Reconstructing Historical Alcohol Landscapes to Inform Contemporary Alcohol Policy

Richard Sadler, Michigan State University
Zachary Buchalski, Michigan State University
Alan Harris, Michigan State University

Historical geographic information systems have been constructed for a variety of purposes. One understudied domain is the presence of alcohol outlets through time. Contemporary research has established that poorer and minority communities are frequently overburdened by off-premise outlets (e.g. liquor stores). These outlets have more associated harms than on-premise outlets such as bars, including associations to increased alcohol consumption and crime. But examining these patterns through time can inform our understanding of temporal shifts in these disparities. Leveraging activities from the NIAAA-funded Characterizing Housing, Alcohol, and Racial Disparities (CHARD) grant, we present a method for defining outlets that sell alcohol by comparing a state database to city directories, and thence using directories as proxies for official state databases. With this approach, we then use GIS to model shifts in alcohol availability by race and socioeconomic status in 10 year intervals from 1950 to 2010. Our results suggest that in our study city of Flint, Michigan, the alcohol environment has become less inequitable since 1950. While liquor stores are still more likely to be located in poorer and more heavily African American neighborhoods, the pattern has abated over time. Furthermore, the number of alcohol outlets per capita has declined. Although the city remains more overburdened with alcohol outlets than its suburbs, the disparity between neighborhoods within the city has shrunk. This work has implications for those working in alcohol prevention and policy, as well as in urban planning. Practitioners and researchers can use this method to model alcohol availability over time in their own communities, which helps better inform the discussion on disparities experienced in poor and minority neighborhoods. Further, this approach can be leveraged by historical scholars interested in reconstructing past landscapes by using contemporary proxies, as we propose here.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 257. Urban Historical GIS