R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Elliott, James R."

Browsing by Author "Elliott, James R."

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As Disaster Costs Rise, So Does Inequality
(Sage, 2018) Howell, Junia; Elliott, James R.
Across the United States, communities are experiencing increases in the frequency and severity of natural hazards. The pervasiveness and upward trajectory of these damages are worrisome enough, but equally disconcerting are the social inequalities they can leave in their wake. To examine these inequalities, the authors linked county-level damage data to a random sample of American households. The authors visualize the pervasiveness of natural hazards as well as their influence on racial wealth gaps over time. The results show that natural hazard damages and how relief is provided afterward exacerbate the growing gap between white and black wealth.
Circling the Herd: Houston’s Black Trail Riders, Placemaking and the Liberatory Potential of Second Sites
(2021-04-28) Binkovitz, Leah; Elliott, James R.
For decades, scholarship on Black communities has framed Black spaces as sites of deficit and pathology. Despite marginalization within mainstream sociology, Black scholars have consistently pointed instead to the placemaking power and geographic knowledges unique to Black experiences. This paper makes two critical interventions: first, revisiting the foundational work of W.E.B. Du Bois to engage its implicitly spatial analysis and reorient urban sociology. Second, drawing on the experiences of Houston’s Black trail riding communities to offer an empirical reflection of the material and imaginative ways Black placemaking connects space, place and time. Through interviews with 21 trail riders and observations of rides and gatherings, this study details the material and non-material dimensions of second site production, a framework that highlights the collectively produced sense of space, place and time that contains an alternative to dominant urban development paradigms.
Cycles Within the System: Metropolitanization and Internal Migration in the U.S., 1965-1990
(1995) Elliott, James R.; Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This paper uses a typology of local metropolitan development to examine population redistribution trends in the U.S. over the past three decades. Theories of systemic maturation and urban life-cycles are discussed. Subsequent analysis of population and inter-county migration data reveals that Deconcentration has become an increasingly common subprocess of local metropolitanization but that this subprocess cannot be adequately explained by a “life-cycle” model of metropolitan development. More importantly, results indicate that metro-based migration varies significantly with local patterns of metropolitanization. The nature of this variation implies that declining metro areas tend to redistribute migrants to relatively distant, nonmetro territory in a manner consistent with extended processes of decentralization.
Framing the Urban: Struggles Over HOPE VI and New Urbanism in a Historic City
(Wiley, 2004) Elliott, James R.; Gotham, Kevin Fox; Milligan, Melinda J.
Recent debate over the federal HOPE VI program has focused primarily on whether local applications have met administrative pledges to provide adequate affordable housing to displaced residents of newly demolished public‐housing developments. In this research we take a different direction, examining local processes of political mobilization and strategic framing around a specific type of HOPE VI redevelopment—one that includes construction of a big‐box superstore as part of proposed urban renewal. We argue that the HOPE VI program's formal alignment with New Urbanism created a political opportunity for competing actors to adopt and espouse selective new urbanist themes and imagery to construct and advance divergent visions of what urban space ought to be. Through these framing strategies and struggles, the developer, displaced residents, and opposition groups produced “the City” as a rhetorical object that each then used to advocate specific redevelopment proposals while de‐legitimating competing claims. In this way, the HOPE VI program constitutes more than a new federal housing policy; it offers a new vocabulary for framing and mobilizing collective action in contemporary urban centers.
Future flooding increases unequal exposure risks to relic industrial pollution
(IOP Publishing, 2022) Marlow, Thomas; Elliott, James R.; Frickel, Scott
Climate change is increasing the probability that urban communities with lengthy histories of land-based industrial pollution and ongoing residential segregation will experience more frequent and destructive flooding in the years ahead. This paper investigates where these past, present, and future forces will converge to potentially produce a new type of climate injustice, as the flooding of former, or ‘relic,’ industrial sites threatens to transport sequestered industrial contaminants off site. Merging property-level flood-risk projections from the First Street Foundation with historical data on former hazardous manufacturing facilities in 6 U.S. cities, we identify more than 6000 relic industrial sites with elevated flood risk over the next 30 years. Exploratory spatial analysis reveals that these sites cluster spatially to create identifiable zones of cumulative impact, within which as many as 560 thousand residents and 229 thousand housing units are currently located. Spatial multilevel modeling further indicates that socially vulnerable groups (i.e. racial minorities, those with lower incomes, and those residing in less autonomous housing) are consistently and disproportionately likely to live in these areas. These findings highlight the need to develop new strategic plans to rethink site-based strategies of remediation and to engage residents of historically marginalized communities in planning efforts as government agencies at all levels work to make their cities more resilient and environmentally just in the age of climate change.
Industrial Pollution and Civic Capacity in Metropolitan America
(2017-03-31) Smiley, Kevin T.; Elliott, James R.
Environmental justice research analyzes inequalities by race and class in exposure to unhealthful toxins in the air, land, and water. These inequalities are typically considered at relatively small scales, such as neighborhoods, because these scales most effectively correspond to the area of exposure. This important focus on neighborhoods, though, is paralleled by a growing research agenda on disparities and patterns at larger scales, such as metropolitan areas, that are theorized to affect exposure to toxins at lower scales. This dissertation investigates disparities in exposure to industrial pollution across metropolitan areas. The emergent research on the topic has not particularly identified mechanisms or processes that contribute to disparities across urban areas at the same time that wide variations have been described. To fill this research gap, I turn to a framework that centers on civic capacity to analyze how and why these disparities have emerged. The analysis is conducted using the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators Geographic Microdata (RSEI-GM), which uses fine-grained air pollution data that takes into account the toxicity of chemicals from more than 20,000 facilities in the United States, and how these data correspond to risks to human health. The findings suggest the utility of a civic capacity framework in three primary findings. First, I explicate how different measures of social capital organizations, which are based on the bridging or bonding nature of social ties, are correlated with levels of exposure to unhealthful toxins from industrial polluters. Second, I dive further into a discussion of social capital organizations by examining religious congregations, and finding that greater numbers of congregations are associated with accentuated or attenuated racial inequalities in exposure depending on the type of religious congregation under examination. Third, I find that the changing manufacturing base of a metropolitan area is associated with industrial pollution such that urban areas that have lost manufacturing jobs from 1970 to 2010 are particularly disadvantaged in exposure to unhealthful toxins. Taken together, these findings argue that civic capacity underwrites capacities for social justice, including environmental justice, in metropolitan areas in the United States.
Investigation of mitigation strategies to reduce storm surge impacts associated with oil infrastructures
(IASSAR, 2017) Bernier, Carl; Padgett, Jamie E.; Elliott, James R.; Bedient, Philip B.
This paper evaluates different mitigation strategies to reduce the risks posed by aboveground storage tanks and the vulnerability of nearby communities. A framework integrating natural hazard exposure, structural vulnerability, and social vulnerability is proposed to investigate the effects and the viability of different mitigation strategies.
Mitigation Strategies to Protect Petrochemical Infrastructure and Nearby Communities during Storm Surge
(ASCE, 2018) Bernier, Carl; Kameshwar, Sabarethinam; Elliott, James R.; Padgett, Jamie E.; Bedient, Philip B.
This paper explores engineering- and social science-based strategies to mitigate risks posed by aboveground storage tanks (ASTs) during storm events. The Houston Ship Channel (HSC) is used as a case study to illustrate the application of an integrated model of built-human-natural systems and evaluate the viability of alternative risk mitigation strategies for protecting petrochemical infrastructure and nearby communities subjected to storm surge events. First, a model that couples storm surge exposure, fragility modeling, and social vulnerability of communities is used to quantify the effectiveness and economic viability of engineering-based measures to reduce spill risks, such as filling ASTs with liquid, anchoring them to the ground, changing their stiffness, or protecting them with dikes. The results indicate that no single measure is optimal and that combinations of measures could be more suitable. Thus, an optimization approach and a heuristic approach are proposed to select and combine measures considering structural and social vulnerability. Both approaches prove to be effective in reducing storm-induced spills to a given target while minimizing costs; however, they do not improve the resilience of residents in the HSC. Thus, through social science assessment of communities at risk, additional measures are identified, including improved risk communication and evacuation planning, simplified governance structures, moving from equal treatment approaches to equitable treatment approaches, and creating institutions that will empower and benefit local residents. Successful mitigation plans should cut across both engineering and social science approaches.
Place, Space, and Racially Unequal Exposures to Pollution at Home and Work
(Sage, 2019) Elliott, James R.; Smiley, Kevin T.
Research on racial inequalities in exposure to industrial pollution in U.S. metropolitan areas typically focuses on places of residence, ignoring the fact that most people work and commute to other areas to do so. To investigate what these daily commutes mean for understanding place- and space-based disparities in exposure, we merge federally compiled data on commuting and industrial air pollution with sociodemographic data on the home and work tracts of employed adults in Houston, Texas. Results from descriptive analyses and spatial regression models yield several insights often presumed but heretofore undemonstrated in prior research: (1) generally, people work in more toxic areas than they reside; (2) blacks and Latinos work as well as reside in more toxic areas than whites; and (3) unequal spatial relations via commuting powerfully predict a place’s level of toxic air pollution, net of other factors, including racial composition. Implications for current and future research are discussed.
Post-War Immigration to the Deep South Triad: What Can a Peripheral Region Tell Us about Immigrant Settlement and Employment?
(Taylor & Francis, 2003) Elliott, James R.
Contemporary research on immigrant settlement and adaptation emphasizes the interactions of ethnic-immigrant resources and local economic contexts. Yet, understandably, most research in this field continues to focus on major urban centers, truncating our view of the range of these interactions and the extent to which theories and concepts emerging from immigrant "magnets" generalize to more peripheral regions of the country. To address this shortcoming, we use census data from the postwar period to examine immigrant settlement trends in the Deep South Triad of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Findings indicate that this peripheral region of an otherwise booming South is extremely diverse in terms of its foreign-born population and that the largest groups (British, Vietnamese, Indians, and Hondurans) exhibit strong yet distinct patterns of concentration in the regional economy. These findings suggest that many of the same immigrant-adjustment processes documented in core immigrant cities generalize reasonably well to very different regional contexts withsubstantially lower rates of immigration and employment growth.
The Regulatory Nature of Urban Ports: The Case of Houston
(Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2015) Elliott, James R.; Shelton, Kyle; King, Lester O.
Classic urban ecology argues that cities grow by connecting economically with other places. As they do, local zones of similar land use emerge, producing natural areas. While still valuable, this paradigm and recent efforts to rehabilitate one of its core concepts –succession – fails to adequately explain how certain urban zones, born relatively free of government regulation, come to be increasingly defined by it over time. The present study engages this lacuna and its relevance to urbanization generally. Using the case of Houston’s Ship Channel, it investigates how a locally important zone develops politically through successive regulation intended to contain risks associated with its own development. In this way we extend insights of urban ecology to consider how government not only leverages infrastructure that gives rise to certain urban zones but also comes to wrap them in regulation that promotes and insulates their continued development, at significant risk to local residents.
The multiplicity of impact: how social marginalization compounds climate disasters
(Taylor & Francis, 2023) Priest, A. Alexander; Elliott, James R.
This study advances and examines the proposition that social marginalization, especially along racial and ethnic lines, produces compound disadvantages that accumulate across a wide range of personal, social and political domains when climate disasters strike, producing a multiplicity of impact often missed by quantitative research on social vulnerability. To test this claim, we use data collected by the Houston Area Survey after the historic rainfall brought by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Analyses reveal that impacts to Black residents were much more pervasive than for any other group, including a disproportionate likelihood of impact to their income, transportation and personal networks in addition to their housing. Results also indicate that this multiplicity of impact across one’s personal and social domains associates with greater scrutiny of local government’s role in the disaster, net of one’s general political ideology. The implication is that we cannot fully understand the social impacts of a changing climate through social vulnerability metrics and property damage assessments, alone. More comprehensive frameworks and impact accounting are needed.
The Regional Journal in Sociology: Recent Trends and Observations
(Springer, 2014) Schultz, Jessica; Elliott, James R.; O’Brien, Robert M.
We investigate the historical trajectories of several sociological journals published by regional associations, focusing our attention on one of the first regional journals published by the Pacific Sociological Association, Sociological Perspectives. We begin with a discussion of the journal’s origins and look at its professional and geographical development over time. Through a comparative-historical analysis of author affiliations of articles published in regional journals, we find geographic ties are important in shaping the early content of regional journals. However, as time passes, regional ties are stretched to include work from a broadening spectrum of regions and nations. So, while regional sociological journals do appear to maintain their original geographical connections, they also tend to expand their relative geographical influence over time.
The Sociological Determination: A Reflexive Look at Conducting Local Disaster Research after Hurricane Katrina
(Scientific Research, 2013) Haney, Timothy J.; Elliott, James R.
This paper examines the process of collecting data on New Orleanians affected by Hurricane Katrina. It does so by focusing upon the experiences of local researchers who were simultaneously conducting research on and within the disaster. It also documents one research team’s attempt to generate a random sample of residents from several New Orleans neighborhoods, stratified both by racial composition and level of damage. Further, it describes the challenges associated with navigating complex bureaucracies that are themselves affected by the disaster. Results demonstrate that our methods for drawing samples from six New Orleans neighborhoods yielded highly representative samples, even in heavily damaged neighborhoods where the long-term displacement required a multi-pronged strategy that involved contact by mail, telephone, and visits to local churches. The paper concludes by making recommendations for facilitating future research by locally affected researchers.
Urban Ecology in the Time of Climate Change: Houston, Flooding, and the Case of Federal Buyouts
(Sage, 2019) Loughran, Kevin; Elliott, James R.; Kennedy, S. Wright
This study proposes a shift in sociology’s approach to urban ecology. Rather than foreground the social ecologies that captivated the Chicago and Los Angeles Schools, we join and extend more recent efforts to engage environmental ecologies that successively intersect with those social ecologies over time. To ground our approach, we focus on areas of urban flooding where federally subsidized buyouts of residential properties have occurred over recent decades. Drawing on data from Houston, Texas, we locate where these buyout zones have emerged and how their social ecologies have changed in ways that feed back to influence the number of local buyouts that occur. Results indicate that Houston’s buyout zones have an identifiable social ecology that has shifted over time, primarily from white to Hispanic working-class settlement as the city has grown and become more racially and ethnically diverse. Results also show that the extent to which this racial succession has occurred powerfully predicts subsequent numbers of buyouts in the area. Implications for developing an enhanced urban ecology for the twenty-first century are discussed.
Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession: The Case of Hazardous Industrial Site Accumulation
(University of Chicago Press, 2015) Elliott, James R.; Frickel, Scott
This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analysis of hazardous industrial site accumulation in four U.S. cities, using a relational database that was assembled for more than 11,000 facilities that operated during the past half centuryﾗmost of which remain unacknowledged in government reports. Results show how three iterative processesﾗhazardous industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containmentﾗintersect to produce successive socioenvironmental changes that are highly relevant to but often missed by research on urban growth machines, environmental inequality, and systemic risk.
The Work of Cities: Underemployment and Urban Change in Late-20th-Century America
(US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2004) Elliott, James R.
This research moves beyond preoccupations with deindustrialization, joblessness, and the urban “underclass” to examine the role that cities and urbanization in general have played in the reorganization of production and local labor markets. After reviewing recent work on global cities, new industrial districts, and the “new” social division of labor, the author used Census data to examine the extent and relative causes of rising underemployment in U.S. metropolitan areas during 1950–90. Several key findings emerge. First, underemployment increased 35 percent between 1970 and 1990, largely due to shifts in structural rather than personal factors. Second, most of this structural shift occurred within industries, not across them. Third, the consequences of these shifts have been most dramatic at the bottom rather than the top of the urban hierarchy, despite recent claims regarding global cities. Fourth, factors associated with the new social division of labor characterized by growing numbers of smaller workplaces and “routine” business service firms offer the strongest empirical explanation for rising underemployment in local metropolitan areas. Implications are discussed.

Browsing by Author "Elliott, James R."

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