Economic Deprivation and Environmental Inequality in Postindustrial Detroit

Abstract

The research presented here directly engages the issues of environmental inequality by testing the empirical merits of two sociological explanations of urban inequality by comparing landfill and Superfund locations in postindustrial (1970 to 1990) Detroit, Michigan. The results indicate that economic deprivation supercedes race in predicting the location of both landfill and Superfund sites; furthermore, both landfill and Superfund sites tend to be located in census tracts located near to industrial districts contiguous to navigable waterways in Detroit. Using Geographic Information Systems and logistic regression, the results indicate that the probability of living near a landfill is highest among the economically deprived and those least able to “escape” the urban center of Detroit. Substantively, the findings suggest that the process of deindustrialization is decisive in understanding environmental inequality, whereas methodologically, the results underscore the subtle nuances posed by different types of environmental threats.