold bend of metal, the weight of transport, the residue of distant production lines. China is often called the world’s factory floor, a title that speaks not only to its industrial dominance but to low prices subsidized by labor performed under high-heat, high-risk and low-protection conditions. Much of the inventory of US dollar stores originates in China’s vast export-manufacturing zones, places where labor-rights groups document long hours and low wages. In manufacturing hubs like Hebei and Guangdong, studies document elevated levels of iron, manganese, lead and other metals in groundwater.
The fallout doesn’t end at the factory gate. Packaged and palletized, these goods embark on a carbon-heavy journey through the arteries of global trade. My tomato cages will have boarded container ships, hulls creaking, diesel exhaust trailing like a phantom across waves. International shipping now accounts for about 2.3% of global CO₂ emissions and continues to rise each year. When the containers reach land, the trail of pollution continues.
Semi-trucks barrel down cracked asphalt, hauling cargo from coastal ports to distribution centers across the Midwest. Just west of the old Stock Yards, Chicago’s Little Village – or La Villita, as its largely Mexican community know it – is home to one of North America’s largest freight hubs, where roughly a quarter of all US freight trains and half of intermodal rail traffic pass through the region. The air hums with diesel. Transport corridors press against playgrounds, schools, and porches. Eighteen-wheelers idle at red lights outside panaderías and auto shops, the smell of burnt rubber and exhaust mingling with the sweetness of pan dulce. Some days, the haze is thick enough to taste, like a film of ash settling on your tongue.
Residents here don’t need data to tell them what they already feel in their lungs, but the numbers confirm it. According to the Environmental Law and Policy Center, diesel particulate matter, which contributes to roughly 5% of premature deaths in Chicago, is highest in these neighborhoods. The burden weighs heavily on children: studies show that in some neighborhoods, one in three lives with asthma.
This isn’t just the price of commerce; it’s a geography of inequality mapped in exhaust and concrete. The corridors that carry imported goods to Chicago’s warehouses dictate where pollution settles and where profit flows. From here, the story shifts from motion to place: the neighborhoods where these goods finally land, and the history that decided which corners of the city would bear the cost.
Business built on redlining and resignation
Chicago’s dollar stores are the local face of an economy built on disinvestment and dependency. Their roots stretch back to the red lines drawn across city maps in the 1930s, when majority-Black neighborhoods were branded “hazardous” and denied investment. By the time dollar stores began proliferating in the 1990s and early 2000s, decades of economic abandonment had done their work: grocery stores had closed, capital had fled, and what remained were neighborhoods primed for a business model that thrives where choices are few. Chains like Dollar General and Dollar Tree opened tens of thousands of branches across the country.
“They fill a need, but not with long-term solutions. They’re not here to build wealth or health. They’re here because the market sees us as temporary.”
On Chicago’s West Side, Austin is a neighborhood where these stores are the only retail many residents can count on. “The arrival of yet another dollar store barely registers,” says Andrew Born, director of data and evaluation at Austin Coming Together (ACT), a community development organization whose work is grounded in practical initiatives: early childhood programs, workforce training, expanding access to healthy food, connecting families with healthcare, and challenging patterns of neighborhood disinvestment by supporting Black- and Brown-owned businesses.
The presence of a dollar store doesn’t signal revival but resignation. Their business model is based on the expectation that decline will continue. That grocery stores won’t return; that housing values will stay low. They offer cheap, shelf-stable items but not the fresh food or economic investment that nourishes communities. “They fill a need, but not with long-term solutions,” Born says. “They’re not here to build wealth or health. They’re here because the market sees us as temporary.”
In 2023, Chicago public radio station WBEZ reported on how multiple full-service grocers, including Aldi, Whole Foods, Target and three Walmarts, had shut down locations across Chicago’s South and West Sides, leaving huge swaths of the city without easy access to fresh produce. Research from the University of Chicago underscores the impact this has: even a single supermarket closure in a low-access neighborhood can significantly disrupt food security for already vulnerable residents.
Where redlining displaced eroded local retail infrastructure, what remains is a landscape of convenience for box-checking investors. “These dollar stores are extractive by design. They take more than they give,” Born says. “Environmental justice and economic justice are inseparable. These stores rely on disposability: of goods, of labor, of people.”
Empty shelves, empty calories
Austin, once home to many Black-owned corner groceries, is typical of a neighborhood where dollar stores have increasingly become the dominant retail option. Crates of bananas, onions, and greens have been replaced by shelves of packaged snacks and sugar-laced drinks. “It’s really sad,” says Veah Larde, manager of the Austin Town Hall Farmers’ market. “You see it when you look in the bags people are carrying out: chips, soda, frozen food. It’s what’s cheap. It’s what’s left.”
In North Lawndale, 29.1% of residents live with type 2 diabetes, 62% higher than the national average. Hypertension affects approximately 38% of adults in the Chicago community of West Englewood, compared to 25% nationwide.
A 2006 Chicago study by food-systems researcher Mari Gallagher helped popularize the concept of ‘food deserts’. Mapping how geography shapes nutrition and health outcomes, Gallagher showed that residents who lived farther from full-service grocery stores and closer to fast-food outlets or convenience shops were significantly more likely to suffer from diet-related illnesses, even after controlling for income, race and education.
In North Lawndale, 29.1% of residents live with type 2 diabetes, 62% higher than the national average. Hypertension affects approximately 38% of adults in the Chicago community of West Englewood, compared to 25% nationwide. With dollar stores now the default option in many of these neighborhoods, the gap between affordable calories and nourishing food has only widened, embedding health disparities into the urban landscape.
Dollar stores don’t so much bridge the divide between neighborhoods with full-service grocery options and those with little access to fresh food, as deepen it. But there are attempts to reclaim food sovereignty. There is Austin Eats, a youth-run produce stand, and Forty Acres Fresh Market, a long-awaited Black-woman-owned grocery store. And there is the farmer’s market Larde runs.
Nourishment only community can provide
Step into Austin Town Hall on a Thursday evening, and you’re a world away from the dollar stores’ synthetic surfaces and shelf-stable calories. Folding tables are piled with crates of collard greens, sweet corn, and late-season tomatoes still dusted with soil. Kids tug parents toward tents offering honey or jars of homemade hot sauce. The smell of BBQ rib tips mixes with the sweetness of ripe peaches. Most of this produce is from regional growers and businesses within a few hours’ drive. It is abundance measured not in brands or barcodes, but in freshness, color and connection.
In a neighborhood shaped by disinvestment, the market offers something global supply chains can’t replicate: trust, relationships, and nourishment rooted in place. It’s a space not just to buy food, but to learn how to prepare it and how to stretch food assistance dollars.
Larde explains to one neighbor at a time how LINK – the local “food stamps” low-income US Americans receive to buy groceries – can be doubled to make fresh produce more affordable. “No shame. No confusion. Just let me show you how to get the most bang for your buck,” she says, smiling from behind the welcome table. She’s found that direct communication works better than any printed handout: “You can’t give people the political answer. You’ve got to meet them where they are.” Still, this system doesn’t make it easy. Many farmers hesitate to accept LINK payments due to delayed payouts, making it harder for low-income shoppers to stretch their benefits at local markets.
Chicago has other resources that aren’t reaching those who need them most. Community gardens dot the West Side, but many residents don’t even know they can harvest food for free. Raised beds overflowing with collards, chard, and herbs are hidden in plain sight, their availability quietly passed through social circles tied to local nonprofits, student volunteers, and middle-class wellness communities. Flyers may be posted, but not in the right languages; announcements made, but not in the right rooms. The disconnect becomes another barrier, layered on top of affordability and transportation. “We don’t all share with the right people at the right times,” Larde says, emphatic that it’s time this changed.
Disposable goods, disposable neighborhoods
“It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that systems aren’t built to make caring easy.”
The area around the Family Dollar in Humboldt Park, a West Side neighborhood long known as the cultural heart of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community, is full of life. On warm days, music spills from passing cars and corner stores, the thump of bass lines weaving with the sizzle of meat on sidewalk grills. Children dash down cracked sidewalks on scooters and grandmothers lean on railings, calling out greetings in Spanish. Crumbling walls are painted with images of resistance, pride and Puerto Rican heritage.
Nicole Stratman, coordinator of the volunteer-driven Chicago Environmentalists’ Cleanup Club, is collecting what gets left behind: candy wrappers, plastic forks, Styrofoam cups, and fast-food packaging. “Especially near dollar stores,” Stratman says, “you see it everywhere.” These stores are often located where heavy foot traffic collides with inadequate sanitation infrastructure, turning sidewalks into dumping grounds.
Stratman’s route takes her down boulevards and sidewalks lined with litter, from Humboldt Park to North Lawndale, neighborhoods with among the highest poverty rates in the city. “The traffic’s loud,” Stratman says, “but the trash really hits you. Piles of it. Graffiti, broken gates, overflowing bins. The alley might get cleaned, but the sidewalks? Constantly unsightly.” It’s not just an eyesore; it’s a structural failure. While city-wide schedules show that street sweeping happens from April to mid-November across all wards, residents in many lower-income neighborhoods report delays or missed sweeps.
In wealthier areas like Wicker Park or Lincoln Park, Chambers of Commerce step in to contract with private crews to supplement city services: emptying overflowing trash cans, power-washing sidewalks, and hauling away extra debris. But in lower-income neighborhoods, there’s no such luxury to fall back on. Trash cans, where they exist at all, are often overflowing and placed far apart, making it easier for trash to scatter with the wind than to get collected, until volunteer groups like the Cleanup Club intervene.
“It’s not that people don’t care,” Stratman says. “It’s that systems aren’t built to make caring easy.” Without adequate infrastructure or investment, residents are forced into an endless cycle of cleanup without real support, a pattern that mirrors broader inequities in how the city allocates resources. “We’re filling in for a system that’s failing us.”
Stratman would like to see businesses take responsibility. “Dollar stores have the potential to serve as community recycling hubs or drop-off points for hard-to-recycle items like plastic bags, foam containers, or small electronics,” she says. “They could host cleanups or partner with local organizations to reduce waste. But right now, they’re part of the problem, and they’re not held accountable for the waste they generate.”
Yet responsibility for plastics – discarded wherever people live and shop and accumulating everywhere from the remotest ocean to the human body – can be traced back further. Further, even than the factories that produce disposable packaged goods. As solar and wind power plummet in price, oil and gas companies aren’t easing up on fossil fuel extraction. Instead of powering engines, more of that oil is being funneled into plastics: the crinkly wrapper around a bag of chips; the polyester shirt that barely lasts a season.
Plastics and other petrochemicals already account for about 12% of global oil demand – and that share is climbing. Within the next decade, petrochemicals are expected to drive more than a third of oil-demand growth, outpacing trucks, planes, and ships. Plastic production accounted for about 5% of CO2 emissions in recent years. But the same cheap products piling up in landfills and neighborhood bins are also propping up the fossil fuel industry’s future, locking communities into rising emissions, indestructible waste and extractive economies – a systemic bet on make-use-dispose cycles.
Local resistance to global injustice
Chicago’s fight for environmental justice doesn’t happen in isolation. What happens in Washington ripples into the alleys and corner lots of the South and West Sides. The Trump administration has accelerated the rollback of environmental protections and censored the language of climate change. At the same time, his tariff agenda has raised the price of imported goods from countries like China, costs that move through the supply chain until they land at the checkout counter. Dollar Tree’s shift from its long-standing $1 baseline to $1.25 is one of the clearest signs of that trickle-down impact. But international trade agreements shape human lives in less immediate ways.
When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in the late 1990s, it allowed subsidized US corn to flood Mexican markets, collapsing local economies and uprooting rural life. An organizer at the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) explains that many families in the La Villita community can trace their history through NAFTA-era agricultural disruption, periodic economic crises and longstanding structural pressures that pushed rural households to seek work in cities in the United States. Policy and profit have been shaping the health of these communities from above ever since. But now, they are under unprecedented attack. Over recent months, ICE patrols have made many people afraid to attend community events or even visit food pantries. “They came here to build stability. Now they’re being threatened again,” says the organizer, who felt it safer not to be named.
“People are delaying going to the doctor,” another activist added. “They’re enduring pain rather than taking the risk of leaving their houses.” The communities under attack depend on grassroots organizers, market managers and cleanup crews to repair and nourish where state agencies and market economics have failed to meet people’s needs. But what was once a fight for cleaner air has become a fight to simply exist safely in public space.
“Just the act of growing food here is revolutionary. We’re repairing our relationship to the land, even as it bears the weight of harm done to our community.”
LVEJO activists agreed that they see this moment not as a break, but another front in their ongoing fight for social and environmental justice. “We have no option but to continue,” I was told. “We owe it to our community; we owe it to ourselves.” The pollution blanketing La Villita and the raids terrorizing its residents come from the same logic; one that views both land and people as expendable.
The community gardens run by LVEJO literally grow out of the neighborhood’s toxic past. The Semillas de Justicia Garden flourishes on remediated brownfield where volunteers removed contaminated surface soils and rebuilt the site as a community-run urban farm and meeting space. Nearby, polluted soils were removed from La Villita Park to make way for community gardens and the La Villita Community Farm, which opened in 2022. “Just the act of growing food here is revolutionary,” the organizer said. “We’re repairing our relationship to the land, even as it bears the weight of harm done to our community.”
Planting the seeds of another future
Heading home, I glance back at the beige outline of the store. It looks unremarkable. But it is saying something: about access, about survival, about what we’ve accepted and what we might still be able to change. The tomato cages clink quietly as I walk, a metal rhythm keeping time with my steps. Embedded in systems of extraction and harm, their journey has brought them to a place where they will hold something hopeful: seedlings I’ll press into backyard soil that for decades was paved over, compacted, and polluted. This earth has carried the weight of soot drifting from the expressway, of lead paint dust from old siding, of industrial fallout that settled here long before I arrived. Still, I dig into it, turning it over, amending it, trying to coax life from a place that’s been asked to bear too much.
There is a truth I carry home with me: I live in contradiction. To plant a seed is to look forward with hope, even as I shop at a global marketplace that threatens the very soil I’m trying to heal. I resist, even as I participate. That tension isn’t just mine; it’s the bind so many of us live in, caught between survival and transformation. But the acts of resistance I’ve witnessed – neighbors reclaiming vacant lots for gardens, youths selling produce they’ve grown, cleanup crews refusing to let trash define their blocks – remind me that change begins in the places we can touch. What we do here, in neighborhoods too often written off, ripples outward. The local is the beginning of the global – and perhaps the only place the future can truly be rewritten.
About the author:
Sofia Caracci is a Chicago-based writer and food systems activist whose work focuses on environmental justice, labor and community resilience. She has written for organizations across the Midwest and works directly with grassroots groups advancing food sovereignty and equitable climate policy.
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