Urban Neighborhood Demographics Associated with Environmentally Suspect,Tax-Delinquent Properties: Equity and Redevelopment Implications

Abstract

This article focuses on how environmental contamination of urban property, or the perception thereof, acts as a new force in widening inequalities between central cities and the rest of the nation. Environmental contamination, one form of negative neighborhood externality, when linked with a second form, that of tax-delinquent property, become the ultimate neighborhood negative externality, creating a redevelopment impasse under present governmental rules and practice. This problem is explored with a case study of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, examining the incidence of environmentally suspect, tax-delinquent properties by census tracts and associated socioeconomic characteristics of population within these tracts. The article concludes with a discussion of how the market, reinforced by evolving public policy, will begin to eliminate the redevelopment impasse posed by environmentally suspect, tax-delinquent property.