Janae Pierre: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Janae Pierre, in for Melissa Harris-Perry.

Residential noise pollution is almost inescapable. Whether it's noisy cars stuck in traffic, [vehicle honks] or blaring lawnmowers, [lawnmower blaring] or construction on the new storefront across the street, [construction noise] or loud music from your hipster neighbor, [music blasting] harmful noise is everywhere. The consequences for residents living near these kinds of noise can be damaging. According to the CDC, living in a residential area with harmful noise reaching 85 decibels or more can damage your hearing after repeated exposures lasting just eight hours.

Across the country, noise pollution in residential areas is not regulated equally. Since President Ronald Reagan defunded the US Office of Noise Abatement and Control in 1981, there have been no major federal regulations on noise pollution in the air, on roadways, and in workplace environments. Today--

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Today, we're trying to understand who decides what kind of noise is too loud for residents across the country. Give me a second here.

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Ah, that's better. Joining me now is Erica Walker, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Brown University, and the Founder of the Community Noise Lab. Erica, thanks for being with us.

Erica Walker: Thank you for having me.

Janae Pierre: Let's start off by understanding the fundamentals of noise in urban residential areas. What kinds of noise are typically found in these communities, and how can they impact the health and well-being of its residents?

Erica Walker: I think we need to take a step back and first describe sound, and then talk about noise.

Janae Pierre: Okay, let's do that.

Erica Walker: There's all kinds of sounds in urban environments. There's helicopters, there's airplanes, there's road traffic, there's pigeons. There's the rustling of trees. When it comes to noise, we talk about unwanted sounds. It's all of the elements of the community, acoustical soundscape that people, whether it's individuals, a street, a household, a block, determined to be unwanted. Noise is defined as unwanted sound. My work with Community Noise Lab, that ranges anything from people's footsteps, to construction, to leaf blowers, to lawnmowers, to children, to church bells, you name it. It's very individualistic.

Janae Pierre: Erica, let's look at noise as a matter of communal versus individual responsibility, because it seems like the burden of reducing noise pollution is placed on individual action rather than government regulation. Why is that?

Erica Walker: When we think about noise, we think about it as being a first-world problem. We think about it as one of the sacrifices you make when you decide to live in urban environments. It's like, "You signed up for this. You chose this. These things were here, you decided to join us." We look at it as something that you opt into and not a serious environmental stressor, seriously or negatively impacting our health.

Janae Pierre: Is exposure to construction noise more harmful to the health and safety of those who live near these sites?

Erica Walker: When you think about construction noise, yes, it's the people who have heard it and determined that it is something that is unwanted and it causes mood disruption. Yes, exactly. A lot of the times, this construction starts very early in the morning, in some cases, it can happen 24 hours a day, especially overnight. Yes, the person who has been awakened, or can't sleep, or whatever, when they determine that this sound is unwanted, it becomes a problem.

Janae Pierre: I'm wondering, why are cities more likely to allow prolonged residential exposure to harmful noise when it comes in the form of construction as you've been talking about?

Erica Walker: I think the city says that, "This is the sound of progress. We are building things for you to enjoy, for you to live at, for you to meet up at. This is part of what it means to live in an urban environment. You signed up for this." I also think that city planners, urban planners, municipalities, whoever you want to call the people that make these decisions, also think that they don't want to own up to the fact that they've done a lot of poor or negative planning that is impacting people's health.

They're worried about, "Okay, we have to undo this? That's going to cost a lot of money. That's going to be a contentious issue in the communities. I don't want to get into that. We'll just continue to enact bad policies and just hope that people put up with it."

Janae Pierre: Talk to me about the disparities in exposure to harmful noise across racial lines. What enables these disparities?

Erica Walker: I think when we think about some of the noises in urban environments that you asked about earlier, what are they, a large part of that is transportation-related sounds. It's people living your highways, living your rail lines, living under flight paths. Then you have to ask yourself, who in our community is living in those areas next to those transportation networks? That's usually poor people. We've put them there, maybe unintentionally, but they are places in the city that are usually more affordable and they live there.

Janae Pierre: I'm curious about the intersections of construction noise and gentrification. Now, in cities where there's a lot of development happening, there's also a lot of harmful noise exposure. Can noise pollution be used as a tool to displace communities?

Erica Walker: Oh, absolutely. When you look at noise complaints in a city, which is what we did in Boston back in about 2015, 2016. When you look at noise complaints, noise complaints are used as a tool to complain about elements in your community that someone has deemed to be unwanted. When we looked at the noise complaints in Boston, we clearly saw patterns where in certain project housing, certain streets that were predominantly minority, and you could see that it was something that was used to target people.

Then when we looked at these statistical analyses of those noise complaints and looked at what were some of the characteristics of why a person rated their neighborhood to be loud or not, some surprising things came up. It wasn't necessarily your proximity to a restaurant, it was more like the percentage of non-white people in your neighborhood. There is some element of noise that is used to sterilize a community's acoustical soundscape.

I think that that's one of the ways that gentrification has-- yes, so people come in with this new acoustical expectation about their community that may go against the original people who live in the community's expectations. They use these outlets, like noise complaints, to target and highlight the elements that they believe to be undesirable.

Janae Pierre: We'll be right back with more from our conversation with Erica Walker, here on The Takeaway.

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We're back with The Takeaway. I'm Janae Pierre, in for Melissa Harris-Perry. We're continuing our conversation with Erica Walker, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Brown University, and the Founder of the Community Noise Lab. Now, how do municipal governments across the country decide what noise is too harmful? How do they regulate noise?

Erica Walker: The question is, do they regulate noise?

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We have noise ordinances in our cities, and I rarely see them used. For example, in another community that I've worked with, on the books, it says that noise should be no louder than, during the daytime, 65 decibels, and at night, 55 decibels, but routinely they allow live concerts in an open-air arena to happen, with the argument that it brings economic activity to the neighborhood.

There's something on the book in terms of ordinances. The FAA has requirements for communities that are under a flight path. The Department of Transportation has loose requirements about people living near highways, but the answer is, are they ever enforced? No, because I have worked with communities that are dealing with some pretty serious noise issues and their complaints go unheard.

Janae Pierre: Are there any model examples for noise regulation in the US? Are there any cities doing it right?

Erica Walker: Yes. I had a conversation with the City of Asheville. They reached out to me with assistance. I thought it was just going to be your routine, let me go out there and measure kind of thing, but they were like, "No, we've been measuring, but we're also interested in the community's feedback." That was the first time where I've heard a city talk about noise perception. We assume noise. We started this conversation just assuming noise. We don't make the distinctions, really, between sound and noise.

The City of Asheville was like, "No, we're going to actually talk about perception. We're going to try to bring as many people in the community together, so they can air their frustration, so we can get a sense of, how can we create a better noise ordinance that accurately reflects our population. I just really thought that was so refreshing, like a breath of fresh air.

Janae Pierre: Lastly Erica, are long-term exposures to noise pollution a matter of housing rights violations? Is there a right to quiet for residents across this country?

Erica Walker: I'm going to say something very controversial here. I don't necessarily believe in a right to quiet. I am actually very very much anti-quiet. I think it's one of those ideals that is unattainable. Our cities are never going to be quiet, and it denotes a power differential. It denotes this ability of some people to literally shut down the activities of other people, and given the subjectivity of noise, it just seems really unbalanced.

I am more of a proponent of peace. Peace is when we work towards peace, all parties have to come to the table. They all have to ask for something. They all have to maybe sacrifice some things, and quiet may be part of those negotiations but it may not be the end goal.

Janae Pierre: Professor Erica Walker is an assistant professor of Public Health at Brown University and the founder of the Community Noise Lab. Erica thanks so much for being with us.

Erica Walker: Thank you for having me.

Janae Pierre: Just for your pleasure, here's the noise pollution we are hearing outside of our studio today. It's two gentlemen removing paint from a pair of chimneys which apparently is a week's small job.

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Thanks, New York City, this is The Takeaway.

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