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Urban youth are exposed to a myriad of conditions that may influence environmental literacy in their informal learning settings. In partnership with the Detroit Zoological Society's Education program, we implemented an environmental literacy questionnaire to 43 participants from ages 9–13. We investigated how place dependency, place identity, research competencies, empathy for wildlife, ecological knowledge – all components of environmental literacy using stepwise regression were influenced by social and environmental neighborhood characteristics in youth residing in the Detroit metropolitan area. While distance to park, road density, and impervious surface affected environmental literacy, social variables such as education attainment and housing burden were most important. Because environmental literacy is crucial to growing advocacy and promoting pro-environmental behavior understanding drivers that influence attitudes towards nature has ramifications for securing both an inclusive STEM workforce and sustainable future.