In Dearborn, industrial facilities, trucking routes, schools, and homes are in close proximity, and air quality varies significantly over time and from neighborhood to neighborhood.
To address public health concerns, the City of Dearborn launched an air quality monitoring program in February 2024 through the
MiNextCities program, partnering with
JustAir. It includes 10 monitors distributed across the city and gives residents and others access to real-time air quality data.
“Air quality, even just down the street, can be very different from your front door. Having these sensors at a hyper-local level can really give you a better picture of what's going on,” says Nick Thomas, director
of MiNextCities at NextEnergy.
The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) and the nonprofit
NextEnergy created MiNextCities, which works with small and mid-sized Michigan cities that are facing challenges and pairs them with sustainable “smart city” solutions to their challenges.
Air quality and health
Poor air quality can aggravate asthma and other health conditions, so people often check their local air quality before spending time outside. But if you use a weather app or the local news to get this information, it may come from an air quality sensor that’s nowhere near you. Regional sensors miss air quality disparities between one neighborhood and another, and JustAir’s network documents these disparities.
"The asthma rates, in particular in the South End [of Dearborn], are well above the state average,” says Samir Deshpande, environmental health manager at the City of Dearborn. “This is also a community that is disproportionately likely to be new arrivals to the country, to be immigrants, to speak English with a limited proficiency," and to have a higher percentage of people of color and lower incomes.
Public-private collaboration
MiNextCities chose the City of Dearborn as one of its target cities and deployed solutions for two problems in Dearborn: flood/water level monitoring and air quality monitoring.
The City of Dearborn's forward-thinking health department wanted to make air quality data easily accessible and useful to residents.
MiNextCities funded the program through the
Dearborn Department of Public Health. MiNextCities and NextEnergy facilitated it, including identifying the companies with the best solutions for Dearborn and bringing in JustAir, which installed the monitors and operates the system. Collaboration among the players was needed to take the project from concept to execution.
Collaboration between a nonprofit like NextEnergy, which can serve as an independent third party, and a city government can be a more effective way to implement smart city technology than “more traditional channels, where it's sort of a buying and selling nature,” Thomas says.
Also key to the program’s success: Dearborn Department of Public Health takes a different approach from that of traditional health departments, such as the Wayne County Public Health Division, which focus on public health issues like vaccinations.
Dearborn is only the second city in Michigan to have a health department, Deshpande says. “Our goal as a health department is to be laser-focused on health policy, and specifically on ‘health in all policies,'” meaning that considerations like
social determinants of health are baked into everything that the city government does, he says.
How the program works
The monitors have been collecting air quality data since they were installed in 2023. All 10 measure particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, and two of them also measure ozone. The monitors have signs explaining what they are, some information about air quality, and how people can sign up for alerts. The signs are also translated into Arabic.
People check air quality at monitors near them using a publicly accessible website,
justair.app, which doesn’t require a login or account. Users can also subscribe to text alerts, which go out when air quality reaches a threshold (that the user chooses) and again when air quality returns to safe levels. About 180 people have subscribed.
A few of the monitors also display a color-coded light that conveys the level of air quality, which you can see from a distance. “At a glance, residents can have a sense of how the air is that day in that space,” says Nate Rauh-Bieri, JustAir’s head of projects.
The light has been a success, with a lot of user engagement and enthusiasm, Thomas says.
“This has been probably one of the biggest points of feedback from residents—they love this,” he says. Focus groups have also revealed that people are using the monitors to adjust their activities, Deshpande says.
The city has been working with several community organizations, nonprofits, and schools so they can use the monitors. “This is a resource that you can consider when sending the kids out for recess or to play outside. Should it be an inside day, or should it be an outside day?” Deshpande says.
However, Deshpande explains, “The intention of this is not to shift the burden of not getting asthma onto people.” People staying inside doesn’t solve the problem of air quality.
Along with informing people about air quality, “we collect and keep all of the historical data from when the monitor was turned on until now, and we have been using that, one, to look at hot spots” in different locations, as well as seasonal and other trends. “As we are rolling out interventions [to address and improve air quality], we'll have some means of understanding: Is this working? Is this making a measurable impact on the air quality?”
In Dearborn, certain neighborhoods have a higher burden of pollution than others. People want to be able “to pinpoint where exactly those disparities lie, and it's pretty clear from lived experience from residents where those disparities lie. Residents can tell you that,” Rauh-Bieri says. This monitoring program is “trying to put data to realities that have been around for a long time.”
At community meetings that discuss the program, “There is an enthusiasm and excitement for residents who feel like they haven't been heard or seen for, in some cases, decades around air quality,” Thomas says. “They're saying, hey, I feel like the air quality here is bad. My family has XYZ health issues…. I think there's something wrong, but I don't have the data to prove it.” This program gives them the data to prove it.
Using the data to improve air quality
The City of Dearborn has moved to improve air quality before. As one example, the city recently passed one of the strongest fugitive dust ordinances in the country, according to Deshpande. Fugitive dust is particulate matter that comes from sources such as industrial facilities, construction and transportation and can aggravate respiratory problems.
The city is also looking at zoning ordinances, trucking routes, increasing green spaces, and using vegetative buffers between industrial and residential areas. It is also analyzing the regulatory architecture of the city and thinking about streamlining those regulations to promote environmental justice and public health, Deshpande says. "What are all of the tools that we have as a local government to try to address this air quality crisis that's hitting our communities?” Deshpande asks.
Air quality data can be used for city planning such as where to put new housing developments, how to manage industrial centers differently, and where to allow trucking routes to protect vulnerable populations, Thomas says.
“No-idling zones around schools are a very simple way to keep people healthy and reduce pollution,” Rauh-Bieri adds.
Dearborn now has over a year of air quality data. Rauh-Bieri says, “We would like more, to be able to build some of the cases for this or that intervention.” One example is that, “pretty immediately, what we've seen in some of our other projects is the localized air quality data absolutely reinforces what's well known: that green spaces are a really good buffer between people and sources of pollution. Air quality is higher in green spaces,” as trees can absorb pollution, he says.
MiNextCities’ involvement formally winds up at the end of January 2025, and funding for Dearborn’s air quality monitoring program is secured through April. The city is exploring options to continue funding beyond that.
The bigger picture
JustAir has sensors elsewhere in Michigan and around the country. Thomas noted that with a larger network of these monitors, bigger patterns in air quality can be tracked and modeled, like weather is.
MiNextCities chose Dearborn, Marquette, and Flint, and the goal is to “provide a roadmap for implementing similar solutions across Michigan.”
Talk about smart cities often centers on starting from scratch with new technology, but “the real smart cities challenge is working on a community that's existed for centuries, in many cases, and really figuring out how to take an existing infrastructure, an existing city plan, an existing grid, and incorporate smart cities technology,” Thomas says.
Both MiNextCities and NextEnergy “integrate into existing communities, and that's where we see the real challenges, we see the real opportunity—the real growth,” he says.
This story is part of the Nonprofit Journal Project, an initiative focused on nonprofit leaders and programs across Metro Detroit. This series is made possible with the generous support of our partners, the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation, Michigan Nonprofit Association and Co.act Detroit.