This is one of those environmental issues where economics is not very helpful:
If Flint were rich and mostly white, would Michigan’s state government have responded more quickly and aggressively to complaints about its lead-polluted water?
The 274 pages of emails released by Gov. Rick Snyder this week on Flint’s water crisis included no discussion of race. Instead, they focused on costs relating to the city’s water supply, questions about scientific data showing lead contamination and uncertainty about the responsibilities of state and local health officials.
But it is indisputable that in Flint, the majority of residents are black and many are poor. So whether or not race and class were factors in the state’s agonizingly slow and often antagonistic response, the result was the same: Thousands of Flint’s residents, black and white, have been exposed to lead in their drinking water. And the long-term health effects of that poisoning may not be fully understood for years.
For civil rights advocates, the health crisis in Flint smacks of what has become known as environmental racism. Coined in the 1980s, the term refers to the disproportionate exposure of blacks to polluted air, water and soil. It is considered the result of poverty and segregation that has relegated many blacks and other racial minorities to some of the most industrialized or dilapidated environments.
via www.nytimes.com
Legitimate concerns about water quality appear to have been ignored in Flint. I can think of two reasons other than race why they may be. First, political ideology. Environmental issues don't rise to the top of the agendas of Republican Governors. Second, Flint is a depressed city and it is relatively easy to ignore the concerns of relatively poor voters. I might be wrong but I don't think this is an environmental Kuznets issue since drinking water quality is one of the more basic environmental goods in the U.S. (although I think there are drinking water quality environmental Kuznets curve studies in developing countries).
I did a Google Scholar search of environmental+racism+economics from 2011 to 2015 and didn't find much. On the third page of search results is this paper:
Wu, Xiaoyu, and Bowman Cutter. "Who votes for public environmental goods in California?: Evidence from a spatial analysis of voting for environmental ballot measures." Ecological Economics 70, no. 3 (2011): 554-563.
Abstract. Voting referenda provide direct evidence of the demand for public goods. A number of previous studies have used referenda to analyze the support for public environmental goods. These studies have used aggregate data from large jurisdictional units (usually counties) and summary income measures such as the mean or median, and have usually found that higher income areas offer greater support for environmental propositions. We examine environmental referenda voting in California using census block group data, spatial dependence controls, and detailed income distribution data. We find that household income has a negative marginal effect on environmental referenda voting for most of the income range when using census block data. In addition, controls for spatial dependence significantly reduce the magnitude of most coefficients. This suggests that OLS estimates of referenda determinants are biased. We also show that county level data may be subject to severe aggregation bias and might not be appropriate for referenda studies.
There is no mention of race (I'm sure it was a control variable but I'm stuck at home with Jonas so I can't get the entire paper from my library) and none of the 21 papers that cite this one appears to be a environmental racism papers.
