Highlights from a Special Issue on Gentrification and Health
Article #1: While Some Things Change, Do Others Stay the Same? The Heterogeneity of Neighborhood Health Returns to Gentrification
Author(s): Jennifer Candipan, Alicia R. Riley, Janeria A. Easley
Date of Publication Online: 6 May 2022
DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10511482.2022.2076715?journalCode=rhpd20
Article #2: Gentrification, Health, and Intermediate Pathways: How Distinct Inequality Mechanisms Impact Health Disparities
Author: H. Shellae Versey
Date of Publication Online: 27 Sept 2022
DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10511482.2022.2123249
Environment has well-documented effects on health. Exposureq to pollutants; access to affordable health care services, healthy food, and exercise and outdoor recreation; and cultural environment all influence an individual’s wellbeing (Krieger, 2005; Petteway
et al., 2019). Gentrification, a process by which an area that is home to low-to-moderate-income residents rises in socioeconomic status, affects all of these factors, and therefore necessarily also affects health. But what exactly does this effect look like?
Past research has yielded mixed findings on whether gentrification benefits or harms the health of a community. On the one hand, gentrification is associated with increases in municipal amenities and services and decreases in poverty and crime, factors that are typically beneficial to health (Papachristos et al. 2011; Williams et al., 2008, Agbai, 2021). On the other hand, gentrification is also associated with the physical and cultural displacement of an area’s original residents who can no longer afford to live there. Those affected are often disproportionately people of color and/or low income (Bhavsar et al., 2020; Croff et al., 2021; Gibbons, 2019; Gibbons et al., 2018; Gibbons & Barton, 2016; Kern, 2012; 2016; Ramırez, 2020; Schnake-Mahl et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2020; Tran et al., 2020; Versey & Russell, 2022), who may suffer negative health consequences as a result (Candipan, 2019; Freeman, 2005; Fullilove & Wallace, 2011; Hyra, 2017). What specific impacts does gentrification have on health, and for whom and where? A special Issue brings new perspectives on these complex questions.
In one of the articles featured, “While Some Things Change, Do Others Stay the Same? The Heterogeneity of Neighborhood Health Returns to Gentrification”, Candipan, Riley, and Easley endeavor to answer three questions linking gentrification and health:
- Does change in neighborhood health occur differently in neighborhoods experiencing gentrification relative to those that do not?
- Which types of socio-demographic change are associated with changing neighborhood health in gentrifying neighborhoods?
- Do these changes to neighborhood health depend on the initial racial composition of the neighborhood?
To answer these questions, the authors compared various health outcomes in gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods in the ten most populous American cities. Data on health outcomes, namely obesity (defined as weighing over 30.0 kg/m2), poor mental health (defined as an adult self-reporting “that their mental health was not good” for 14 days or more), binge drinking (defined as an adult self-reporting as having had 4-5 drinks per occasion during the last 30 days), smoking (defined as an adult self-reporting having smoked 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and currently smoking every day or some days) and sleep deprivation (defined as an adult self-reporting regularly getting less than 7 hours in a 24 hour period) were gathered from the Center for Disease Control’s PLACES project for two points in time, 2013-2014 and 2017-2018.
Next, the authors created samples of “gentrifying” and “non-gentrifying” neighborhoods. A neighborhood was “gentrifying” if its median home value rose from below the median home value for its respective metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in 2010 to above the median in 2015-2019. “Non-gentrifying” neighborhoods also had 2010 median home values below the median for the MSA but did not rise above the MSA median in 2015-2019. Data on socio-demographic factors such as the neighborhood’s initial status as predominantly White, Black, or Hispanic, as well as measures of change in composition and socioeconomic status overtime such as the proportion of White, foreign-born, college-educated, or home-owning individuals in a neighborhood were also gathered from the ACS.
The authors then conducted both a spatial-autoregressive and two-stage least squares SAR analysis which allowed them to spatially map out their results, as well as to examine how gentrification, contextual, and demographic features changed alongside neighborhood health.
Based on these analyses, the authors concluded that both geography and changing socio-economic and racial factors impacted the role of gentrification on health in a variety of ways. They found that neighborhoods with predominantly negative health outcomes and predominantly positive ones are often clustered next to those similar to themselves. They also found that in gentrifying neighborhoods, increasing proportions of college graduates, homeowners, and White and foreign-born residents were associated with decreases in negative health outcomes and health risk behaviors (with the exception of binge drinking). Improved health outcomes were even more pronounced among initially majority Hispanic or Black gentrifying neighborhoods in comparison to initially majority White gentrifying neighborhoods. However, researchers found that while increased home value, rates of homeownership, and shares of college-educated residents in gentrifying neighborhoods correlated with better health outcomes in gentrifying neighborhoods, these changes were accompanied by worse health outcomes in non-gentrifying neighborhoods.
While Candipan, Easley, and Riley offer insights into aggregate health outcomes within gentrifying neighborhoods, their study cannot tell us about the health impacts of gentrification for those who are displaced or specifically for those within a gentrifying neighborhood who experience displacement pressure. In another article in the issue, “Gentrification, Health, and Intermediate Pathways: How Distinct Inequality Mechanisms Impact Health Disparities”, H. Shellae Versey provides an individual-level perspective.
Versey’s study has its conceptual roots in Anguelovski et al.’s (2021) framework linking gentrification to health through four major pathways:
- A) housing, financial insecurity, and residential displacement;
- B) sociocultural displacement
- C) loss of public amenities, facilities, and services
- D) crime and safety
Versey’s analysis sheds light on how gentrification-driven inequality can harm health through both direct and indirect displacement. Along the first path—whereby gentrification impacts health through material scarcity—a major theme among respondents was food insecurity. Many interviewees reported skipping meals to afford rent or feed their children. Some relied on multiple food banks to get by, but still struggled.
Cultural displacement also harmed health by causing emotional distress and detachment from the community. For example, one interviewee reported that she felt that the “Black cultural legacy” of her neighborhood was disappearing as new noise ordinances were used to stop traditional music from being played aloud in the neighborhood.
Interviewees also described decreased access to or investment in public facilities such as affordable housing and public transportation as a result of gentrification. Finally, with respect to the fourth pathway of crime and safety, interviewees focused primarily on personal safety threats, including landlords’ illegal, neglectful, and discriminatory housing practices, which resulted in stress and health hazards.
These two studies took very different approaches to the question of how gentrification relates to health. Yet their authors had similar advice for policymakers, namely, that displacement is a health concern, and that government action should be taken to guarantee affordable housing and prevent evictions as new development occurs. Candipan, Riley, and Easley also called on both policymakers and health professionals to consider gentrification’s health consequences, including increases in binge drinking and possible detrimental effects to non-gentrifying neighborhoods nearby.
About the Authors:
Jennifer Candipan is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and faculty affiliate at the Population
Studies and Training Center and the Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) program at Brown University.
Alicia Riley is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and core faculty in Global and Community
Health at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Janeria Easley is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University.
H. Shellae Versey is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Fordham University, and leads several projects explor-
ing the intersection between neighborhoods, race/racism, and health. She also writes on housing and older adults.
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