The Effect of the 1930s Residential Security Maps on Environmental Disparities

Abstract

Have discriminatory housing policies contributed to today’s pollution and climate hazard disparities? We examine the impact of Redlining during the 1930s in the US, which assigned risk grades to neighborhoods according to housing characteristics and ethnic composition, on spatial patterns of urban environmental disparities. An extensive literature on environmental justice documents strong correlations between a worse neighborhood risk grade and higher air pollution and climate risks today. However, whether these disparities have been caused by redlining or merely coincide with pre-existing discrimination is unclear. Our analysis exploits an exogenous city size cutoff i.e. only neighborhoods in cities above 40,000 residents received risk grades from HOLC. We compare areas that received a particular grade with neighborhoods that would have received the same grade if their city had been treated. The control neighborhoods are defined using a machine learning algorithm trained to classify HOLC-like grades using full-count census records. Using local measures of environmental hazards, we find that the disparities exhibit the same pattern in treated and comparison cities, with meagre differences across the same grade in treatment and control cities. Instead, our results suggest that sorting, and alternative forms of discrimination drive contemporary environmental and climate disparities.

Type
Publication
Conference draft
Julian Wichert
Julian Wichert
PhD Researcher

My goal is to contribute to our understanding of the environment and development intersection.