Low Income Populations and Poor Water Quality in Tennessee
Alaina Makowski
GY 430
Introduction
Access to clean drinking water is important and essential in
communities. With recent events in Flint, Michigan, we see that
even in the United States this access to clean water is not always
available. Low income communities, like much of Flint, are less
equipped to deal with the consequences of poor drinking water.
For this reason, it is important to understand if poor water
quality is affecting these communities more. This study looks at
water quality, specifically in Tennessee. Using impaired
waterway sites, it aims to understand if low income populations
are disproportionally affected by poor water quality.
Data
To address poor water quality the impaired waterway data
from the EPA was used. The shapefiles for the " Listed Impaired
Waters NHDPlus Indexed Dataset with Program Attributes” were
downloaded from this database and the points layer was used
for the analysis. This is vector data for the United States. This
data was created May 1st of 2015 and last updated May 16th of
2016.
For the census tract data two separate sources had to be
used. First, the shapefiles for the 2016 census tract boundaries
were downloaded. This data came from the Census Bureau
mapping files “TIGER/Line Shapefiles.” For this data, all legal
boundaries and names are as of January 1, 2016. However the
attribute table for this layer did not include the demographic
information needed for the analysis. To include these
demographics, a table from the Census Bureau was created for
this study. The census data was filtered to create a table of
Tennessee’s demographic income data for 2016 by census tract.
Sources URL: https://www.epa.gov/waterdata/waters-
geospatial-data-downloads#303dListedImpairedWaters
https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-
series/geo/tiger-line-file.2016.html
https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/pro
ductview.xhtml?pid=ACS_17_5YR_S1903&prodType=table
Methods
Using the point shapefile for impaired waterway sites a 5-
mile buffer was created. First, the point layer was trimmed
down to the boundaries of Tennessee. From these remaining
points the geoprocessing analysis tool called buffer was used to
create a 5-mile buffer surrounding each point. This buffer
represents an area most affected by the site of poor water
quality.
To analyze which low income tracts were affected the table
of demographic information for census tracts of Tennessee was
joined with the shapefile for the census tracts boundaries. The
join used the unique IDs of GEOID and Geo.id2.
The census tracts that intersected the buffer were then
selected using the select by location tool with the census tracts
layer as the target layer and the buffer as the source layer. This
selection was then created as a new layer. To create the low-
income census tracts layer, the select by attribute tool was used
to select from the census tracts that intersect the buffer. To
determine if the tract is low income the equation “HO2_EST_V”
< ‘39,500’ was entered in the select by attribute tool. This
selected from the affected census tracts for the census tracts
that have a median household income less than $39,500.
Results
Results showed that 25 out of the 56 census tracts affected
were low income. This means 44.6% of the affected areas were
low income. To analyze if this was a disproportionate amount, I
looked at all the census tracts in Tennessee to see how many
were low income. The results showed that 43% of all census
tracts in Tennessee would be categorized as low income based
on my cutoff of a $39,500 median household income. From this
we can see that the 44.6% of census tracts affected by poor
water quality is almost equal to the overall portion of low
income tracts in Tennessee. Therefore there is not a significant
difference to say that low income tracts are affected by poor
water quality in Tennessee anymore than other income classes.