Housing,Environmental Justice,and the Case of the Stop Cop City Movement: A Structural Intersectional Approach to Housing Equity

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Afundamental cause underpinning housing, environmental injustices, and health disparities is structural racism.¹^,² Structural racism drives racialized health inequities.² This process is partially facilitated by previous policies and legacy institutions, adapting over time to reproduce disparate housing conditions (e.g., social, economic, and environmental), a lack of safety (e.g., policing and surveillance), security, and belonging within one's own community, especially for racially minoritized groups.

At the same time, racism is intertwined with complementary systems (e.g., racial capitalism, political economy)³ that require earning access to housing through capital accumulation and demonstrating worthiness (e.g., means-testing, gatekeeping, and respectability).⁴ Because of this, where people live now—and have lived in the past—is not random; residential communities are influenced by laws and policies that form the basis of neighborhood disparities, ethnic enclaves, and segregated cities across the United States.

Housing inequities are enduring, sustained by systems and tactics (e.g., forced evictions, eminent domain, land theft) that disenfranchise poorer people and people of color, primarily Black and Latine communities.³ Since housing in this country is configured such that access to it is assumed to be a privilege rather than a right, discrimination and segregation remain staggeringly high, buoyed by global trends (e.g., austerity policies, globalization, urbanization, gentrification).

Housing is a necessary feature of environmental justice (EJ). However, linkages between housing and the environment are broad and not well defined, in part due to research connecting the two evolving in somewhat distinct and separate literatures. In addition, barriers to housing (e.g., housing discrimination) are often framed as historical, rather than ongoing. This commentary proposes that an integrative EJ framework rooted in structural intersectionality can bring together and highlight seemingly disparate issues that disproportionately impact communities of color.

Intersectionality theorists maintain that interlocking forces of domination and oppression shape the ways people experience the world.⁵^,⁶ Structural intersectionality fundamentally engages with how multiple systems of oppression (e.g., racism, racialized capitalism, neoliberal urbanism) vary and relate to one another at a macro-level, influencing lived experiences at the micro-level. In other words, a key tenet of structural intersectionality is that seemingly neutral institutional domains (e.g., housing) are shaped by multiple systems of power, disproportionately harming those without power, replicating broader inequalities.⁷ Though not comprehensive, this commentary examines contemporary and current threats to housing, suggesting that using an intersectional EJ framework to address housing disparities may aid future policy, advocacy, and research efforts.

While the information presented is not new, research and policy efforts have stalled in connecting housing and land to broad environmental equity agendas.⁸ Using EJ principles and suggestions for leveraging housing as a platform for health equity, this commentary outlines tools for integrating an EJ framework in housing and health policy. In doing so, I draw upon grassroots efforts mobilized by the Stop Cop City (SCC) and Defend The Atlanta Forest (DTF) movement(s) as an example of the imperative of merging EJ with housing justice goals.

NEIGHBORHOODS AND HOUSING: SIMILAR, BUT DIFFERENT

To advance a comprehensive housing justice platform, housing must be integrated within neighborhoods and larger regional areas, yet also studied as distinct units of analysis. For example, “affordable housing” is not always safe and adequate housing. Housing and building units that are not well maintained are risk factors that threaten health and well-being, separately from the neighborhoods they are located in. At the same time, housing remains segregated; therefore, affordable housing is often located within high-poverty neighborhoods, which presents additional risk exposures at the neighborhood level.

To account for the independence and interdependence of neighborhoods and housing, research and policy must not conflate housing and neighborhoods as being one in the same. Although related, housing, and the lack of it, along with the quality of housing structures, are unique health and EJ issues, distinct from broadly defined neighborhood research. According to Swope and Hernández, “the symbiotic relationship between housing and neighborhoods is key to understanding proximal and distal aspects of housing disparities, first, because housing is embedded in the broader neighborhood context and, most consequentially, because neighborhoods have historically served as the main point of departure for unequal processes that link health and place.”⁹ Put another way, while neighborhoods can be unequal, the housing structures embedded within them can vary as well, requiring a more nuanced approach to framing housing and environmental risks.

Access to safe affordable housing: an elusive goal?

One way to characterize variability in housing and where it is located (e.g., neighborhoods) is to interrogate questions of access—who has universal access to housing? Who can choose where to live without restrictions or exposures to risks? Who cannot? For centuries, racially minoritized and poorer communities have been relegated to the least desirable places to live, co-located in areas that also pose environmental health risks. In this way, the same forces that fuel inequities in housing also fuel environmental racism. Therefore, structural racism constrains accessibility to both natural and built resources that can promote health.

Housing access is often historicized in the academic literature as resulting from explicit segregation (e.g., racial covenants, Home Owners' Loan Corporation, and redlining) and past policy. While these policies are important, housing access is also an ongoing issue that disproportionately affects both homeowners and renters of color, albeit via more subtle and covert practices. Housing is not equally accessible for everyone who needs it; people with the fewest resources face the greatest challenges accessing and maintaining suitable housing.¹⁰^,¹¹^,¹² Gaps in predatory lending practices, mortgage approvals, and home appraisal patterns—all contribute to limited opportunities to access wealth and relative safety through housing, contributing to stark disparities in neighborhoods and health.¹³^,¹⁴^,¹⁵ These findings persist even when income and area-level characteristics are held constant, suggesting that contemporary housing practices are racialized in ways that devalue communities of color.¹⁶

As a result, Black Americans accumulate less wealth from homeownership than their white counterparts, comprising the largest racial gap in homeownership.^17,18 For renters, housing can be more precarious; very low-income Black renters report discrimination in finding housing, frequent evictions, issues with housing quality, and landlord harassment.^4,¹⁹^,²⁰ Though similar pressures often apply across disinvested neighborhoods, given the historical and persistent challenges for Black Americans specifically, the case example charaterizes how structural intersectionality shapes access to housing and land for a predominantly Black community in Atlanta, Georgia.

Continuous dispossession and displacement: the case of cop city as a threat to housing access

The connection between housing and displacement as an EJ issue is critically important, yet often missed. For example, residential stability—choosing to stay rooted in one place, community, or home for as long as desired—is a luxury not afforded to all Americans. Whether fleeing domestic terror of the Jim Crow South, moving to avoid harmful exposure(s) to toxins, or being forced off land and out of neighborhoods by gentrification and other means (e.g., dispossession), Black Americans face continuous dispossession and displacement. In some cases, they have relied on mobility to demonstrate resistance, maintain freedoms, and reconstruct a sense of safety (e.g., Great Migration). In this way, displacement can be a constant threat to maintaining stable and healthy communities.

Displacement unfolds directly (e.g., eviction) and indirectly (e.g., being priced out of a neighborhood). In both cases, policy and development schemes initiated and supported by local, state, and regional actors (i.e., landlords, policymakers, developers) often yield complex changes for communities within a city and/or region.^19,²¹ Political and corporate actors can be incentivized, through a racial capitalism model, to support “seemingly neutral” state-level policies that ultimately disenfranchise (and displace) multiple groups simultaneously (i.e., structural intersectionality).

One seemingly neutral development proposal that threatens access to both housing and the environment is the development of ‘Cop City,’ an international training facility in Atlanta, Georgia. SCC/DTF is comprised of community residents, organizers, and activists aiming to stop construction of the training center, sponsored by the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) and the City of Atlanta.²² The City of Atlanta and the APF propose to construct a ∼$90 million militarized campus in Pittsburgh, a predominantly Black, working-class community located approximately two miles south of Atlanta.

The APF—a private entity, backed by local corporations and political leaders—proposes to build the largest police training facility in the United States, including a firing range, a burn building, and “kill house” designed to mimic urban combat scenarios. The facility would be built on a prison farm located directly in the Pittsburgh neighborhood and the Weelaunee Forest, three hundred acres of woodlands that provide the highest percentage of tree canopy of any major metropolitan area in the United States.²³

The scale of the project, as well as the residential displacement, deforestation, and disruptions to the natural environment required to build it, has prompted resistance from multiple groups, leading activists, organizers, and community members to rename the project Cop City.²¹ Residents and activists opposing the facility argue that police occupation and violence is itself an environmental hazard, and the construction of Cop City would severely compromise human, animal, and plant life in the area. For example, the forest ecosystem and wildlife depend on the extensive tree canopy that would be destroyed by Cop City construction.

Reducing the canopy via deforestation will trigger secondary effects, including changes to air quality, noise levels, contamination of drinking water, and flooding; risk exposures over and beyond the primary danger of locating explosives and an open gun range in a residential community. The proposed development will distance residents from green space and bring toxic waste (e.g., from the facility runoff) closer. Overall, the facility represents a specific type of environmental racism that operates under the guise of public–private partnership and developmental growth schemes, likely to draw additional industries (e.g., film and entertainment) that may gentrify and displace existing residents of the Pittsburgh neighborhood.

Taken together, the campaign against Cop City is simultaneously a campaign to defend the Weelaunee Forest, an opposition movement to militarized policing, and a call to preserve the Pittsburgh neighborhood from gentrification and displacement. The intersectional nature of the SCC/DTF campaign, drawing from multiple stakeholder and constituent groups, demonstrates that issues impacting the natural and built environment are not separate but interconnected; therefore, efforts dedicated to ensuring EJ must also consider intersecting threats to equity, including housing and displacement.

STRATEGIES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Placing housing within an intersectional EJ frame means considering multiple threats to environments.⁸ Drawing from the academic literature and grassroots organizing, both top-down and bottom-up strategies are needed, including better defining housing and neighborhood research, addressing root causes to housing access and stability, and using a structural intersectional framing (and thereby diverse coalitions) to address inequity.

Naming and defining housing and health disparities: the four pillar model

Emerging research calls for expanded definitions of housing, housing insecurity, and related environmental threats. Some scholars suggest focusing on four housing risk factors (or pillars) to advance equity: cost (affordability), conditions (housing quality), consistency (instability), and context (neighborhood opportunity).² First, instability refers to transient housing situations such as being unhoused, living in overcrowded conditions, residing in shelter settings, or forced displacement from homes and communities. Affordability, the second pillar, addresses financial difficulties in housing, including being cost-burdened (i.e., paying more than 30% of income on rent/mortgage) and having trouble paying rent, mortgage, and/or utility services.

The third pillar, housing quality, describes the physical conditions of the residential unit, as well as any defects, hazards, or negative environmental exposures. Finally, neighborhood opportunity refers to any environmental factors that have the potential to impact health, such as the built environment, availability of health-related resources, environmental burdens, and social characteristics. These domains characterize one strategy to conceptualize housing and neighborhoods as both separate and integrated entities, and position access as a key link to reaching EJ goals.

Addressing threats to housing access and stability: top-down approaches

Access is also critical to addressing issues of stable housing. To ensure greater access to housing, three large-scale shifts are required. First, we must build more housing. Public housing, a primary source for affordability, ceased construction nearly five decades ago, and newer initiatives seeking to reposition (i.e., Hope VI) and privatize (i.e., Rental Assistance Demonstration) public housing have not been fully successful. Public housing remains the primary source of affordable housing, yet it is rarely discussed as a affordable housing strategy. Across all housing stock, public housing is at highest risk for budgetary cuts and is arguably in the poorest quality. In other words, the people most in need of decent housing have the least access to it—struggling to find ways to stay consistently housed, often making trade-offs in other ways.¹¹ Therefore, easing barriers to housing access necessarily means identifying those most at risk for instability—and providing housing for these residents at the same pace as market-rate housing. To do this, a radical reimagining of affordable housing must occur, including increasing capital resources and other support to public housing.

Secondly, while better policy is part of the equation, collectively, we must address the root causes of inaccessibility—structural racism, housing as a commodity, histories of segregation and neighborhood disinvestment, and continuous threats to affordable housing and stability (e.g., dispossession and displacement). The SCC/DTF movement is an important case study because it highlights the complex, layered, and often insidious nature, whereby community disruption and displacement occurs in Black and Brown communities, where affordable housing often already exists.

Finally, conversations about housing must be comprehensive and mobilize intersectional interests concerned with both housing and the environment. For example, the California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA)²⁴ published a five-point plan outlining actionable steps to advance environmental equity by ensuring safe and healthy housing. Addressing development and structures that pose threats to the environment (sprawl and land use), as well as housing-specific goals (e.g., tenant and anti-displacement protections, and making housing more affordable and climate-resilient) provides a useful roadmap to achieving equity goals.

In addition, the four pillar model articulates several goals to ensuring housing and environmental equity by seriously embracing a health-in-all policies approach to housing. Prioritizing health—including individual, community, and environmental health—includes ensuring that “all individuals…benefit from development in modern building, science, fair maintenance practices, community planning, and creative uses of space through programming, to foster a culture of health and social connections.”¹

In concrete terms, using policy to redress disparate housing conditions involves building better, affordable, and energy-efficient housing, free from hazards. Providing living (not luxury) amenities includes green space, sufficient natural light, and quiet zones as standard across housing type—for renters and homeowners. In addition, engaging community residents should be prioritized in decisions regarding land-use, siting, and budgeting, whereby responsible and inclusive decision-making involves alternative ownership models (e.g., community land trusts) and health-promoting opportunities that allow for both community and environmental stewardship.

Activism, advocacy, and allies pushing for equity: bottom-up approaches

While policy remains a significant mechanism for enacting large-scale change, housing activists often address inequities head-on, using bottom-up strategies. For example, CEJA is one of the largest coalitions of organizers and community groups advocating for better environmental policy. Their efforts have led to numerous ballot and policy initiatives that both directly and indirectly relate to EJ, using community voices to push equity. Also in California, a Reparations Task Force (the first of its kind in the United States—AB 3121) recently voted to approve reparations for descendants of slavery, with at least some consideration for land return to descendants of enslaved Americans.

Combined with other efforts to return land to individuals, groups, and communities impacted by dispossession and land theft, the task force marks a historic shift to mobilize and enact reparative agendas through legislation. For example, following a decades-long fight to reclaim land wrongfully taken from Black entrepreneurs Willa and Charles Bruce used for profit by Los Angeles County and the City of Manhattan Beach (via eminent domain seizure in 1924), Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation (SB 796) in 2021 enabling Los Angeles County to return the beachfront property to the original owners' descendants, nearly a century after the initial theft.²⁵

In New York and other cities, tenant advocates are lobbying for “good cause” eviction protections for renters to remain stably housed (via the Good Cause Eviction Law; also referred to as Just Cause Eviction), meaning that tenants current on rent payments cannot be unfairly evicted. Caveats would allow evictions for a “good reason,” including breach of lease, causing a nuisance, or failure to pay rent.²⁶ Advocating for policy and reparative systems that return land to rightful owners, reduce unfair evictions, and keep people stably housed pushes federal, local, and state changes that can begin to correct historical injustices tied to renting, housing, and land ownership using an intersectional approach.

Structural intersectionality frame to address EJ and housing for all

A large body of research on affordable housing suggests that engagement with housing as a right—including both homeownership and tenancy—is important to addressing equity. In fact, several models of equitable housing already exist.²⁷ Enacting and supporting these models requires political will and intentional action to ensure access to housing for all. Market pressures (namely cost and availability) increasingly impact moderate-income homeowners and renters, creating anxiety regarding the ability to stay stably housed across a wider income range. Industries and actors that hold power in making decisions about access—city officials, banks, mortgage brokers, real estate professionals, policymakers, and landlords—should be held accountable, and additional regulation may be needed to facilitate transparency and to eliminate discriminatory practices that deter equal access to housing.

Finally, regional and local development proposals seeking to “improve access to affordable housing” necessarily must engage residents for whom such initiatives are supposed to benefit (e.g., creating housing policy with, not for, community residents). For example, renters are citizen experts in knowing what is needed to flourish; therefore, strengthening supports for residents to co-manage (e.g., tenant managers) certain roles and responsibilities within lower-income developments and/or public housing leverages human capacity, making lower-income housing more socially cohesive, safe, and inclusive. Other opportunities exist at multiple steps between proposed development and construction to engage residents and community stakeholders in ways that center and prioritize needs for health and safe housing, regardless of income level. A wealth of research indicates that centering housing as a right rather than a commodity will help turn the tide of inequity.

TOWARD HOUSING EQUITY AND EJ

By definition, housing issues are EJ issues. In a foundational article highlighting race as a continuing factor in framing EJ work, Bullard²⁸ maintains that:

The framework seeks to prevent environmental threats before they occur. The environmental justice framework incorporates other social movements that seek to eliminate harmful practices (discrimination harms the victim) in housing, land use, industrial planning, health care, and sanitation services. The impact of redlining, economic disinvestment, infrastructure decline, deteriorating housing, lead poisoning, industrial pollution, poverty, and unemployment are not unrelated problems if one lives in an urban ghetto or barrio, rural hamlet, or reservation. The environmental justice framework attempts to uncover the underlying assumptions that may contribute to and produce unequal protection. This framework brings to the surface the ethical and political questions of “who gets what, why, and how much.” (p. 153)

Therefore, the EJ framework already frames housing as a human right; all individuals have the right to live free and protected from environmental harm. While some policy precedents for establishing equity in housing access exist (e.g., Civil Rights Act of 1964, Fair Housing Act of 1968), an increasingly complex housing crisis and continued racial discrimination still restricts housing to individuals and families who need it most.²⁹ In this way, environmental racism, a type of environmental injustice defined as any “policy, practice or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups or communities based on race” is fitting for describing why disparate outcomes in housing and homelessness occur, and what can be done to address them.³⁰ Yet since housing policy is legally restrictive in discussing issues of race, and housing has been left out of larger conversations on the environment and environmental concerns, access has not received comparable attention.²³

What is necessary moving forward is a clearly articulated agenda that places housing and the current housing crisis at the fore of environmental equity policy, framed as a key justice issue to slow the widening gap between the housed, unstably housed, and unhoused, focusing on groups that have been disproportionately impacted. Decades of environmental racism and segregation can now be seen in present-day wealth and neighborhood disparities—Black/African Americans see lower property values for their homes, meaning that land in those areas is less expensive and more accessible for corporate, municipal, and industrial actors to acquire—leading to less community control over neighborhood environment and community resources (e.g., Case of Cop City). These exclusionary zoning and policy decisions unfold alongside financial drivers aiming redevelopment and super-gentrification toward communities of color and away from wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.³¹^,³²^,³³^,³⁴^,³⁵

These practices justify a strong rationale for centering housing alongside neighborhood conditions within an EJ frame. Recommendations for comprehensive housing policy necessarily involve engaging with issues of equity, structural racism, and historical marginalization; small-scale and stopgap policies are not likely to yield permanent and lasting impact.⁴

CONCLUSIONS

Without intervention, racial inequities in housing are likely to widen in the future. As practitioners, scholars, and advocates, we can push for environmental equity broadly, while recognizing that housing and housing-related threats (e.g., evictions, displacement, land theft) are also EJ issues that cannot wait. Moving forward, future agendas that integrate housing as an EJ issue should (at a minimum): 1.

Consult communities and constituents in which any changes in policy across federal, state, and local levels will impact (positively or negatively) housing and access to affordable housing for a community/neighborhood. Human impact and environmental impact assessments should be required.

Strategies designed to address/redress housing as an EJ issue should take broad frames to investment beyond individuals and communities, to extend to cities and regions. Developing liberatory economic practices that invest in (and with) local and regional communities that have been subject to historic disinvestment can result in material, spatial, and operational benefits for communities and community-city partnerships.

Prioritize vulnerable, housing insecure, and very low-income groups that may be at high risk for eviction or experiencing homelessness. A coordinated approach that includes direct cash assistance, vouchers, and Housing First strategies are likely to be most successful.

Connect and leverage internal assets and community-building efforts with tangible opportunities for affected communities to make substantive change (e.g., participatory budgeting, DIY urbanism) and self-make the communities they envision.

A complete “re-envisioning” of national housing policy and lower income housing, including Section 8/public housing. Remedying legacies of discrimination in housing will require creating new tools (e.g., community land trusts) to subsidize affordable development for lower income households, preserving existing affordable housing, and promote equitable development without displacement.

Pay serious attention to barriers to homeownership racial gaps and providing incentives for mortgage financing for groups that have been typically impacted by predatory and discriminatory mortgage and finance options.

Although not comprehensive, coordinated multilevel efforts across grassroots, local, state, and federal levels can be effective in a larger conversation about EJ. Affordable housing, reparations, and tenant protection legislation require the sustained attention of researchers and policymakers, as well as businesses that profit and have profited from these communities. These recommendations are proposed in the spirit of the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Conference, in which many important resources related to the EJ movement were birthed. This foundational work continues to place people and communities at the center of environmental work, showing that progress is possible through collaborative movement building, grassroots organizing, and mindful shifts in policy.