Projects In Preparation
Building the Hell Out of This Place: An Environmental Justice Perspective on the IE’s Warehouse Boom
Jessica Geiger & Heather Campbell
ABSTRACT:
As recently as the 1980s, the Inland Empire (IE) was considered a rural agricultural hub. Ontario, which now has the highest concentration of warehouses in the IE, was covered in orange groves and dairy farms. As farm operators and owners began to leave in search of cheaper land in the Central Valley, the toxic waste and legacy of the agricultural industries were left for residents and city officials to manage. A quote by Jerry Blum, the 1986 director of the Ontario Planning Department, exemplifies the approach many IE city officials took to address the issue: “In its truest sense, this is a brownfield — about four feet thick! … Our point was, let's build the hell out of this place because it's the doughnut hole. It's surrounded by urban uses. It's not habitat for anything.” Although city officials welcomed warehouse developers with the promise of economic prosperity for residents, the costs and benefits of this endeavor were not evenly distributed. There is evidence to suggest that warehouses are disproportionately located in communities of color. A study by Quan Yuan (2021) finds that race rather than income explains the location of warehouses. We expand on this work using longitudinal data provided by WarehouseCITY and the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to examine the extent to which historical demographics of a region predict the placement of new warehouses instead of describing the current demographics around existing warehouses. Additionally, we use data from CalEnviroScreen 4.0 to assess the pollution burden and negative health consequences associated with residing near warehouses. In our preliminary results, we find that the number of nearby warehouses is negatively related to the lagged percent of White residents, while the number of warehouses is positively related to the lagged percent of Latino residents. Air pollution and rates of asthma and heart attack-related ER visits are positively related to an increase in the number of nearby warehouses.
Local Climate Risk and Support for Climate Mitigation Policy: The Moderating Role of Place-Based Identity
Jessica Geiger
ABSTRACT:
Americans are seeing their communities increasingly ravaged by frequent and intense heat, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods related to climate change. Despite many Americans already having firsthand experiences with the climate disasters, support for policy solutions is still far from universal. Previous research has shown that climate attitudes are deeply partisan and highly crystallized. As such, exposure to climate change risk and disaster has been shown to have either no effect on attitudes or small, weak, and short-lived effects. However, the majority of this work has yet to explore how risk and place-based identities—identification with and attachment to one’s community—interact to shape policy attitudes. A deep attachment and sense of belonging to one’s local community should motivate support for policies that aim to protect communities from harm. Therefore, I expect that strong place-based identities can motivate those who view their communities most at risk to support mitigation policies. Using a series of original cross-sectional national surveys, I show that the link between community-level climate disaster risk and support for climate change mitigation policies emerges among those respondents who have higher levels of place-based identity. These results suggest policy attitudes are influenced most by local context when individuals have strong attachments to their communities and, consequently, have a vested interest in preserving them.
Amplified Harm: LGBTQ+ disaster displacement.
ABSTRACT:
Qualitative studies have shown that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities can experience discrimination in disaster response and relief services, exacerbating social, economic, and health disparities. This article offers the first quantitative insights into these issues. To measure disparities in displacement rates and experiences of disaster among LGBTQ+ communities and between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ communities, we used linear probability models to assess relevant responses from Waves 52–63 (December 9, 2022–October 30, 2023) of the US Census Household Pulse Survey (n = 826,941). We found that people identifying as LGBTQ+ reported statistically higher rates of disaster-related displacement compared to non-LGBTQ+ individuals, with variations along the lines of race and socioeconomic status. We also test the hypothesis that higher levels of displacement among LGBTQ+ individuals might be due to individual states’ anti-LGBTQ+ policies. The results are mixed, largely because of confounding factors such as poverty and states’ limited disaster resources for the most socially vulnerable populations. Our analysis concludes with policy guidance to help ensure that disaster response and preparedness efforts meet the needs of LGBTQ+ communities throughout the country.
Jessica Geiger, Michael Mendez, and Leo Goldsmith
Published Work
Geiger, J. R., & Reny, T. T. (2024). Embracing the Status Hierarchy: How Immigration Attitudes, Prejudice, and Sexism Shaped Non-White Support for Trump. Perspectives on Politics, 1–16. doi:10.1017/S1537592724000847 LINK
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