UC Merced

Theoretical frameworks in environmental inequality suggest that affluent, white, and educated communities have a greater ability to control local environmental change. With a focus on neighborhood-level land development, the authors evaluate this proposition considering the spatial shifts that are reshaping metropolitan areas across the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. With coverage for 52,473 metropolitan census tracts, the authors integrate sociodemographic variables from governmental sources with longitudinal data on developed land area from the National Land Cover Database, 2001–2011. Controlling for a host of other factors, results from spatial regression models with fixed effects show that new land development is negatively associated with affluence and educational attainment. Situating the notion of environmental privilege in a historical context, we propose that, with the “back to the city” movement, these groups are moving back into the urban core, which is already relatively built-out and thus has a lower rate of new land development.