Is Gentrification a Carcinogen?
Neighborhood Change and Cancerous Vehicle Emissions in Los Angeles County
By Jared Schachner (the newest member of the Nerdopolis Ave Family)
Gentrification debates have long centered on fears of displacing disadvantaged residents, disrupting local retail corridors, and disintegrating social networks. Among the many impacts wrought by rapid demographic and economic transformations in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods, there is one less well known: residents’ physical health may also suffer.
Few gentrification critics and urban policy experts have seriously considered this possibility or theorized why it might be the case, but illuminating the health dimensions of gentrification is crucial to gaining a fuller picture of its consequences.
In a new working paper, I propose that gentrification fuels not only spiraling housing costs but also rising levels of cancer risk among long-term residents, who were already vulnerable in the first place.The logic goes something like this: as gentrifying neighborhoods receive influxes of richer, whiter residents, private vehicles emitting large quantities of carcinogenic toxins come with them.
The argument draws on two growing bodies of research. The first shows that private vehicles have supplanted manufacturing facilities as a primary source of carcinogenic emissions in contemporary American cities. The second reveals that higher-income households tend to have more private vehicles and use them more often than lower-income households, especially immigrant ones. If gentrifying neighborhoods attract higher-income households and their pollutant-emitting vehicles, then residents who remain in place may face higher cancer risks over the course of their lives.
This is exactly what I find when analyzing neighborhood data from Los Angeles County. L.A. is an interesting case because it is both notorious for its automobile dependency, and it is enduring particularly strong gentrification pressures. I use Urban Displacement Project data to identify neighborhoods that gentrified during the 2000s and link these indicators to neighborhood data on vehicle ownership and residents’ estimated cancer risk– the latter from Environmental Protection Agency’s National Air Toxics Assessment (EPA-NATA) and the former from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey.
I find that over the course of the 2000s, gentrifying L.A. neighborhoods’ cancer risks climbed by over half a standard deviation more than otherwise-similar disadvantaged neighborhoods that did not gentrify (see figure below). Moreover, nearly half of gentrification’s carcinogenic effect may be explained by increasing vehicular density.
I conclude that gentrification may be a carcinogen. This provocative finding is particularly salient for populations that already suffer disproportionately high risks of cancer and other chronic illnesses: low-income minorities living in urban neighborhoods.
Sorry, dear readers, for these bleak findings. But there could be hope. Policy interventions may help make this looming threat less lethal. Ongoing efforts to boost electric vehicle sales may modestly reduce gentrification’s carcinogenic effects in the short run. Longer-term strategies aimed at encouraging transportation mode shift and reducing car dependency are likely required to more substantively address the threat. Although this may be a particularly heavy lift in car-centric Los Angeles, the county has already invested billions in public transit infrastructure, which should theoretically reduce car reliance down the line. The federal infrastructure bill could further bolster those investments and spur others, such as the extension of bike lanes, which are notoriously scarce in the city, and incentives for private and public investments that make neighborhoods more walkable.
When it comes to gentrification, environmental justice-oriented policies have long been secondary to housing-oriented interventions, like rent control and subsidized housing units. But a cruel unintended consequence of these policies is that by keeping long-term residents in place, they may inadvertently increase vulnerable populations’ exposure to an increasingly carcinogenic environment. The bottom line: we must ensure that historically disadvantaged neighborhoods do not become increasingly toxic as they become increasingly rich.
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Jared Schachner is an urban researcher. After completing his Ph.D. in Sociology & Social Policy at Harvard University, he began a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he is affiliated with the Department of Sociology, Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, and the UChicago Consortium on School Research. Before his foray into academia, Jared spent several years working as a management consultant at the Monitor Group, where he collaborated with nonprofit leaders of organizations ranging from the United Negro College Fund to the National Audubon Society to amplify their social impacts. His current research examines whether and how neighborhoods, schools, and childcare settings shape the transmission of skills and status across generations.
