Race, Property, and Population Health: Examining Policy-Driven Patterns of Whiteness, Anti-Blackness and Health Inequity in Metropolitan Detroit
Eisenberg, Alexa
2021
Abstract
Trenchant health inequities between Black and White Americans persist in metropolitan areas in the Midwest and Northeast characterized by high levels of residential segregation and municipal fragmentation. The recalcitrance of these racial and spatial relations more than a half-century after the 1968 Fair Housing Act underscores the need to investigate the contemporary institutions and laws that reproduce White supremacy and its embodied consequences in US metropolitan areas. This three-paper quantitative dissertation draws on critical race theory and methods from the fields of demography, social geography, and legal epidemiology to examine policy-driven patterns of Whiteness, anti-Blackness, and health inequity in metropolitan Detroit. This project seeks to better understand how structural racialization operates through municipal institutions, fiscal inequities, and property tax foreclosure law to uphold a racialized metropolitan hierarchy of population health. Chapter 2 (paper 1) examines the relationship between geographical Whiteness and excess mortality across municipalities (cities and townships) in the tri-county Detroit Metropolitan Area (DMA) in 2010 using data from the Michigan Department of Community Health and the US Census. This study found that stark inter-municipal disparities in excess death between White and Black populations in the DMA could be partly attributed to a protective relationship between suburban Whiteness and mortality that preponderantly benefitted White residents. Conceptualized within a relational framework of spatial White supremacy, this study problematizes the undue health benefits of suburban Whiteness within a racialized metropolitan health hierarchy where Black populations suffer disproportionately from excess death. Integrating data from the Michigan Department of Treasury and the American Community Survey (ACS), Chapter 3 (paper 2) builds on Chapter 2 by exploring whether the protective health status of suburban Whiteness could be explained by systemic fiscal advantages that benefit the health of predominantly White suburbs at the expense of Black populations. Findings revealed steep fiscal gradients in mortality among White and Black municipal populations; while the most staggering rates of excess death were documented among a cluster of fiscally poor majority-Black cities, the largest health benefits accrued to a minority of affluent and overwhelmingly White suburbs that held a disproportionate share of the region’s fiscal resources. This study is the first to employ a measure of municipal fiscal health to examine intra-metropolitan health inequities, shedding new light on how racialized patterns of fiscal accumulation and deprivation may structure persistent disparities in health. Chapter 4 (paper 3) assessed evidence for structural racialization in the spatial distribution of occupied property tax foreclosures and urban health equity across census tracts in Wayne county using the ACS, foreclosure records from the Wayne County Treasurer, and data from several public sources. The findings show that tax foreclosure law perpetuated racialized spatial patterns of housing dispossession that intersected with preexisting inequities in health; between 2014 and 2015, tax foreclosures dispossessed about 50,000 Wayne county residents, and occupied foreclosure burdens were principally concentrated in Black neighborhoods characterized by shorter life expectancies and higher rates of disability. As the first study to operationalize disparate impact for housing and health research, this research generates knowledge on how structural racialization works through colorblind laws and policies to reify racialized hierarchies of housing and health in segregated areas.Deep Blue DOI
Subjects
population health inequity segregation White supremacy housing and urban policy accumulation and dispossession property tax
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