This article, by Eileen Sember, is part of a series highlighting members of the Office of Sustainability’s Experts Database. In a collaboration with instructor Hannah Monroe’s course, LSC 561: Writing Science for the Public, students interviewed campus sustainability experts and produced short feature stories.
Christopher Timmins, Professor of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics and Gary J. Gorman Affordable Housing Professor, does not just work under one definition of sustainability, but at the intersection of economic, environmental, and social sustainability.
He combines these different understandings of sustainability through the lens of environmental justice, the idea that marginalized communities are more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards. Specifically, his work focuses on how air pollution can interact with the housing market, in order to identify deficiencies in the market that lead to environmental justice issues and to inform public policy.
To understand his environmental justice research, it is important to understand each type of sustainability. When most people think of sustainability, they likely think of environmental sustainability which focuses on protecting and preserving natural resources. While social sustainability is less familiar and focuses on well-being and equity within communities. The type of sustainability that is the least commonly discussed in the general public is the one from Timmins’s own field, economics.
As Timmins said, “The economics approach to sustainability tends to be more about substitutability between things. The idea is, you want everybody in the future to be just as happy as you are today, but there are many different ways they can go about achieving that happiness – for instance, you might be able to substitute an urban park for a natural woodland that would still give people access to nature. There are some environmental resources – e.g., clean air – for which there may not be substitutes. This is a fundamental problem in environmental economics and in the study of environmental injustice.”
Timmins combines these ideas of sustainability in environmental justice and describes his research as focusing on, “housing markets and where people choose to live and where they’re kind of forced to live and [how] things like that interact with where the pollution is.”
Recently Timmins conducted research investigating the relationship between discrimination in housing and air pollution to understand current faults in the housing market and policies that could potentially address these issues.
To do this, his team used a computer system to send inquiries to thousands of apartment listings using typically white, Black, or Hispanic names in different areas of the country that corresponded to zip codes that had high and low levels of air pollution. All they had to do then was wait for the potential landlords to answer back.
In communities that had low levels of air pollution, Black names would receive responses 41% of the time compared to white names. However, in communities with high amounts of air pollution Black names would receive responses 100% of the time compared to white names. They also found that Hispanic names follow the same trend as Black names.
This means that Black and Hispanic applicants were more likely to end up in a community with higher air pollution based on the probability of a landlord responding.
A follow up study with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that this relationship between discrimination and air pollution may have missed other forms of discrimination, where landlords might keep rental units from publicly available websites and reserve them for people from certain groups..
These results indicate that there is not only a relationship between discrimination and air pollution, but that there is a larger problem with the housing market more broadly.
When describing the implications of this research Timmins said, “I’m usually the one in the housing world who’s saying, our theories are kind of broken and they don’t work. Which, you know, sometimes it can get you some pushback because people, especially more in the business world, like to just sort of operate on the assumption that things work pretty well.”
While these results and implications seem bleak for sustainability, Timmins suggested that these results provide an opportunity to challenge the status quo within economics and advocate for policy growth.
To further study this gap in the housing market, Timmins is currently working on a project based in the United Kingdom understanding how policy changes can impact the relationship between discrimination, housing, and air pollution to better inform how policy changes and enforcement can be implemented in the United States.
To expand this research at the intersection of different types of sustainability, Timmins is hoping to collaborate with experts in high power computing to better analyze interactions with landlords as well as, “people who are working on various kinds of urban pollutants and things like that, where we like to explore exposure. People in the sciences who do and who would be interested in environmental justice work in the sciences.”