Environmental Racism

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Environmental Racism
Reminder Midterm distributed on Tuesday No
groups work must be alone.

• Do governments, firms, and individuals
  discriminate against the poor and racial
  minorities?

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1. Introduction

• Environmental Racism refers to those
  institutional rules, regulations, and policies of
  government or corporate decisions that
  deliberately target certain communities for least
  desirable land usesit is the unequal protection
  against toxic and hazardous waste exposure
  (Bryant, 1995)

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Some definitions LULUs

• LULUs toxic waste sites, bus depots, solid waste
  transfer stations, airports, sewage treatment
  facilities, recycling centers, etc.

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Early movements

• 1967 University of Houston riots over the death
  of an African American girl at a garbage dump
  that was located in the middle of a predominantly
  African American neighborhood
• Early 1980s protests over the landfilling of PCBs
  and oil-toxics in Warren County, North Carolina
  (mostly African American population)

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More recent action

• The 1987 United Church of Christ Commission for
  Racial Justices Toxic Wastes and Race in the
  United States shows that communities of color
  are disparately impacted by the nations
  environmental, industrial, and land use policies
  
• All of these events point to discrepancies in the
  local, state, and federal permitting process that
  allow facilities to locate and pollute
  (disproportionately,) in minority and low-income
  neighborhoods

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2. Motivation

• The Chicken vs. Egg controversy the
  traditional environmental racism model only looks
  at a point in time, developing correlations
  between pollution levels and racial composition
• This doesnt answer the question, because firms
  may only be locating based on cost

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• a) Research question
• Is there discrimination, or are we merely
  experiencing an edogeneity problem where firms
  (and people) are locating in the least expensive
  places?
• b) Policy questions
• Have zoning regulations targeted (or allowed
  firms to target) minority populations, or those
  that lack a voice in the political arena?

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Previous Literature

• Alesina, et al, 1999 QJE article Public Goods
  and Ethnic Divisions Results show that the
  shares of spending on public goods in U.S. cities
  are inversely related to the city's ethnic
  fragmentation
• Cutler and Glaeser 1997 QJE Article Are Ghettos
  Good or Bad They find that African Americans in
  more segregated areas have significantly worse
  outcomes than African Americans in less
  segregated areas.

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3. Models (read how can we improve them)

• Dependent Variable Pollution
• Independent Variables Indices of Segregation,
  Socioeconomic variables, etc.
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• Pollution estimates Total releases (volume)
• Toxicity-weighted releases (acute, chronic)
• Additional characteristics (odor, color)
•  

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• Indices of Segregation (from Denton and Massey
  Alesina)
• Evenness (dissimilarity)
• Concentration (people per physical space)
• Centralization  
• Exposure (potential for interaction, or
  isolation)
• Clustering (spatial proximity)

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• Socioeconomic Variables
• Income/Capita (by race, by age, by gender)
• City Size (log of population)
• Educational Attainment
• Income Inequality
• Poverty Rate
• Foreign Born
• Home Ownership and Age of Stock
• Transportation (modes, access, and time needed)
• Level of Aggregation City, County, MSA/PMSA

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Spatial Improvements

• Using U.S. EPA-Office of Solid Waste guidelines,
  Meteorological Data, and Digital Terrain Data,
  ISC-AERMOD software computes the risk receptor
  grid for multiple pollutantsIndustrial Source
  Complex AMS/EPA Regulatory Model
• In short, the various pollution sources are
  modeled along with the surface contours, air
  dispersion. The model takes into account the
  dose-response assessment for the different
  pollutants, creates an exposure assessment, the
  risk characterization from that exposure.

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Theoretical Improvements

• Traditional Env. Justice argument vs. Median
  Voter argument vs. Principle-Agent argument
• How can we incorporate political representation,
  interest group practices, campaign
  contributions, etc. into the model?
• How do we model perceived risk vs. actual risk?
  Do we need to?
• Include non-homogenous (ubiquitous) mobile source
  pollution?

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4. Conclusions

• Multiple dimensions to segregation (spatial) as
  opposed to traditional measures which just look
  at of total population
• Does our model differ from what the median voter
  model might predict? Perhaps the spatial
  distribution of races (and incomes) is a better
  predictor or pollution exposure and the provision
  of public environmental goods
• With the goals of
• a)Determining if environmental racism exists
• b)Figuring out how it came about in the first
  place
• c)Attempting to predict where it may occur in the
  future
• d)Creating ways to prevent it from happening
  again