The Problem with Environmental Justice Studies (And How Hedonics Can Help)

Focus on environmental justice has intensified since President Clinton issued an executive order in February, 1994 requiring that all government agencies investigate the potential impact of any proposed policy on the environment of disadvantaged classes. Bullard (1996) broadly defines environmental justice as providing equal environmental and health protection under governmental laws and regulations. Specifically, environmental inequity is associated with unequal application of environmental and other social regulations, unequal exposure to environmental hazards, improper risk assessment, exclusionary zoning, and exclusionary practices that prevent minorities from participating in environmental decision making. It has been clearly demonstrated that better community organization and decisionmaking is a powerful factor in preventing sitings of noxious facilities (Berry 2003), and access to information is critical in this effort (Kellogg and Mathur 2003; Shapiro 2005). This paper is organized as follows: first, I present an exhaustive review of the seminal and current literature on environmental justice, predominantly from a sociological and economic point of view; next I present the foundations for applying hedonic techniques to housing data to measure the distribution of environmental quality in neighborhoods; then I discuss further shortcomings of the proposed he- donic methods and suggest some additional ways to refine the aforementioned models using recent contributions in econometrics, as well as provide concluding comments.