Examining The Roots of Environmental Injustice in Minneapolis: An Advocacy for Equitable Access to Urban Green Spaces
Why do two Minneapolis neighborhoods, just a 15-minute drive apart, have such starkly different levels of access to quality green spaces? How does this correlate with the apparent environmental racism against Minneapolis residents of color. How much can we see, in this pattern, the legacy of residential segregation such as racial covenants and redlining?
Racial covenants are clauses inserted into property deeds to prevent non-White people from occupying and owning land since their presence were deemed to “detrimental to property values”. Introduced in the 1910s in MN, racial covenants legitimized residential segregation and gave way to the practice in redlining in the 1940s.
Racial covenants are among the many tools to decrease home-ownership rates of African American, contributing to their generational dispossession and displacement.
Importance of Urban Green Spaces
Urban ecosystems face heightened effects of climate change due to the Urban Heat Island Effect. The Urban Heat Island Effect, or UHI, causes increased air & land temperatures, severe unpredictable weather events, increased precipitation, and seasonal timing changes in cities. This effect occurs because of higher amounts of impervious surfaces, higher emissions, higher Albedo effect, and lower amounts of vegetation.
Green spaces in urban ecosystems are a home for trees and other plants that have been shown to reduce the severity of these UHI effects by:
- Lowering air & land temperatures
- Preventing droughts and floods
- Providing habitat for native species
- Improving air quality
Why does it matter?
The legacy of residential segregation has led to stark environmental injustice that tremendously ails Black, Latino, and Native American families in Minneapolis:
- 6x asthma death risk
- Among those who were under age 65, the asthma death rate for Black Minnesotans was 6 times higher than it was for white Minnesotans.
- 3x higher infant mortality
- Infant mortality rate for Native Americans is nearly 3x higher than that of white Minnesotans.
- 9x positive COVID-19 tests
- Latinx Minnesotans are testing positive at more than 4 times the overall population and 9 times the white population.
- 2x the cancer risk
- Black Minnesotans have 2.25 times the cancer risk as the average Minnesotan
Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. are expected to “bear the brunt of the impact for the “greater good”“. There has been extensive research around environmental injustice, yet they tend to merely provide a snapshot of this picture at a moment in time.
However, these prejudiced practices didn’t just happen in a vacuum. Rather, these policies were part of a larger system that paved the way for the systemic environmental disparities we’re seeing today.
How, then, can we contextualize and provide a comprehensive portrayal of this injustice?
Looking at historically racially covenanted neighborhoods in Minneapolis and present day environmental data, can we still see patterns in the impact of residential segregation on the disparity of climate change effects? In other words, our research question is two-fold: How much does the introduction of racial covenants in the 1910s impact the environmental inequality in Minneapolis that we see today? How can we, then, inform environmental practices with data?
