Racial composition and homeownership influence the distribution of coastal armoring in South Carolina, United States

The desire to stabilize coastlines has led to widespread use of hard armoring infrastructure across the globe, however, ecologists and coastal managers have increasingly documented the deleterious effects of armoring on ecological communities. Although many studies have assessed economic and landscape correlates of armoring, few studies incorporate race as a predictor of armoring. Race may be an important force structuring the placement of armoring due to the long history of Black land loss in the US Southeast. Here, we assessed the distribution of armoring in the US state of South Carolina with respect to demographic and housing characteristics using a high spatial resolution data set and a combination of spatial statistics and generalized linear mixed models. We found clusters of high armoring counts in the more urbanized Beaufort and Charleston counties, with these clusters frequently occurring in large-scale, planned communities. We found a positive correlation between armor count and the percentage of White residents and homeowners in a census block group. Both terms showed a similar magnitude of effect, with the number of armoring structures predicted to increase from 1.61 to 7.77 and from 1.14 to 8.97 between CBGs that are 0 to 100% White and homeowners, respectively. These results highlight that racial composition and homeownership are strong predictors of armoring count on private, personal property, which provides critical context for how these structures are distributed and underscores that socioeconomic factors can control where their associated environmental impacts may be concentrated.

Methods
The data analyzed in this study were originally collected by Jackson (2017). Armoring data was associated with census block groups in ArcPro and then analyzed with respect to demographic data gathered from the Census Bureau via GLMMs in R.  A copy of the Jackson 2017 is provided in the "Armoring_Supplemental" folder.

Jackson, C. 2017. Mapping Coastal Erosion Hazards Along Sheltered Coastlines in South Carolina 1849 to 2015. South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management.