Abstract
Excerpted From: Danielle Stokes, Climate Resilience as Reparations, 5 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 4 (2026) (Full Document)
The Tulsa Race Massacre. The Love Canal Tragedy. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Exploitation. Each of these events exemplifies the destructive consequences of systemic marginalization and environmental injustice faced by vulnerable communities in the United States. Each underscores a disregard for the rights and well-being of marginalized groups often exacerbated by government indifference or complicity. The Tulsa Race Massacre was incited by white mobs that violently attacked a prosperous Black community, resulting in death and property destruction. The Love Canal crisis exposed the severe health risks posed by industrial pollution that disproportionately impacted low-income neighborhoods, particularly the largely working-class community in Niagara Falls, New York. The Mashpee Wampanoag tribes historical land dispossession and contemporary struggles for recognition and sovereignty underscore the persistent challenges of being secure in ones place. These events are not anomalies but rather a representative sample of stories that could be told across time and space. Each story challenges the current narrative that place is valued by aesthetics and market forces alone.
When viewed in proper historical context, a new story emerges--a story of intersecting forces of social inequality, economic exploitation, and environmental hazards, leading to the marginalization of places that bear the brunt of historical injustices and contemporary inequities. These events also tell the story of how wealth, power, and innovation disproportionately harmed marginalized community members. The complexities of land acquisition and property development extend across a long time horizon, but along the way, real property became the pinnacle of wealth and power.
In the United States, these power dynamics yielded a system that delineated people into winners and losers based upon immutable characteristics and socioeconomic factors. As I have shown elsewhere, this designation was initially person-centered, and transitioned into place-based marginalization. Power and privilege were so inextricably interwoven into the fabric of places such that some areas were sustainable and appreciated in value, while others depreciated and were susceptible to deterioration. The property valuation origin story has had lasting impacts on people, but what is often underappreciated is its cumulative impact on places. Valued places continue to benefit from the sociopolitical choices made over a century ago, while marginalized communities continue to bear the burden of places deemed undesirable. One especially overlooked area in which that burden persists is the disproportionate burden of climate change.
Although climate scholars have considered some connections between land use and environmental regulations, the social and legal underpinnings of places and how they took shape remain vastly underappreciated. Specifically, the adaptation and resilience literature does not fully engage with the sociocultural implications of climate-centric laws and policies. Yet to be explored is the interconnection of place, property, and value. This Article does just that.
Each place has an origin story. Each origin story is complicated by regulatory actions that created various overlays onto places. Land use and zoning established an initial layer that would ultimately demarcate places of value and marginalization. Public amenities subsequently developed in places deemed valuable, while undesirable land uses were sited in marginalized places. Environmental injustice was an outgrowth of the land use and zoning process, creating a second overlay. These layered challenges have created multidimensional harms and places that are desperately in need of repair.
It is well past time for a comprehensive, place-based theory of reparations. This Article undertakes that endeavor by disentangling the practical and theoretical conceptions of place and value, taking inventory of pivotal inflection points--the redlining era and the climate crisis--to underscore how the value ascribed to a place impacts sustainability and climate resilience. In a prior work, I began this framework with a concept I called greenlining. Greenlining is a comprehensive planning mechanism that integrates sustainability principles into land use decisions, using development standards and other incentives to ameliorate longstanding injustices. Here, I use greenlining to identify the areas where place-based reparations are warranted by exploring the basis of property valuation methods and how reparative efforts can support climate resiliency in marginalized places.
The proposal introduced here is not a traditional reparations framework that calls for direct payments or land reconveyances. Rather, this place-based reparations project incorporates a sustainability framework that contemplates environmentalism, social equity, and economics, in that order. This approach avoids notions that reparations are merely a race-based, zero-sum game. Instead, it offers place-based reparations as a means of remediating longstanding historical harms by shifting values from wealth and power to wellness and security. This shift reinforces the notion of climate resilience, including investing in clean technology, food security, and other means of sustainable development. Climate resilience as reparations reorients the land use and planning development system such that places exposed to disproportionate harm--whether by virtue of discriminatory zoning practices or environmental injustice--are fortified to withstand the ills of the climate crisis. Climate resilience as reparations is not merely a way for place-based reparations to be implemented, but also the way to deconstruct the placemaking scheme of the past.
To make the case for climate resilience as reparations, this Article proceeds in three Parts. Part I sets the stage for place-based reparations, providing the historical context of property valuation by detailing the conceptual and regulatory origin stories. It also explains how the federal government became involved in placemaking and value-setting through its mortgage lending practices. Part II explains how the climate crisis is an invitation to reimagine land use and zoning more broadly and to integrate understandings of sustainability into future development schemes. It also underscores the need to expand the concept of reparations to build out sustainability principles and incorporate them into legal frameworks, and describes the tenets of a place-based reparations framework. Finally, Part III describes methods of intervention relevant to the development and cultivation of resilient places, and identifies the role that various levels of government can play in providing the intervention.
It is said that the past is prologue. That is certainly true of inequitable placemaking. Failing to acknowledge these inequities will simply perpetuate them. A commitment to place-based reparations recalibrates place-based value, replacing the placemaking scheme of the past to realize a more equitable and resilient future.
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The story of place, property, and value in the United States offers insight into the marginalization and environmental injustices prevalent in places across the country--places that have been disproportionately overburdened, places that are now in need of support to withstand the climate crisis. Advancing a comprehensive, place-based reparations theory provides a pathway for addressing these systemic harms and reshaping the existing paradigm of place-value assessment. There is value in a nested sustainability framework that respects the environment, prioritizes social equity, and safeguards economic interests. There is value in remediating past harms. There is value in creating safe, secure, resilient places.
The present is a precarious moment in time riddled with uncertainty and a resounding plea for urgent action. True sustainability--considering the past, in the present, to plan for the future--is the type of reparative action that just may yield places that are not only rooted in equity but are climate resilient.
Danielle Stokes is Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Merhige Center at the University of Richmond School of Law. She teaches and writes in property, environmental law, environmental justice, sustainability, and equity in land use planning.
