Full Citation
Title: Gentrification and Community Gating around Sub/urban Drinking Water Supply Reservoirs in North Carolina, USA
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2012
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Abstract: To achieve sustainability, the utilitarian tendency toward “the greatest good for the greatest number” must be tempered by a concern for justice. Infrastructure intended to serve the public good frequently has environmental justice implications, meaning the infrastructure often plays a role in inducing or advancing demographic processes of concern: Persistent poverty or segregation, gentrification, wealth or white flight, and community gating. Sub/urban drinking water supplies in North Carolina, USA, have regularly been secured by constructing dams to impound drinking water supply reservoirs. Though intended to serve the public good, these reservoirs appear to implicate one or more demographic processes of concern. We used higher resolution, publicly available US Census data and an area-weighted GIS analysis to explore whether 66 sub/urban drinking water supply reservoirs in North Carolina have induced gentrification in lakeside communities. Our principal findings include: (1) The ratio of white people to non-white people was significantly higher in communities within 0.5 mile of reservoirs’ shorelines than in more distant communities; and (2) even as North Carolina overall became less white from 1990 to 2010, the ratio of white people to non-white people within the 0.5 mile areas increased relative to the overall ratio in the State. These tendencies are consistent with the proposition that our sample of North Carolina sub/urban drinking water supply reservoirs have induced racial gentrification in the past and are continuing to have a gentrifying or community gating effect. These tendencies raise environmental justice and social sustainability concerns that should, at a minimum, be taken into account in planning and building new North Carolina drinking water supply reservoirs.
Url: https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/bitstream/handle/1840.16/8115/etd.pdf?sequence=2
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Authors: Youth, Michael, D
Institution: North Carolina State University
Department: Natural Resources
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Degree: Master of Science Natural Resources
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Pages: 73
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Natural Resource Management
Countries: United States