This chapter examines migration patterns around seven Superfund sites, from 1970 to 2000, including periods of remediation. It shows a wide range of changing demographic patterns at the various sites but few definitive patterns across sites. It appears that there is little evidence of groups “coming to the nuisance” in these data. The discussion suggests that one possible reason for this finding is that households may have had different perceptions about the environmental hazards of the sites, and these perceptions may have changed over time in unpredictable ways. For instance, the sites may be perceived to be improving if they are remediated, or, alternatively, the sites may be permanently stigmatized.
This research documents the long term impacts of delayed cleanup on property values in communities neighboring prominent Superfund sites. The research examines the sale prices of nearly 34,000 homes near sites in three metropolitan areas for up to a 30-year period. To our knowledge, no other property value studies have examined sites in multiple areas with large property value losses over the length of time used here. The results are both surprising and inconsistent with most prior work. The principal result is that, when cleanup is delayed for 10, 15, and even up to 20 years, the discounted present value of the cleanup is mostly lost. A possible explanation for these property value losses is that the sites are stigmatized and the homes in the surrounding communities are shunned. The results suggest that expedited cleanup and minimizing the number of stigmatizing events would reduce these losses.
In hedonic property value models, economists typically assume that changing perceptions of environmental risk should be captured by changes in housing prices. For long-lived risks emanating from point sources, however, many other features of neighborhoods seem to change as well. Households relocate in response to changes in. perceived environmental quality. We consider spatial patterns in selected census variables over three decades in the vicinity of four Superfund sites. We find many examples of moving and staying behavior, inferred from changes in the relative concentrations of a wide range of socio-demographic groups in census tracts near the site versus farther away.