Single‐Mother Families and Air Pollution: A National Study^*

Abstract

Objective-This study uses tract-level demographic data and toxicity-weighted air pollutant concentration estimates for the continental United States to determine whether (1) single-mother families are overrepresented in environmentally hazardous Census tracts and (2) the percentage of single-mother families in a Census tract is a significant predictor of tract-level toxic concentration estimates.Methods-After calculating tract-level toxic concentration estimates for the average female-headed family, male-headed family, and married-couple family with and without children, we use fixedeffects regression models to determine whether the percentage of single-mother families in a tract is a significant predictor of tract-level toxic concentration estimates.

Exploring patterns of environmental injustice in the Global South: Maquiladoras in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

“…Shifting into the children finding, this study finds that neighborhoods with higher percentages of children have higher levels of industrial hazard; this was also found in studies conducted in Sweden, Great Britain, and the US (Chaix et al 2006;Downey and Hawkins 2008;Mitchell and Dorling 2003). In terms of why children are disproportionately exposed to hazards at home, an explanation in the US relates to the location of public housing projects provided to a proportion of the poor.…”

“…While some studies have compared the social demographics of at-risk children and found them to be more often racial/ethnic minorities in south Florida (Chakraborty and Zandbergen 2007), less affluent in Sweden (Chaix et al 2006), and both (minority and/or low-income) in California (Houston et al 2006), others have used the concentration of children as an explanatory variable in predicting hazard, as we do here. Downey and Hawkins (2008) found in a national-level study (US) that single-mother families with young children were more concentrated in toxic neighborhoods than were any other family type; this variable was also a robust predictor of hazard across several statistical models. They tentatively propose that public housing and welfare policies may explain the concentration of single-mother families with young children in hazardous areas in the US, and they call for further studies to investigate why this pattern occurs (Downey and Hawkins 2008).…”

“…Downey and Hawkins (2008) found in a national-level study (US) that single-mother families with young children were more concentrated in toxic neighborhoods than were any other family type; this variable was also a robust predictor of hazard across several statistical models. They tentatively propose that public housing and welfare policies may explain the concentration of single-mother families with young children in hazardous areas in the US, and they call for further studies to investigate why this pattern occurs (Downey and Hawkins 2008). Researchers in Britain found that pollution (i.e., nitrous dioxide) was most concentrated in areas where young children and their parents lived, and least concentrated in areas with higher concentrations of elderly residents (Mitchell and Mitchell and Dorling (2003) situated exposure on an age-urban space continuum relevant to the British context.…”

“…In the US, the vast majority of studies have found that poor and racial-ethnic minorities live disproportionately close to environmental hazards (e.g., Downey 2006;Grineski et al 2007;Pastor et al 2002;Sicotte and Swanson 2007) with few exceptions (e.g., Anderton et al 1994;Brown et al 1997). US-focused research has found patterns of injustice related to the presence of technological hazards (most commonly Toxic Release Inventory [TRI] industrial facilities) near the places of residence of socially marginal populations, including home renters , female headed households (Downey 2005), elderly (Bae et al 2007), children (Downey and Hawkins 2008), public housing residents (Cutter et al 2001), and immigrants (Hunter 2000).…”

“…Children's exposure to hazards has been a recent area of focus in environmental justice studies (Chakraborty and Zandbergen 2007;Downey 2005;Downey and Hawkins 2008). Children have been the focus of analysis because they are a relatively powerless group in determining their home (and school) location and because they are more susceptible to health effects from pollution: their lungs and immunological systems are still under development (Mitchell and Dorling 2003).…”