J R Elliott
Biographic Data
| ID | 31669 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J R Elliott |
| GIVEN NAMES | J R |
| FAMILY NAME | Elliott |
| SIGNATURE | ELLIOTT J R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rice University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9790-5433 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 971 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1965 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Colorblind retreat
Over recent decades, the United States federal government has funded the purchase and demolition of flood-prone housing across the country through a policy known as managed retreat. As this policy has touched down in areas where residents and government actors look to adapt to growing climate threats, managed retreat has entered housing markets long shaped by racial segregation and become entangled with the ideological frameworks that support and…
The Revolving Door of Risk
Nationwide, flood risks are encouraging local authorities to implement a federal policy known as managed retreat. The program offers homeowners a fair market price to voluntarily relinquish their properties for demolition and move elsewhere, thereby subsidizing residential relocation as a means of climate adaptation. Despite widespread implementation, we know little about how people move or how many move from places where the program intervenes. …
Toxic Fear
Tropical storms and flooding can compromise industrial infrastructures and other land-based hazards in ways that contaminate nearby communities. This study uses novel data from the Houston Area Survey to investigate racial and ethnic disparities in reports of such contamination in metropolitan Houston during Hurricane Harvey and its influence on residents’ long-term worries about future flooding. Results indicate that among those negatively impac…
Managed retreat
The government-funded retreat of homeowners from flood-prone housing is a globally ascendant policy of climate adaptation. Yet, we still know relatively little about some fairly basic questions involving its participants: e.g. How much risk do homeowners tolerate before retreating? Where do they move? Does that move reduce their future flood risk? And, to what extent do answers to these questions vary by the type of racial and ethnic communities …
The multiplicity of impact
This study advances and examines the proposition that social marginalization, especially along racial and ethnic lines, produces compound disadvantages that accumulate across a wide range of personal, social and political domains when climate disasters strike, producing a multiplicity of impact often missed by quantitative research on social vulnerability. To test this claim, we use data collected by the Houston Area Survey after the historic rai…
Divergent Residential Pathways from Flood-Prone Areas
Flood risks are rising across the United States, putting the economic and social values of growing numbers of homes at risk. In response, the federal government is funding the purchase and demolition of housing in areas of greatest jeopardy, tacitly promoting residential resettlement as a strategy of climate adaptation, especially in cities. Despite these developments little is known about where people move when they engage in such resettlement o…
Unequal Retreats
Recent research on climate adaptation points to the need to take flood control seriously as a state-led process that organizes and responds to the racial and environmental spaces of cities. The present study advances that agenda by focusing on the federally funded retreat of homes and residents from flood-prone urban neighborhoods. While officially organized by rational engineering and technocratic calculations, its implementation cannot escape t…
Future flooding increases unequal exposure risks to relic industrial pollution
Climate change is increasing the probability that urban communities with lengthy histories of land-based industrial pollution and ongoing residential segregation will experience more frequent and destructive flooding in the years ahead. This paper investigates where these past, present, and future forces will converge to potentially produce a new type of climate injustice, as the flooding of former, or ‘relic,’ industrial sites threatens to trans…
The Racially Unequal Impacts of Disasters and Federal Recovery Assistance on Local Self-Employment Rates
This study examines racial inequalities in changing self-employment rates associated with natural hazard impacts and federal recovery assistance in ethnoracially diverse metropolitan counties between 2000 and 2010. It advances the viewpoint that such inequalities can stem from hoarded opportunities tied to white privilege in addition to commonly highlighted social vulnerabilities tied to racial inequities and exclusion. To test that proposition, …
Accessibility and Recovery Assessment of Houston’s Roadway Network due to Fluvial Flooding during Hurricane Harvey
The record-breaking rainfall produced by Hurricane Harvey resulted in catastrophic and prolonged impacts on Houston’s transportation infrastructure, inundating entire neighborhoods and rendering them inaccessible to emergency response services. Harvey highlighted the vulnerability of the roadway network to severe inundation during extreme fluvial flood events and emphasized the need for a detailed roadway network accessibility characterization in…
Do Legacy Industrial Sites Produce Legacy Effects in Ethnic and Racial Residential Settlement? Environmental Inequality Formation in Rhode Island’s Industrial Core 1
This study advances understanding of environmental inequality by examining its production through the interaction of two ubiquitous and ongoing urban‐ecological processes: industrial land‐use changes and changing patterns of residential segregation. We employ longitudinal data from the Rhode Island Directory of Manufacturers (1953–2012) and tract‐level US Census data measured at four panel‐years (1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010) to study the effects o…
Racial Inequities in the Federal Buyout of Flood-Prone Homes
One way the U.S. government is responding to the challenges of climate change is by funding the purchase of tens of thousands of flood-prone homes in more than 500 cities and towns across the country. This study provides a nationwide analysis of that program, extending beyond cost-benefit calculations to investigate racial inequities at different scales of local implementation, from county-level adoption, through neighborhood-level participation,…
The Successive Nature of City Parks
This study examines the historical establishment and shifting residential access to city parks over time. It begins by engaging and extending a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. It then assembles and analyzes longitudinal data on city park creation and neighborhood change in Houston from 1947 to 2015. Results reveal how socially privileged residents have long enjoyed unequal access to city parks as well as strong influence …
Residential buyouts as environmental mobility
Recovering Inequality
Damages Done
This study investigates a largely ignored contributor to wealth inequality in the United States: damages from natural hazards, which are expected to increase substantially in coming years. Instead of targeting a specific large-scale disaster and assessing how different subpopulations recover, we begin with a nationally representative sample of respondents from the restricted, geocoded Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We follow them through time (1…
Urban Ecology in the Time of Climate Change
This study proposes a shift in sociology’s approach to urban ecology. Rather than foreground the social ecologies that captivated the Chicago and Los Angeles Schools, we join and extend more recent efforts to engage environmental ecologies that successively intersect with those social ecologies over time. To ground our approach, we focus on areas of urban flooding where federally subsidized buyouts of residential properties have occurred over rec…
Disasters, local organizations, and poverty in the USA, 1998 to 2015
Attitudes Toward Mass Arrivals
Objective Disasters can send large numbers of evacuees into new contexts of reception, where attitudes toward them can vary significantly by perceived social distance. To conventional assessment of such distance along racial lines, we add spatial and temporal distance from point of central arrival. Methods A novel research design combines the natural experiment triggered by Hurricane Katrina with five consecutive Kinder Houston Area Surveys (2006…
As Disaster Costs Rise, So Does Inequality
Across the United States, communities are experiencing increases in the frequency and severity of natural hazards. The pervasiveness and upward trajectory of these damages are worrisome enough, but equally disconcerting are the social inequalities they can leave in their wake. To examine these inequalities, the authors linked county-level damage data to a random sample of American households. The authors visualize the pervasiveness of natural haz…
Community Perceptions of Industrial Risks Before and After a Toxic Flood
The present study examines risk perceptions before and after a recent natural-technological event. The aim is to improve understanding of how long-time residents understand chronic and acute industrial risks, including hazardous industrial releases triggered by natural disasters. Thirty-two interviews were conducted in Channelview, Texas: 19 in February 2017, six months before Hurricane Harvey’s landfall, and 13 with those same residents in Decem…
Place, Space, and Racially Unequal Exposures to Pollution at Home and Work
Research on racial inequalities in exposure to industrial pollution in U.S. metropolitan areas typically focuses on places of residence, ignoring the fact that most people work and commute to other areas to do so. To investigate what these daily commutes mean for understanding place- and space-based disparities in exposure, we merge federally compiled data on commuting and industrial air pollution with sociodemographic data on the home and work t…
Natural Hazards and Local Development
The built environment that serves as the literal foundation for social life involves not just the material development of local landscapes but ongoing damage from natural hazards endemic to these landscapes, which are forecasted to increase over coming years. Prior research has investigated each of these dynamics independently but not their intersection. The present study begins to fill this gap by combining county-level data on land development …
Inequality and the City
Urban sociology emerged from the fertile ground of US cities during the early 1900s as a means of understanding social problems and the processes that produce them. Central to the field's conceptualization and analysis of these social problems was, and remains, the idea of inequality, defined loosely as the uneven distribution of social resources and actors relative to one another. As such, the term “inequality and the city” is best understood as…
Beyond Disasters
This study investigates the unequal impact of natural hazard damage on people's residential instability over time by shifting analyses from an event-centered design common in disaster studies to a longitudinal, population-centered approach. To demonstrate this approach, we link annual data on property damages from natural hazards at the county level to geocoded data on nationally representative samples of men and women from the Panel Study of Inc…
Race, class, and Hurricane Katrina
Race, Gender, and Workplace Power
Survey data support hypotheses regarding differential access to workplace power among women and minorities relative to white men. Specific findings indicate that, relative to white men, all groups encounter increasing inequality at higher levels of power, but only black women seem to experience this form of inequality as a result of direct discrimination. Further analysis indicates that network assistance is more a response to this form of discri…
Places as Recovery Machines
This study advances a conceptual framework for understanding the transformation of places into recovery machines after major hurricanes. This framework contends that in the years following such disasters, pro-growth coalitions take advantage of new sources of material and symbolic capital to promote further demographic growth. It also contends that the spatial nature of this growth varies significantly as a result of social inequalities among res…
Social Isolation and Labor Market Insulation
This study examines the influence of neighborhood poverty and social networks on labor market experiences of less-educated urban job seekers. Data come from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality and the 1990 decennial census. Results indicate that relatively small differences in job search strategies among residents of high- and low-poverty neighborhoods are magnified in the hiring process and that supply- and demand-side factors have qualita…
The Historical Nature of Cities
Endemic uncertainties surrounding urban industrial waste raise important theoretical and methodological challenges for understanding the historical nature of cities. Our study advances a synthetic framework for engaging these challenges by extending theories of modern risk society and classic urban ecology to investigate the accumulation of industrial hazards over time and space. Data for our study come from a unique longitudinal dataset containi…
Referral Hiring and Ethnically Homogeneous Jobs
Ethnic Matching of Supervisors to Subordinate Work Groups
Research on minority authority attainment tends to stress top-down processes of social closure, whereby the dominant social group produces and preserves positions of power and influence by excluding out-group members. We argue that this view, while helpful, is incomplete. Returning to Weber's original conceptualization of social closure, we argue that top-down exclusion often generates pressures for bottom-up ascription, whereby employers match s…
Limits to Social Capital
Sociological research emphasizes that personal networks offer social resources in times of need and that this capacity varies by the social position of those involved. Yet rarely are sociologists able to make direct comparisons of such inequalities. This study overcomes this methodological challenge by examining network activation among residents of two unequal neighborhoods severely devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Results indicate that local ne…
Ghettos and Barrios
Recent research suggests that racial and poverty concentrations in urban neighborhoods influence how minorities look for and find jobs. In this study, we use data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality to examine this hypothesis, focusing on the use and return to various modes of job matching among blacks and Latinos in different residential contexts. Results show that while Latinos are generally more likely than blacks to acquire jobs th…
Racial Inequities in the Federal Buyout of Flood-Prone Homes
One way the U.S. government is responding to the challenges of climate change is by funding the purchase of tens of thousands of flood-prone homes in more than 500 cities and towns across the country. This study provides a nationwide analysis of that program, extending beyond cost-benefit calculations to investigate racial inequities at different scales of local implementation, from county-level adoption, through neighborhood-level participation,…
Damages Done
This study investigates a largely ignored contributor to wealth inequality in the United States: damages from natural hazards, which are expected to increase substantially in coming years. Instead of targeting a specific large-scale disaster and assessing how different subpopulations recover, we begin with a nationally representative sample of respondents from the restricted, geocoded Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We follow them through time (1…
Natural Hazards and Residential Mobility
This study conducts a nationwide, locally comparative analysis of the extent to which natural hazards contribute to residential mobility in the United States and how this influence varies for racial and ethnic minorities. Analyses combine census data on households with data from thousands of recorded natural hazards during the late 1990s. Findings affirm that natural hazards are common throughout the country; that associated property damage corre…
Does Ethnic Concentration Influence Employees' Access to Authority? An Examination of Contemporary Urban Labor Markets
This article examines whether ethnic concentration in establishments, occupations, and industries influences the authority attainment of white, Hack, Hispanic, and Asian men and women. Data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality and the 1990 decennial census indicate that “horizontal” concentration among roughly equivalent coworkers and within local industrial and occupational sectors has little effect on minority chances of accessing pos…
As Disaster Costs Rise, So Does Inequality
Across the United States, communities are experiencing increases in the frequency and severity of natural hazards. The pervasiveness and upward trajectory of these damages are worrisome enough, but equally disconcerting are the social inequalities they can leave in their wake. To examine these inequalities, the authors linked county-level damage data to a random sample of American households. The authors visualize the pervasiveness of natural haz…
When Nature Pushes Back
Objectives. This research investigates the spatial redistribution of socially vulnerable subpopulations during long‐term recovery from natural disaster. We hypothesize that the local environmental impact of a disaster influences this redistribution process and that how it does so varies by the urban or rural context in which the disaster occurs. Methods. To test these hypotheses, we use a novel research design that combines the natural experiment…
Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession
This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analys…
Natural disasters and local demographic change in the United States
Framing the Urban
Recent debate over the federal HOPE VI program has focused primarily on whether local applications have met administrative pledges to provide adequate affordable housing to displaced residents of newly demolished public‐housing developments. In this research we take a different direction, examining local processes of political mobilization and strategic framing around a specific type of HOPE VI redevelopment—one that includes construction of a bi…
Disasters, local organizations, and poverty in the USA, 1998 to 2015
Place, Space, and Racially Unequal Exposures to Pollution at Home and Work
Research on racial inequalities in exposure to industrial pollution in U.S. metropolitan areas typically focuses on places of residence, ignoring the fact that most people work and commute to other areas to do so. To investigate what these daily commutes mean for understanding place- and space-based disparities in exposure, we merge federally compiled data on commuting and industrial air pollution with sociodemographic data on the home and work t…
Natural Hazards and Local Development
The built environment that serves as the literal foundation for social life involves not just the material development of local landscapes but ongoing damage from natural hazards endemic to these landscapes, which are forecasted to increase over coming years. Prior research has investigated each of these dynamics independently but not their intersection. The present study begins to fill this gap by combining county-level data on land development …
The Influence of Qualifications on Women's Work Histories, Employment Status and Earnings at Age 33
This paper examines the relationship between women's qualifications and their labour-market participation up to the age of 33 for a cohort of women born in Great Britain in one week of March 1958. The period of the life-cycle on which the analysis focuses is one during which many women are attempting to juggle the competing demands of young children and employment. In Britain, with very limited institutional support for retaining employment durin…
Metropolitanizing Nonmetro Space
The recent volatility of population redistribution trends in the U.S. continues to stimulate the demographic imagination. This research sheds new light on this subject through an examination of newly designated metro areas, which collectively constitute the largest source of national metropolitan growth in two of the past three decades. The results show that, over this period, new metro areas have consistently drawn the majority of migrants from …
Residential buyouts as environmental mobility
Urban Ecology in the Time of Climate Change
This study proposes a shift in sociology’s approach to urban ecology. Rather than foreground the social ecologies that captivated the Chicago and Los Angeles Schools, we join and extend more recent efforts to engage environmental ecologies that successively intersect with those social ecologies over time. To ground our approach, we focus on areas of urban flooding where federally subsidized buyouts of residential properties have occurred over rec…
A Comment on Inter-Party Competition, Economic Variables, and Welfare Policies in the American States
The Gain of a Feedback Control System for a Given Damping Ratio
An important problem in the design of a closed-loop control system is the selection of an open-loop system gain to match an allowable damping ratio. This paper presents an analytical method for determining the open-loop gain for a given damping ratio. A derivation of the method, a few points of note in the computer program, and some numerical examples are discussed
Geology and resources of the Tar Sand Triangle, southeastern Utah
The Tar Sand Triangle is located in southeastern Utah between the Dirty Devil and Colorado Rivers and covers an area of about 200 square miles. The geology of the area consists of gently northwest dipping strata exposed in the box canyons and slopes of the canyonlands morphology. Strata in the area range in age from Jurassic to Permian. The majority of tar sand saturation is found in the Permian White Rim Sandstone Member of the Cutler Formation.…
Metropolitanizing Nonmetro Space
The recent volatility of population redistribution trends in the U.S. continues to stimulate the demographic imagination. This research sheds new light on this subject through an examination of newly designated metro areas, which collectively constitute the largest source of national metropolitan growth in two of the past three decades. The results show that, over this period, new metro areas have consistently drawn the majority of migrants from …
Cycles within the System
This paper uses a typology of local metropolitan development to examine population redistribution trends in the US over the past three decades. Theories of systemic maturation and urban life-cycles are discussed and evaluated. Analysis of population and inter-county migration data reveals that localised deconcentration has become an increasingly common sub-process of metropolitanisation, but that this sub-process cannot be fully explained by a li…
Putting “Global Cities” in Their Place
This paper examines changes in the incidence of low-income employment within and across different tiers of the United States urban hierarchy between 1950 and 1990 using data from Public Use Microdata Samples. Theoretical guidance comes from past studies on the relationship between urban hierarchy and income inequality and more recent conceptualizations of global cities. An established urban typology is used to identify the “positions” of 105 metr…
Urban Restructuring Revisited
This research revisits the structural determinants of changing job prospects at the bottom of urban labor markets during the 1980s, measured in terms of employment instability, earnings inequality, and low-income jobs. In addition to the deindustrialization thesis, hypotheses are drawn from recent perspectives on new industrial districts, global cities, and the 'new' social division of labor. Statistical analyses reveal that the organization, rat…
Social Isolation and Labor Market Insulation
This study examines the influence of neighborhood poverty and social networks on labor market experiences of less-educated urban job seekers. Data come from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality and the 1990 decennial census. Results indicate that relatively small differences in job search strategies among residents of high- and low-poverty neighborhoods are magnified in the hiring process and that supply- and demand-side factors have qualita…
Ghettos and Barrios
Recent research suggests that racial and poverty concentrations in urban neighborhoods influence how minorities look for and find jobs. In this study, we use data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality to examine this hypothesis, focusing on the use and return to various modes of job matching among blacks and Latinos in different residential contexts. Results show that while Latinos are generally more likely than blacks to acquire jobs th…
Ethnic Matching of Supervisors to Subordinate Work Groups
Research on minority authority attainment tends to stress top-down processes of social closure, whereby the dominant social group produces and preserves positions of power and influence by excluding out-group members. We argue that this view, while helpful, is incomplete. Returning to Weber's original conceptualization of social closure, we argue that top-down exclusion often generates pressures for bottom-up ascription, whereby employers match s…
The Influence of Qualifications on Women's Work Histories, Employment Status and Earnings at Age 33
This paper examines the relationship between women's qualifications and their labour-market participation up to the age of 33 for a cohort of women born in Great Britain in one week of March 1958. The period of the life-cycle on which the analysis focuses is one during which many women are attempting to juggle the competing demands of young children and employment. In Britain, with very limited institutional support for retaining employment durin…
Referral Hiring and Ethnically Homogeneous Jobs
Does Ethnic Concentration Influence Employees' Access to Authority? An Examination of Contemporary Urban Labor Markets
This article examines whether ethnic concentration in establishments, occupations, and industries influences the authority attainment of white, Hack, Hispanic, and Asian men and women. Data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality and the 1990 decennial census indicate that “horizontal” concentration among roughly equivalent coworkers and within local industrial and occupational sectors has little effect on minority chances of accessing pos…
Postwar Immigration to the Deep South Triad
Contemporary research on immigrant settlement and adaptation emphasizes the interactions of ethnic-immigrant resources and local economic contexts. Yet, understandably, most research in this field continues to focus on major urban centers, truncating our view of the range of these interactions and the extent to which theories and concepts emerging from immigrant “magnets” generalize to more peripheral regions of the country. To address this short…
Hope VI, New Urbanism, and the Utility of Frames
Based on our analysis of New Urbanist frames, we suggest that HOPE VI provides both structural and interpretive political opportunities to actors competing to frame the transformation of public housing. As a structural opportunity, HOPE VI alters public-housing debates by enhancing the possibilities for political action by economic elites in competition with other actors. As an interpretive opportunity, HOPE VI’s explicit embrace of New Urbanism …
Framing the Urban
Recent debate over the federal HOPE VI program has focused primarily on whether local applications have met administrative pledges to provide adequate affordable housing to displaced residents of newly demolished public‐housing developments. In this research we take a different direction, examining local processes of political mobilization and strategic framing around a specific type of HOPE VI redevelopment—one that includes construction of a bi…
Race, Gender, and Workplace Power
Survey data support hypotheses regarding differential access to workplace power among women and minorities relative to white men. Specific findings indicate that, relative to white men, all groups encounter increasing inequality at higher levels of power, but only black women seem to experience this form of inequality as a result of direct discrimination. Further analysis indicates that network assistance is more a response to this form of discri…
The Effects of Race and Family Structure on Women's Spatial Relationship to the Labor Market
This study examines the intersection of race, family structure, and economic inequality through women's spatial relationships to the labor market. Using survey data from three major metro labor markets, we operationalize spatial relationships in two ways: first, using a conventional measure of commute time, and second, using an indicator of neighborhood job contacts to obtain employment. Results indicate that family structure exerts no direct eff…
Family Structure and Organizational Power
This study examines how dimensions of family structure, specifically marriage and parenthood, influence authority attainment among men and women of different racial and ethnic identities. Using survey data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality, we reach several empirical conclusions. First, the link between family structure and authority attainment is much stronger for women than men, and it revolves more strongly around marriage than pa…
Race, class, and Hurricane Katrina
Tracking Industrial Land Use Conversions
Research on urban development and environmental hazards has focused attention on problems associated with current industrial facilities, derelict industrial brownfields, and government-listed hazardous waste sites. Yet we continue to know very little about environmental contaminants remaining on past industrial sites that have since converted to other uses. This article develops a methodology for examining the prevalence of such sites and their h…
Places as Recovery Machines
This study advances a conceptual framework for understanding the transformation of places into recovery machines after major hurricanes. This framework contends that in the years following such disasters, pro-growth coalitions take advantage of new sources of material and symbolic capital to promote further demographic growth. It also contends that the spatial nature of this growth varies significantly as a result of social inequalities among res…
Unequal Return
This article examines early resettlement of four neighborhoods in New Orleans’ Uptown district, which was among the first areas to officially reopen for residential return. Drawing on survey data collected from more than 400 households, results show that even in relatively unflooded sections of town, racial and class disparities shaped early returns and accumulated to the disadvantage of African American residents of the city. A key mechanism beh…
Introduction
This article introduces a special issue of Organization & Environment that uses the historic case of Hurricane Katrina to investigate the social organization of demographic responses to disaster. It begins by establishing natural disasters as a dramatic form of human interaction with the environment. It then goes on to advance a novel framework for understanding the different population movements triggered by such interaction in the context of br…
When Nature Pushes Back
Objectives. This research investigates the spatial redistribution of socially vulnerable subpopulations during long‐term recovery from natural disaster. We hypothesize that the local environmental impact of a disaster influences this redistribution process and that how it does so varies by the urban or rural context in which the disaster occurs. Methods. To test these hypotheses, we use a novel research design that combines the natural experiment…
Sociology (41 works) · Geography (40 works) · Political science (33 works) · Economics (32 works) · Disaster Management and Resilience (23 works) · Demographic economics (21 works) · Demography (19 works) · Inequality (18 works) · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies (17 works) · Economic growth (16 works)