Housing Discrimination Informs Racial Gaps in Pollution
Max Snyder 
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A large body of evidence shows that Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionally exposed to harmful pollutants. People of color are more likely to live near hazardous waste landfills, more likely to reside near contaminated waterways, and more likely to breathe air containing pollutants such as ozone. Scholars have named this phenomenon the “toxics exposure gap” and believe that it contributes to poor health outcomes and persistent poverty.
Some, however, have wondered whether this gap truly damages human welfare since residences in polluted areas also tend to have cheaper rents. If living in such neighborhoods is indeed harmful — goes the reasoning — wouldn’t people choose to move elsewhere?
A new study illuminates one potential answer. Between 2018 and 2019, a team of three economists — Christensen, Sarmiento-Barbieri, and Timmins — studied the connection between housing discrimination and residential air pollution. Their results suggest that discriminatory behavior among realtors makes it more difficult for Black and Hispanic Americans to move to neighborhoods free of pollution.
To conduct the experiment, the scholars worked with an undisclosed online housing platform. They sent what appeared to be real housing applications to roughly 3,000 listings from almost 20 different zip codes. Messaged areas include major American cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and smaller urban areas such as Birmingham, Charleston, and Columbus. To examine the racial preferences of realtors, the scholars selected names that research shows are likely to be perceived as either white, Hispanic, or African-American. In order to mitigate potential bias, the authors controlled for the perceived education level of each name (i.e., “African-American” sounding names associated with people with high levels of education were paired with “Caucasian” sounding names associated with people with high levels of education).
The results provide significant evidence of discrimination in the American housing market. When a perceived person of color applied to live in a low-pollution neighborhood, they received only 59% as many realtors’ responses as white applicants did. These disparities were particularly pronounced for African-American men and held regardless of a given neighborhood’s racial composition and income.
Areas with high pollution levels are less attractive to renters and homebuyers, and recent evidence suggests that pollution substantially lowers housing prices. For households with tight budgets, these prices may be an appealing feature. However, this study suggests that a desire for cheaper housing cannot wholly explain the toxics exposure gap. Even if households are willing to pay a premium for cleaner air, structural barriers for African-Americans and Hispanics make it more challenging to do so.
The study is the first to examine the relationship between discrimination and air pollution experimentally, but it contributes to a large body of “audit studies” in which researchers measure the preferences of realtors and employers by sending out paired applications. The authors suggest that additional research is needed to investigate how discrimination affects the in-person housing search and the extent to which discrimination discourages applicants from applying to properties in the first place.
President-elect Joe Biden has promised his administration will prioritize issues of environmental justice, arguing in a recent policy proposal that “the energy and environmental policy decisions of the past have failed communities of color.” However, to fulfill this promise, policymakers need to acknowledge how residential pollution is connected to many other social issues. To this end, Christensen and colleagues offer a key insight: stopping housing discrimination is a crucial step for eliminating the racial gap in exposure to harmful pollutants.
Christensen, Peter, Ignacio Sarmiento-Barbieri, and Christopher Timmins. 2020. “Housing Discrimination and the Toxics Exposure Gap in the United States: Evidence from the Rental Market.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 26805. https://doi.org/10.3386/w26805.
