Sorry, hipsters: your favorite Los Angeles neighborhoods are among the most polluted in the state. According to a new interactive map released today by the California Environmental Protection Agency, Echo Park, Silver Lake, Atwater Village, and all of Downtown are all more polluted than 90 percent of other California zip codes. They're joined in the map of shame by much of South LA and pockets of the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys. According to SCPR, the new tool assigns a score to every zip code based on a range of factors--11 types of pollution, the effects of pollution, and the vulnerability of residents--to determine where the state EPA should direct funding. CalEnviroScreen (as someone stuck in the 1980s named it) used publicly available data that "has never been assembled and combined in an analytical way" to find that nearly half of the most polluted zip codes are in Southern California, and three of the top 10 are in LA County.
The full interactive state map can be found here
· California pollution map: LA has 3 of the top polluted areas [SCPR]
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