Cumulative Impact: Organizing Risk and the New Urban-Environmental Crisis in Stockton, California

Underneath Stockton, California's popular depiction as a dangerously violent metropolis is a new urban-environmental crisis involving the spatial concentration of low-income, racialized, and foreign-born populations, as well as heightened risk of exposure to food insecurity, air-toxic contamination, climate-related sea-level rise and flooding, and home foreclosure in its "risky neighborhoods." This dissertation seeks to answer two primary research questions: To what extent does the Stockton case represent the dynamics of a new urban-environmental crisis unfolding throughout the continental United States? What historical processes and events contribute to patterns of demographic stability and change in Stockton's risky neighborhoods? This study uses a quantitative spatial analysis of secondary data to characterize variation in segregation levels of risky neighborhoods in Stockton, 34 comparable "crisis" metropolitan areas, and other "non-crisis" areas in the continental United States. This analysis reveals how risky neighborhoods are segregated in complex yet consistent ways by race, ethnicity, nativity, and income. Stockton represents an "extreme" case due to its status as an "inland" crisis case and particularly high concentrations of air-toxic contamination exposure risk, home foreclosure risk, low income households, nonwhites, and Latinos. A mixed-method, in-depth case study of Stockton finds the area's contemporary geography of risky and segregated neighborhoods is significantly associated with three important historical processes. The first is the race- and class-based organization of "hazardous" space and "green" space through the practice of mortgage redlining. Second, is how physical and institutional actions by local elites reinforced the racialized boundaries of those spaces over time. Third, local reaction to court-ordered school desegregation racialized the Stockton Unified School District boundaries and combined with neighborhood-based exclusionary legacies to consistently produce above average patterns of white flight from Stockton's contemporary "risky" and "high risk neighborhoods" while contributing to nonwhite containment and transition in those spaces. This dissertation builds on previous sociological research by outlining a new approach to understanding the character of residential segregation throughout the continental United States. It also extends previous scholarship on the racialization of space by showing how that process interacts symbolically and materially with class and environmental risk to shape neighborhood-level patterns of demographic stability and change. Lastly, this dissertation has practical implications for cumulative impact analyses in the United States and abroad.