Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Racial Disparities In Access To Community Water Supply Service In Wake County, North Carolina, Jacqueline Macdonald Gibson, Nicholas Defelice, Daniel Sebastian, Hannah Leker

Frontiers in Public Health Services and Systems Research

Anecdotal evidence suggests that historically African American communities on the fringes of cities and towns in North Carolina have been systematically denied access to municipal drinking water service. This paper presents the first statistical analysis of the role of race in determining water access in these fringe areas, known as extraterritorial jurisdictions. Using publicly available property tax data, we quantified the percentage of residences with municipal water service in each census block in Wake County (the second-largest by population in North Carolina). Using the resulting water service maps plus 2010 U.S. Census data, we employed a logistic regression to assess …