Going green together? Brownfield remediation and environmental justice

Adam Eckerd () and Andrew Keeler

Policy Sciences, 2012, vol. 45, issue 4, 293-314

Abstract: Research on the location of hazardous facilities that contribute to environmental degradation indicates an unequal distribution of such sites within low socioeconomic status communities. In this paper, we contribute to research investigating whether there are similar patterns of unequal prioritization in environmental remediation, by assessing cleanup of a broader, more diverse set of contaminated sites, all brownfields that receive federal grants, with a finer level of geographic detail than previous studies. First, we set the context by assessing the characteristics of the communities in which brownfield sites are currently located. Then, we compare the likelihood and temporal prioritization of cleaning up brownfield sites based on the composition of the neighborhoods in which they are located. We find that brownfield sites are more likely to be located in both poor and predominantly minority communities, but while sites located in poor communities tend to be cleaned up relatively quickly, sites located in communities with larger minority populations tend to be cleaned up more slowly. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2012

Keywords: Environmental justice; Brownfield remediation; Environmental policy; Urban affairs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11077-012-9155-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:policy:v:45:y:2012:i:4:p:293-314

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11077/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11077-012-9155-9

Access Statistics for this article

Policy Sciences is currently edited by Michael Howlett

More articles in Policy Sciences from Springer, Society of Policy Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().