When Rise South City joined a TLCI Friday Forum in 2024, their community monitoring work was already gaining momentum. Today, the organization is participating in a California Air Resources Board–supported community air monitoring initiative for South San Francisco.

Julio Garcia has a story he tells about a little boy in his neighborhood — three years old, hospitalized for asthma one or two times every month. The family had moved three or four times looking for relief. But in South San Francisco, where affordable housing clusters along the corridors closest to three major highways and one of the country’s busiest airports, there is no easy escape from the air.

The boy kept ending up in the hospital. The family kept moving. The air stayed the same.

Garcia shared that story during TLCI’s virtual Friday Forum in October 2024, not as an anomaly but as evidence that his community was living inside a health crisis that official data was not capturing, because monitoring in low-income Latino neighborhoods was limited or nonexistent. Garcia and his co-founder, Francesca Pedraza, built Rise South City to generate that data themselves.

As TLCI prepares for its 2026 Forums on social determinants of health, Rise South City’s work offers a striking example of how community-led environmental monitoring can shape public attention and policy discussions.

From Community Monitoring to State Recognition

When Garcia spoke at the Forum, Rise South City was running PurpleAir monitors that depended on household WiFi — meaning that in low-income homes, monitors went offline whenever bandwidth ran short. The same resource gaps contributing to health risks were also limiting efforts to document local air quality consistently.

That problem has since been partially addressed. Rise South City added solar-powered Clarity sensors that run continuously, independent of household internet access, while continuing to operate PurpleAir monitors. A bilingual, mobile-friendly dashboard — developed with Stanford students — now gives residents real-time access to the data their own neighborhood is generating, and Rise South City’s Clarity sensors are included in the EPA’s AirNow Fire and Smoke Map.

(Explore Rise South City’s Air Quality Projects dashboards.)

In September 2025, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) approved a Community Air Monitoring Plan for South San Francisco in partnership with Rise South City and Aclima.

What Hasn’t Changed

South San Francisco’s most pollution-burdened census tracts, where Latino families are more likely to live near highways, still have not received AB 617 designation, one of California’s key policy frameworks for addressing cumulative pollution exposure.

Recent state CalEnviroScreen data ranks at least one Old Town census tract as the most pollution-burdened in San Mateo County across multiple metrics — and third worst out of more than 1,700 census tracts across the entire nine-county Bay Area. The health consequences are documented: zip code 94080, where Old Town is located, recorded the highest number of asthma hospitalizations of any zip code in San Mateo County for 8 out of the 10 years between 2013 and 2023, according to California Department of Public Health data.

The data exists. The state partnership exists. Yet the area still has not received AB 617 designation.

That said, the issue is drawing more municipal attention. In April 2026, the South San Francisco City Council agreed to elevate East Side air quality on its priority list and assess possible pollution sources and remedies, with Councilmember Eddie Flores, who represents the area, calling it a “quality-of-life issue” for the community.

The Conversation Continues

Air pollution, environmental exposure, and Latino health are issues TLCI has explored across multiple Forum series and expects to revisit in the 2026 Forums focused on social determinants of health.

Community groups like Rise South City demonstrate how local residents can help surface health concerns, generate data, and push for change. Their work has drawn recent local attention, including in-depth reporting from the San Mateo Daily Journal: Why is pollution in east South City so bad? (March 2026) and South San Francisco to probe air quality: East Side at top of priority list (April 2026). Their work also reflects a broader trend: communities, researchers, and advocates building stronger evidence to improve health outcomes. 

TLCI’s role in 2024 was to provide a platform for these conversations and elevate community voices already doing important work. The progress that followed belongs to Rise South City and its partners.

Related TLCI Work

In June 2025, TLCI founder Ysabel Duron — with co-authors Alexandra Garcia of the Yale School of the Environment and Miriam Juarez-Vargas of TLCI — published a commentary in Cancer Causes & Control: “Climate change, cancer, and the critical importance of Latino community engagement.”

The paper holds up Rise South City’s collaboration with Stanford students as a model for the kind of community-driven academic partnership it argues must become standard practice in environmental health research.

The commentary also includes an Addendum — added after the paper’s submission — addressing the sweeping federal research cuts of early 2025 and their implications for health equity research. It is a frank document, and it reads with new weight in 2026. Read it here: Climate change, cancer, and the critical importance of Latino community engagement