Data from: 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.