ABSTRACT

Under a market system, we might expect there to be differential environmental outcomes between the wealthy and the poor. The wealthy, having the resources to pay more, can opt to live in areas with high environmental quality, which puts a premium on environmental quality that the poor likely cannot afford. Indeed, the poor do tend to live with worse environmental quality than the wealthy. However, there is also accumulated evidence indicating that the disproportionate collocation of environmentally harmful facilities and locales—referred to as disamenities—with racial and ethnic minorities is not fully explained by socioeconomic status, and that race itself is an important factor. 1 Some studies do not find disproportionate minority-based collocation, 2 but of course failure to find minority-based environmental injustice in one situation does not demonstrate that it does not exist in another. As Noonan points out, choice of the size of the analytic space used for EJ analysis can affect findings. 3 Ringquist’s meta-analysis of the EJ literature finds that overall the literature indicates that race/ethnicity-based environmental injustice is present in the United States, though he estimates that the magnitude of the effects is small. 4 His work is in keeping with some earlier meta-analyses, including one by Mohai and Saha. 5 However, there is considerably less clarity with regard to why or how this inequality occurs.