Race, class, and space: an intersectional approach to environmental justice in New York City

Abstract

The present study contributes to the environmental justice (EJ) literature by quantitatively examining spatial location within a city through an intersectional lens. Specifically, we develop the literature on longstanding conflicts over the location of bus depots and urban environmental inequality to study how patterns of racial, ethnic, and class inequality are related to distance to bus depots in four boroughs in New York City. We use a continuous measure of distance and examine the moderating effects of race, ethnicity, and class. Using census tracts as our unit of analysis, we find a general trend suggesting that census tracts with above-average percentages of racial and/or ethnic minority groups are located closer to bus depots, and we find that in three of the boroughs class moderates the relationship between racial composition and census tracts’ distance to bus depots. However, we also show how these relationships vary across the boroughs. Thus, this article develops the study of EJ, transportation justice, and spatial location to examine how social disparities created by political and spatial divisions within cities are varied in their impact across intersecting social identities.