ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that community benefits agreements are a mechanism by which green social workers can ally with residents and community organisations to protect the health and well-being of people living in proximity to undesirable development. Urban land-use decisions are a necessary, although under-examined, intervention point for green social workers in preventing or mitigating environmental injustice. Environmental burdens are not experienced equally across populations. Instead, the most polluted urban communities in the US are disproportionately populated by people of colour, the poor, women, and children. Urban political theorists suggest that, within a capitalist economy with private property, market competition, and economic inequality, the most important concern of cities and their governmental leaders is growth, which happens through development. Urban growth coalitions, including developers, are incentivised to place locally undesirable land uses in low-income communities of colour because land is comparatively affordable and residents are perceived to be less politically powerful than those in more affluent areas.
