PACOIMA, Calif. — On a quiet residential street in this north-east San Fernando Valley neighborhood, Shance Taylor, an environmental project manager for the community group Pacoima Beautiful, climbed a ladder to zip-tie a white shoebox-sized sensor to the siding of Jose Luis Salas’s house. The device, an Aeroqual air-quality monitor, began silently sampling the air for microscopic particles and ozone, feeding real-time data into a dashboard that residents can check from their phones.
The sensor at Salas’s house is one of six that Pacoima Beautiful has deployed since 2025 around Pacoima — a neighborhood that the California Environmental Protection Agency ranks among the state’s most environmentally burdened, squeezed between Interstate 5, Highway 118, Interstate 210, a regional airport, auto-dismantlers, landfills, factories, and a rail line.
“The data I’ve seen from these monitors shows there is more pollution near the freeway areas because of the heavy trucks that transport heavy materials and use diesel,” said Salas, who has lived in Pacoima for 26 years. He said he sometimes struggles to breathe when exercising outdoors on days when the air is visibly hazy.
Pacoima Beautiful, founded in 1996 by five mothers concerned about trash and toxic smells their children encountered walking to school, has expanded its focus to include air quality monitoring as a central project. The group’s sensor network includes not only Aeroqual stations — supplied by the state agency South Coast AQMD — but also commercially available Purple Air monitors and portable AirBeam devices that volunteers carry on walks to map pollution in real time.
The hyperlocal approach fills a gap left by regulatory infrastructure, said Paloma Giottonini, an urban planning professor at California State University, Northridge, who brings students to work with Pacoima Beautiful. The closest official regulatory monitor is miles away, she said, and does not reflect conditions on the ground.
“They can come to the city saying: ‘Look at our levels. Our levels are much higher than everywhere else. Do something about it,’” Giottonini said. “Data in the hands of the community is really powerful.”
Nearly 9% of Pacoima residents have asthma, according to the California EPA. Shance Taylor told the Guardian that the heavy truck traffic — a 2023 student study counted more than 500 trucks daily, with over 100,000 cars on each adjacent freeway — increases the risk of respiratory disease and heart issues. “Our residents tend to be older, or young people – the most vulnerable,” Taylor said.
Amanda Ortega, a Los Angeles Unified School District teacher who participated in Pacoima Beautiful’s Air Ambassador program in summer 2025, said she walked the same paths her students walk and found the highest pollution levels in lower-income neighborhoods. At one spot off San Fernando Road near the freeway, she said, “I thought: Whoa. This is bad.”
The monitoring is part of a broader set of climate-adaptation projects in Pacoima. The city has coated more than 700,000 square feet of roads, school playgrounds, and parking lots with reflective epoxy to lower surface temperatures. A 2020 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that similar coatings reduced pavement temperatures by up to 10°F in two Los Angeles neighborhoods.
The data from Salas’s sensor showed moderate air quality a week after installation, but PM2.5 levels — microscopic particles linked to heart and lung disease — were higher at his house than at reference stations in nearby Reseda and North Hollywood, according to the Guardian.
In a climate-changing world, air pollution in the Los Angeles basin is expected to worsen. The region is predicted to experience an average of 22 extreme heat days annually by 2050, up from six per year between 1980 and 2000, according to the Guardian, citing climate projections. Higher temperatures trap polluted air, compounding the effects of local emissions.
“My hopes are to leave a better world for the people who come after us,” Salas said. “I’m not just talking about our children, but our grandchildren. I hope they are left with a better world, with a better natural environment and a cleaner environment.”