NEIGHBORHOOD DYNAMICS AND PRICE EFFECTS OF SUPERFUND SITE CLEAN‐UP*

ABSTRACT Numerous hedonic price analyses estimate price effects associated with hazardous waste site remediation or other environmental variation. This paper estimates a neighborhood transition model to capture the direct price effect from Superfund site clean‐up and the indirect price effects arising from residential sorting and changes in investment in the housing stock following clean‐up. First‐difference models of neighborhood change and a national sample are used. This approach fails to find consistent positive direct price effects. Positive indirect effects, however, may arise through residential sorting and neighborhood investment spurred by remediation. The findings can be sensitive to policy endogeneity and model specification.     

Coming Through a City Near You: The Transport of Hazardous Wastes

Current figures (compiled in 1995) indicate that hazardous waste transporters (19,567 in number) ship approximately 16 million tons of hazardous waste annually in the United States (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 1995). While some state and local governments have enacted hazardous waste transport regulations for the protection of their citizens, the federal government has had primacy in initiating and setting the course of hazardous waste transport regulation. As a result, the predominant perspective on hazardous waste transport has been technical in orientation. This paper identifies and discusses how this technical perspective and the social perspective differ and what the consequences are for government policies and actions regarding hazardous waste transport.     

Race,Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard

This paper advances the concept of “waste formations” as a way of thinking together processes of race, space, and waste in brownfield redevelopment projects. Defined as formerly industrial and contaminated properties, in the 1990s brownfields emerged as the grounds for new forms of urbanization and an emerging environmental remediation industry. Through their redevelopment, the twentieth century's urban wastelands—environmentally degraded, economically divested, and often racially marked—have become sites of investment, resignification, and value formation. The concept of waste formations provides a critical framework on the ways these socio‐ecological transformations rework twentieth century urban inequalities—in particular, the articulation of waste and toxic waste—and the ways they produce new geographies of environmental injustice through the displacement of toxic waste to newly waste‐able spaces. This paper develops an analytic of waste formations and applies it to the process of brownfield redevelopment at the Hunters Point Shipyard in southeast San Francisco.     

Voluntary Approaches to Environmental Problems: Exploring the Rise of Nontraditional Public Policy

Government reliance on voluntary programs represents a significant shift in public policy: moving from command and control regulations to market based mechanisms. This article explores the determinants of Voluntary Remediation Programs (VRPs) in the American States. During the 1980s and 1990s, 44 states adopted VRPs to facilitate remediation of existing hazardous waste sites. Relying on diffusion of innovation theory, I develop a model of state policy adoption that explores the influence of internal state political and economic factors, as well as testing the influence of regional and top‐down diffusion forces. I utilize a discrete‐time event history approach to test this model. The results indicate that state policymaking is responsive to interest group pressure and the pace of cleanup at hazardous waste sites. Additionally, state policymaking is consistently influenced by the actions of surrounding state governments; the probability of adopting a voluntary program increases if surrounding states have already developed these policies.     

An Equity Model for Locating Environmentally Hazardous Facilities

This paper develops a multiobjective mathematical location model to identify possible locations for environmentally hazardous facilities. Risk and equity are recognized as the most important criteria in determining site selection. In contrast to earlier models, the equity objective explicitly considers the existing distribution of environmental burdens when siting new hazardous facilities. Proposed environmentally hazardous facilities are located so that the burdens associated with new and existing hazards are shared as equally as possible among all areas. The application of the model, in a case study of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, illustrates the trade‐offs associated with various risk and equity scenarios. Sensitivity analyses demonstrate how the existing distribution of environmental burdens may act as a constraint and limit the degree of equity that may be obtained when locating new facilities.     

There Goes the Neighborhood

Many research studies have examined if hazardous waste treatment, storage, or disposal facilities (TSDFs) tend to be located where people are disproportionately minority, low-income, and politically inactive. This article focuses on whether variables representing potential neighborhood activism were related to where new TSDFs located during the 1990s. My analyses demonstrated that there is no consistent, substantial evidence that the demographic characteristics of neighborhoods around new TSDFs affected their location decisions. The overall composition of these neighborhoods indicates that there are disproportionately high concentrations of minority and low-income people around these TSDFs and disproportionately fewer people who were more likely to be politically active and concerned about new TSDFs. The shew towards more minorities was overwhelmingly due, however, to a relatively small number of TSDFs in heavily populated neighborhoods with high minority proportions.     

The external effects of inner-city shopping centers: Evidence from the Netherlands

Shopping center redevelopment is inevitable to remain attractive for consumers. In this paper, we investigate the external effects of shopping center redevelopment on nearby residential property prices. Using a difference-in-difference empirical framework, we find the redevelopment has positive external effects on nearby property prices. We find the price of a property located next to a redeveloped shopping center increases by 1.43% on average just after redevelopment. Our results indicate that these positive external effects wear off rather rapidly across space and over time. This suggests that shopping center redevelopment plays a substantial, but limited, role in combating neighborhood deprivation.     

Policy Influence and Policy Responsiveness in State Pollution Control

This article develops an integrated theory of state policy influence and responsiveness, then operationalizes this theory to account for variations in the strength and scope of state water pollution control and hazardous waste management programs. The analysis finds that economic, ideological, interest group, and political system characteristics act in concert to affect state policymaking, and that the influences behind policymaking vary systematically and predictably across policy areas within environmental protection.     

Controversial Cleanup: Superfund and the Implementation of U.S. Hazardous Waste Policy

While there is widespread public and political support for cleaning up the nation's hazardous waste sites, Superfund has been fraught with dissension and controversy since its inception. Some criticisms of the program focus on deriding an all-too-expensive program run amuck with litigation and federal heavy-handedness. Other critics complain of an inefficient and ineffective program that has made painfully slow and inconsistent progress. Detractors do not disagree with the fundamental goal of the program—cleaning up hazardous waste sites. Rather, they focus on the fairness of Superfund's liability provisions and the Environmental Protection Agency's record of cleanup competency. This paper discusses these major issues at the core of the controversy over Superfund. The policy implications of Superfund program reform efforts and the ramifications for future hazardous waste policy are considered.     

All Hazardous Waste Politics is Local: Grass-roots Advocacy and Public Participation in siting and Cleanup Decisions

The combined effects of federalism and interest group pluralism pose particularly difficult problems for hazardous waste siting and cleanup decisions. Most national environmental groups have only limited involvement in local hazardous waste politics, while local grass-roots advocates have very different interests and sometimes are pitted against one another. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy recently have begun to use site-specific citizen advisory boards at cleanup sites. This approach appears to improve communications at some sites, but does not address the issues of "not in my back yard" politics and alleged inequitable exposure to hazardous wastes.     

Policy Gridlock in Waste Management

Current federal hazardous and low-level radioactive waste management policies (under conjoint federalism) fail to balance national concerns for consistency with state concerns for equity, discretion, and adequate resources. Congress should expand conjoint federalism to permit states to charge differential fees on imported hazardous waste as it does for low-level radioactive waste. For low-level radioactive waste, clarification of the "take title" issue makes the present framework for state discretion implementable, given sufficient time.     

Class,Community and Communicative Planning: Urban Redevelopment at King's Cross,London

Abstract: This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class‐ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”‐based rather than in class‐sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.     

Living in the Industrial City: Housing Quality,Land Ownership and the Archaeological Evidence from Industrial Manchester, 1740–1850

This paper looks at the recent archaeological evidence for industrial housing in Manchester, United Kingdom. The paper argues that a fragmented land-holding pattern developed in a number of city-centre areas during the second half of the eighteenth century. This land-holding pattern gave rise to overcrowding as a result of the domestic redevelopment of back yard plots and the conversion of older housing to tenements. This redevelopment was at its most acute during the peak decades of population growth in the city, 1800–40, and this led to the conditions of poverty, disease, and overcrowding recorded in contemporary accounts from the mid-nineteenth century.     

Policy Implementation and the Environmental Protection Agency: What Factors Influence Remediation at Superfund Sites?

Since the early 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has struggled to make Superfund, the program that addresses the nation's worst hazardous waste sites, "faster, fairer, and more efficient." Indeed, agency figures reflect substantial changes in recent years. Since 1993, over 500 Superfund sites have reached the "construction completion" stage in remediation. Comparatively, in the program's first 13 years, only 156 sites reached construction completion. This article explores why some Superfund sites are more likely to be remediated than others. We use survival analysis to empirically test three theoretical models of Superfund remedial progress: (1) Administrative Convenience/Transaction Costs; (2) Problem Severity; and (3) Political Pressure models. The results indicate that the EPA is more likely to tackle "easier" or low-risk sites within the program, community involvement in Superfund is associated with decreased remedial progress, and remedial action is more likely to occur when political oversight is present.     

Subject–object perceptions of heritage: a framework for the study of contrasting railway heritage regeneration strategies

A railway or any other form of heritage site may be perceived as a subject or an object-orientated experience. While the former invites an emotional reaction based on personal association, the later suggests a detached response grounded in a transfer of knowledge. This paper considers the role of heritage legislation in shaping such perceptions. Using archival research and site observations, the paper specifically examines the impact of different State-based heritage legislation on the adoption of contrasting redevelopment and site management strategies at two historic railway workshop complexes in Australia. The two sites are the Eveleigh Railway Workshops in New South Wales where an object-centred approach was adopted, and the Ipswich Workshops in Queensland where a subject-centred approach was employed. Although both sites are comparable in terms of their history, scale and cultural significance, the alternative approaches to redevelopment and management have resulted in different perceptual experiences for visitors. The paper reveals the subliminal impact of heritage legislation and suggests the need to consciously manage perceptual experiences, firstly, as a strategic objective in any redevelopment process and, secondly, as a means to integrating meaningful site-specific interpretation into the longer term management of cultural significance.     

Heritage conservation and advocacy coalitions: the state-society conflict in the case of the Enning Road redevelopment project in Guangzhou

The Enning Road redevelopment project has been controversial in Guangzhou as the site possesses many vernacular buildings that are not officially recognised by the authorities as significant but are nevertheless highly regarded by non-state stakeholders as important entities that embody the unique essence and culture of local neighbourhoods. This paper examines the positive role led by the press media, the New Express, in bringing about changes in the government-sanctioned Enning Road redevelopment project plan through the lens of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). The significance of this paper lies in detailing how the news group has helped shift the project priority from being property-led to conservation-led. Its reports have gained a wide audience in appreciating and recognising the conservation value of non-designated vernacular architecture in inner city areas. Nonetheless, this paper raises question about the sustainability of civil mobilisation in subsequent conservation efforts, due to a general lack of enthusiasm. Neither urban redevelopment strategies nor conservation agenda have been subject to a major overhaul due to the impact of this individual redevelopment project. Therefore, the promise of change is at best a tactical compromise adopted by the municipal authorities to nullify opposing public voices in Guangzhou.     

Race and the Making of Southeast San Francisco: Towards a Theory of Race‐Class

San Francisco is engaged in a redevelopment project that could bring millions in investment and community benefits to a starved neighborhood—and yet the project is embedded in an urban development process that is displacing residents. In trying to unsettle these contradictions, this paper achieves two aims. First, I unearth a little known history of redevelopment activism that frames debate around the current project. Second, I use this history to argue for a reframing of the language of race. To wit: although the social construction of race and racism is well established, race is still deeply understood in everyday life as natural. This paper offers a theoretical fusing of race and class, “race‐class”, to help us think race through a vital constructionist lens. Race‐class makes present the economic dynamics of racial formation, and foregrounds that race is a core process of urban political economy. Race‐class works both “top‐down” and “ground‐up.” While it is a vehicle for capital's exploitation of people and place, race‐class also emerges as a mode of power for racialized working‐class residents.     

Comparing Governance and Local Engagement in the St. Marys River Area of Concern

Under the 1987 revisions to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between Canada and the United States, Areas of Concern (AOC) were designated around the Great Lakes to target the remediation of environmental impairments. Local governments have the potential to play an important role in Great Lakes restoration and protection efforts in AOCs, though the scope of their engagement in remediation efforts is not fully understood. This case study investigates the St. Marys River AOC, which spans the border between Canada and the United States. Through the theoretical lens of the ecology of games, the case study explores the strategic choices of local governments to engage in environmental policy networks in Canada and the United States. The case illustrates the importance of intergovernmental aid and collaborative institutions for ongoing environmental remediation efforts and cross-border coordination.     

Partisan Probing and Democratic Decisionmaking Rethinking the Nimby Syndrome

In this paper, I focus on Minnesota's unsuccessful attempt to site a hazardous waste stabilization and containment facility, but argue that this should not be seen as another siting failure due to irrational and self-interested citizens who subverted a well-conceived and essential disposal facility, Through a detailed comparison of citizen and elite claims about the facility, I show that many of the sources of disagreement between citizens and siting officials involve value trade-offs rather than technical issues, and contend that state officials' views on these matters should not take precedence. Through "partisan probing," citizens actually contribute to effective policymaking rather than detract from it.