Commuting Out of Urban Pollution: Flows to and from Industrially Produced Toxins in Houston

• In Event: 297 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Paper Session. Urban Spatial Inequality

Abstract

Social research on industrial pollution has made impressive advances over recent years by
studying unequal exposures in residential neighborhoods. This approach, while still useful, ignores the fact that most urban residents work, and when they do, it is typically in areas other than where they reside. In this way, the daily commute both connects and separates areas of
potentially substantial environmental inequality in ways that help to sustain and reproduce this inequality on an everyday basis. To examine how this process operates, the present study uses the Houston metropolitan area as a case study. Within this study area, we merge residential data with commuting data from the Census Transportation Planning Products and industrial pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators Geographic Microdata. Results from descriptive and spatial regression analyses offer several
novel insights: (1) individuals tend to work in more polluted environments than they reside; (2) longer commutes correlate with cleaner residential areas; and (3) the most toxic air tends to be not just in poorer neighborhoods, but in poorer neighborhoods where residents of wealthier neighborhoods commute to work. The corollary is that residents of more toxic areas typically do not work there. As such, they get the pollution from nearby facilities but not the jobs and wages, further reinforcing an unequal ecological exchange facilitated by daily commutes.

Authors

• Kevin T Smiley, Rice University

• James R. Elliott, Rice University