Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Environmental Racism In A Growing City: Investigating Demographic Shifts In Salt Lake City's Polluted Neighborhoods, Emma Jones, Mariya Shcheglovitova

Undergraduate Honors Projects

We aim to contribute to research on environmental racism by asking how relationships between race and hazard exposure change over time. We analyze American Community Survey (ACS) demographic data from 2010 and 2019 to determine whether census tracts with high densities of EPA environmental hazard sites have a growing, shrinking, or unchanging proportion of Latinx residents. We argue that racist planning practices effectively weave environmental racism into the fabric of cities and that cities with growing communities of color must consider how existing spatial patterns of segregation may perpetuate exposure to environmental harms.