The problems of industrial/military contamination and degrading infrastructure exist nationwide. Even younger, not-highly-industrialized cities like my own, in supposedly more-pristine surroundings have had water-table and soil-contamination issues (such as jet-fuel in aquifers and PFAs in livestock and dairy products). The US elites have always found it convenient to trade people’s lives for profit, and moreover to invest without much attention to domestic interests like infrastructure. When the nature of the economic system is such that it favors investment based mostly on return, rather than such national domestic improvement, it’s hard as hell to fathom even a regulatory structure securely enough enforced to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Add to that the apparent national tendency running through both major political parties to invest in the militarily-industrial machine rather than in infrastructure and the outlook’s even more bleak. This is a vast challenge and I question whether it’s addressable without fundamental economic restructuring.