“We are all victimized by a system that puts money before everything else,” said Amos Favorite, a long-time resident of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” “That’s the way it is today when we got stuff in the water and air [that] we can’t even see that can kill us deader than we ever thought we could die.”
As gentrification and rising housing costs displace longtime residents across the US, industrial pollution creates a cruel trap where toxic industrial facilities can lower land values and slow down gentrification but only by endangering the health of those who choose to stay. Discriminatory zoning practices have reinforced this cycle by clustering affordable housing structures in historically redlined areas right alongside these toxic facilities.
In disinvested neighborhoods, those without toxic pollution sites face a higher risk of gentrification than those near polluters. Beyond posing risks to human and environmental health, these facilities may also negatively impact property values and deter potential real estate developers and homebuyers.
Gentrification occurs when an influx of economic investment and higher-income residents transforms a neighborhood, often at the expense of longtime residents and the local culture, according to a study on neighborhood displacement by NCRC’s Senior Director of Research Jason Richardson. As housing costs rise, lower-income families are systematically priced out of the places they called home for decades.
The National Association of Realtors suggests that neighborhood amenities, or community benefits such as green space, sidewalks and access to public transportation, are important considerations for homebuyers and tenants. In contrast, neighborhood disamenities like toxic industrial sites that emit harmful pollution can decrease buyer appeal, suppressing the real estate investment that drives gentrification. While residents near these toxic sites might avoid gentrification-driven displacement, they instead bear the brunt of living in heavily polluted neighborhoods.
A recent study conducted by NCRC’s principal researcher Bruce C. Mitchell, Dr. Helen Meier with the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and Dr. Jeffrey Wing with the Ohio State University’s College of Public Health examines why some neighborhoods gentrify while others do not. Using a newly published NCRC national gentrification dataset, the team identified that neighborhoods without a toxic industrial site have a 33% higher chance of gentrifying than those with one. This finding underscores the unfair dilemma residents near toxic sites face where they may avoid displacement from gentrification yet continue to live in places harmful to their health.Â
The map of Richmond, Virginia below illustrates how toxic sites may inhibit gentrification. The map also shows that toxic sites are primarily located in census tracts that did not gentrify.
Of the neighborhoods eligible for gentrification in 2010 (the ones colored green and blue), not a single neighborhood that gentrified by 2019 contains a toxic site. Instead, half of the city’s toxic sites are concentrated in eligible neighborhoods that did not gentrify, with the remaining sites located in ineligible neighborhoods.Â
Although this unfair dilemma is abundantly clear in Richmond, regional differences across the country can shape how toxic sites impact the gentrification process. At the core of the spatial differences in toxic sites is a fundamental power imbalance. Neighborhood residents rarely have a say in city planning or property development. Instead, they are caught in a system with no good options. They are either priced out by rising housing costs or stuck in neighborhoods with polluted air and soil.
Decades of unfair discriminatory policies concentrated industrial and hazardous facilities in low-income neighborhoods and near communities of color. Today, these same neighborhoods continue to face the lasting impacts of these policies. Without structural reform and land use decisions being led by impacted communities, residents remain locked in a system where clean air and stable housing are treated as mutually exclusive.
No resident should be caught in a system that forces them to be exposed to harmful chemicals to continue living in the community they’ve called home for years. The reality that pollution may act as an unintended barrier to gentrification reflects a fundamental failure in city planning and environmental regulation. To break this cycle, policymakers must enforce stricter limits on toxic industrial emissions while actively involving affected communities in land use decisions. Everyone should have access to stable housing and clean air without having to compromise on one or the other.
Craig A. Caudill is a Master of Public Health (MPH) student specializing in occupational and environmental epidemiology at the University of Michigan. He is also a research assistant at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research’s Population, Neurodevelopment and Genetics program.
Funding: The research activities described in this article are supported by the National Institute on Aging (Grant: R01AG080401). The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Photo credit: Natalie Dmay via Pexels.
