Dam White Property: Quantifying the Disparate Racial Impacts of Dam Removals

Keywords: Dam removal, Environmental racism, Home values
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 74

Abstract

Dams have increasingly been removed from U.S. waterways to reap improvements in safety, ecology, aesthetics and recreation. This paper explores a new frontier of environmental racism research by measuring whether these beneficial impacts accrue disproportionately to non-Hispanic whites. Using data about all U.S. dams, we estimate a linear probability model of which were removed since 2010, based on neighborhood racial composition and controls for region, ownership, type, purpose, size, and age of dams. We find that only in the case of dams owned by local and state governments in the South, the probability of a dam being removed since 2010 is positively associated with the proportion of proximate white residents. We then employ an Adjusted Interrupted Time Series regression model to quantify how much proximate home values were enhanced by removal of the aforementioned dams and use this figure to estimate the aggregate gains for white and non-white homeowners. Removal of these dams produced an average 7% gain in home values beginning the year before the dam was removed, though this gain slowly erodes over time. Based on the racial composition of homeowners in the vicinity of these dam removals, we calculated that Southern white homeowners reaped 83% of the $1.3 billion in aggregate home equity gains in these areas. We conclude that this represents a clear and substantial case of environmental racism that calls for revisions in regulatory frameworks governing dam removals.