Suchergebnisse

AbstractWe use critical race theory (CRT) to examine the involuntary loss of land and homes among Black residents of the southeastern United States and in particular among the Gullah/Geechee. An Afro‐indigenous population, the Gullah/Geechee have deep roots in the federally designated Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, an area of sea islands and coastal Lowcountry within 25 coastal counties in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. We identify legal vulnerabilities associated with heirs property, in particular tax sales and predatory partition actions, as mechanisms used within the legal system to dispossess owners of their land. Our use of CRT allows us to understand heirs property as a legacy of the Jim Crow era and to recognize material motivations behind continued racial discrimination that has led to involuntary land loss. CRT also leads us to consider the question of empowerment of the Gullah/Geechee population through a program of reparations for wrongful taking of land and homes since coastal development began roughly 70 years ago. One possible mechanism for reparations is to increase existing lodging taxes on coastal tourism along the Gullah/Geechee coast.

ObjectivesThe following study contributes to the bridging green criminology's quantitative research gap by analyzing the spatial distribution of environmental crimes throughout the United States. In doing so, we consider the possibility of green crime havens; areas with elevated health risks associated with dense concentrations of green criminal behavior.MethodsUsing data obtained from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ECHO database, we conduct a spatial cluster analysis to identify counties bearing a disproportionate number of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act violations.ResultsFindings affirm the existence of numerous green crime havens with violations occurring both within and across different types of pollution cases.ConclusionsThe study concludes with a theoretical reflection of the treadmill of crime and corresponding series of policy recommendations.

A database of property tax records was used to locate and quantify the extent of heirs' property across 11 states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia). Based on previously published work, an index of four variables was then developed to estimate the likelihood that a given parcel was heirs' property. The authors conservatively estimate that there are at least 496,994 parcels of heirs' properties with a combined total area of 5.3 million acres and a market value of $41.9 billion in these states.

AbstractWe use a database of property tax records for 13.6 million acres representing every parcel of privately owned timberland in 48 rural Alabama counties to test two hypotheses inspired by Walter Goldschmidt relating land ownership and quality of life. Our data show private ownership is highly concentrated and 62 percent is absentee owned. We employed Pearson correlations alongside Poisson and negative binomial regression models to estimate influence of both concentrated private ownership and absentee ownership of timberland. Our findings support Goldschmidt‐inspired hypotheses that concentrated and absentee ownership of timberland exhibit a significant adverse relationship with quality of life as measured by educational attainment, poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, eligibility for free or reduced price lunch at public schools, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program participation, and population density. Low property taxes in Alabama limit the ability of local governments to generate revenue to support public education or meet other infrastructural or service needs in rural areas. We call on rural sociologists and kindred spirits to pay more attention to the fundamental importance of land ownership which shapes the foundations of power and inequality affecting rural life in America and beyond.