Green Gentrification, Environmental Injustice, and Displacement: What Policies May Help?

Description:

The remediation of an environmental disamenity, such as a brownfield, may well have short-term beneficial effects. Thedisamenity is gone, the environmental conditions in a community improve, and in the short term that improvement can be enjoyed by the people that live in proximity to the newly cleaned site. In the longer term, however, this remediated area may become appealing for redevelopment, leading to rising property values; if so, this is "Green Gentrification.” With green gentrification, those who lived in the community at the time of the remediation may be made worse off in the longer term via rising housing costs leading to displacement out of thenewly cleaned-up community—and perhaps even forced relocation to a community with worse environmental conditions. Such outcomes are of particular concern for communities that disproportionately suffer from environmental disamenities, often known as “Environmental Justice” communities.

Green gentrification leading to displacement has been identified by both scholars and communities for specific cases (Curran & Hamilton, 2017), but has not really been assessed in a generalized manner (SK Kim & Wu, 2021). I and coauthors use complexity thinking and Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to analyze short-term versus long-term effects, both environmentally and socially, of cleaning up an environmental harm. This begins to break a path toward a generalizable approach to the different complex local settings. We end by outlining policy insights from these analyses.

Guest speaker:

Heather E. Campbell, PhD, Thornton F. Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy, is Director of the Division of Politics and Economics in the School of Social Science, Policy and Evaluation at the Claremont Graduate University, part of the Claremont Consortium in the city of Claremont, California, USA. She is interested in policy analysis broadly, with a primary focus on urban environmental policy and particularly research in minority-based environmental injustice.