US Metropolitan-area Variation in Environmental Inequality Outcomes

Liam Downey
Additional contact information
Liam Downey: Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, 219 Ketchum Hall, UCB 327 Boulder, Colorado 80302, USA, liam.downey@colorado.edu

Urban Studies, 2007, vol. 44, issue 5-6, 953-977

Abstract: Over the past 20 years a steadily increasing number of researchers have investigated the relationship between neighbourhood demographic composition and environmental hazard presence. However, relatively few researchers have attempted to determine why the distribution of social groups around environmental hazards takes the form that it does or why some studies find strong evidence of environmental racial inequality while others do not. One possible explanation for this is that environmental racial inequality levels vary from one location to another. In order to see if this is the case, the article compares environmental racial inequality levels in the 61 largest metropolitan areas in the continental US, holding the unit of analysis, type of hazard, type of region and comparison population constant across metropolitan areas. Analyses demonstrate that environmental racial inequality levels do vary across metropolitan areas. Thus, after presenting these analyses, hypotheses are tested that make predictions about the determinants of this variation. These hypothesis tests show that neither residential segregation nor racial income inequality does a good job of explaining metropolitan-area variation in environmental inequality outcomes in the US.

Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420980701256013 (text/html)

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:sae:urbstu:v:44:y:2007:i:5-6:p:953-977

DOI: 10.1080/00420980701256013

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().