Abstract
Although the pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the US, little is known about the health consequences of growing up in gentrifying neighborhoods. We used New York State Medicaid claims data to track a cohort of low-income children born in the period 2006-08 for the nine years between January2009 and December2017. We compared the 2017 health outcomes of children who started out in low-income neighborhoods that gentrified in the period 2009-15 with those of children who started out in other low-income neighborhoods, controlling for individual child demographic characteristics, baseline neighborhood characteristics, and preexisting trends in neighborhood socioeconomic status. Our findings suggest that the experience of gentrification has no effects on children's health system use or diagnoses of asthma or obesity, when children are assessed at ages9-11, but that it is associated with moderate increases in diagnoses of anxiety or depression-which are concentrated among children living in market-rate housing.
Highlights
The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the US, little is known about the health consequences of growing up in gentrifying neighborhoods
Assessing multiple definitions of gentrification, we reported previously that low-income, Medicaid-enrolled children in gentrifying areas in New York City were no more likely to be displaced from their homes than were their peers in persistently low-socioeconomic status (SES) areas, nor were they more likely to move to worse neighborhoods when they did move from gentrifying areas.[14]
We focused our comparisons in the study on children in rapidly gentrifying areas relative to those in persistently lowSES areas
Summary
The pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the US, little is known about the health consequences of growing up in gentrifying neighborhoods. F rom 2009 to 2015 a single census tract in the historically low-income neighborhood of Bushwick, in Brooklyn, New York, saw an increase in mean income of nearly $15,000 (a change of 31 percent) and a jump in the percentage of adults with college degrees from 8 percent to 21 percent Such large increases in socioeconomic status (SES) in historically low-income, urban neighborhoods—or gentrification—have occurred in many cities across the US.[1] Many observers worry that gentrification will destroy neighborhood cultures, increase both rents and the cost of daily living, and price long-term residents out of their communities2–8—all of which could heighten stress and undermine children’s health.Yet gentrification may bring changes to low-income areas that we expect to enhance health, such as increased safety, healthier food, improved parks, and new businesses and economic opportunities.[9,10].
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