| Critical environmental justice studies have suggested that selective sociospatial processes of affluent white flight are the keys to understanding the current unequal distribution of environmental burdens in urban and suburban areas in the United States. The affluent white flight argument, however, has not been adequately explored in environmental justice research. This thesis explores the affluent white flight process that underlies the current disproportional distribution of hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) in urban and suburban areas of northeastern New Jersey by using theories from urban geography, specifically critical explanations of capital-driven suburbanization.; In this research, significant correlation was found between an affluent white flight index and the distribution of HAPs, showing the evidence of affluent white flight from environmentally burdened areas. An affluent white flight model was built using the characteristics of neighborhood change, HAPs concentration, socioeconomic status, land use change, and private capital investment in the housing market. The model building, however, was limited by multicollinearity among the explanatory variables. Factor analysis was used to create independent factors. Three factors, representing disadvantage, suburban sprawl and urban sprawl respectively, were extracted and successfully built into the model. The model results indicated that affluent white flight was an out-migration from disadvantage (worse environment, poor and minority communities, and capital disinvestment), with accompanying land use changes of suburban sprawl (low density and rural residential land use increase in the expense of agricultural land use) and urban sprawl (high and medium density residential land use increase). While the first factor may suggest various explanations such as the pursuit of better environments and continuing segregation, the interpretation of this factor is quite controversial. Based on critical theories of suburbanization, this study follows the explanation of capital-driven urban-suburban sociospatial change as the fundamental cause. This interpretation reveals more difficult questions in environmental justice discourse on how we understand this problem when it comes with a rather resultant and collateral meaning. Finally, incorporation of a spatial autoregressive (SAR) specification into the OLS model improved the performance of the affluent white flight model in the presence of spatial autocorrelation among residuals that violates the assumption of the OLS model. |
