By Rick Sadler,
We know that structural racism has far-reaching and enduring impacts on the built environment of neighborhoods and on the health of the people who live there. Structural racism both contributes to and is compounded by neighborhood disadvantage, the overconcentration of alcohol outlets, the incidence of firearm violence, the unequal redevelopment of urban areas via gentrification, and rates of childhood obesity.
And yet, most of the work being done on this topic is limited in the breadth and depth of what kinds of structural racism are considered and how they are measured. A lot of work winds up leaning back on the singular measure of redlining. This metric is increasingly easy for researchers to analyze now that the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project has created a helpful resource of geographic datasets for every city where these maps were created during the 1930s. Contemporary segregation is also commonly studied based on the well-supported assumption that the racial and socioeconomic composition of a neighborhood influences availability of resources, health risks, and overall wellbeing.
But many other measurable elements of structural racism in the built environment exist. They include blockbusting (or the closely related phenomenon of White flight), urban renewal, interstate highway construction, restrictive covenants, predatory lending, and gentrification. While some of these are lesser known, they may have had big impacts on the trajectory of cities.
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