Are Global Neighborhoods in Houston Less Polluted? A Spatial Analysis of Twenty-First-Century Urban Demographics

Suburban metropolitan areas across the United States have become racially diverse. We examine this novel spatial demography in relation to pollution levels across census tracts within the greater Houston area for the year 2015. We integrate a multigroup measure of racial diversity (the Entropy Index) with information on pollution levels from the Toxics Release Inventory. Maps of these two variables show that racial diversity tends to be higher in the Houston suburbs where pollution levels tend to be lower. Indeed, across five different spatial regression models, we find that tract-level racial diversity is negatively correlated with pollution levels, controlling for a host of other factors, including population size and land area. We outline this finding as a human ecology approach to urban environmental inequality; specifically, we speculate that recent demographic shifts, like the “back-to-the-city” movement, are modifying the dynamics of environmental inequality in cities.