Effects of gentrification on health status after Hurricane Katrina

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Despite substantial debate about the impacts of gentrification on cities, neighborhoods, and their residents, there is limited evidence to demonstrate the implications of gentrification for health. We examine the impacts of gentrification on several health measures using a unique individual-level longitudinal data set. We employ data from the Resilience in Survivors of Hurricane Katrina (RISK) project, a study of low-income parents, predominantly non-Hispanic Black single mothers, who participated in a New Orleans-based study before and after Hurricane Katrina. After Katrina, all participants were displaced, at least temporarily, from New Orleans, and had little or no control over neighborhood placement immediately following the storm. This near-random displacement after Katrina created a natural experiment. We employ a quasi-experimental intent to treat design to assess the causal effects of gentrification on health in the RISK population. We do not find evidence of significant main effects of being displaced to a gentrified neighborhood on BMI, self-rated health, or psychological distress. The analysis employs a quasi-experimental design and has several additional unique features–homogeneous population, limited selection bias, and longitudinal data collection– that improve our ability to draw causal conclusions about the relationship between gentrification and health. However, the unique context of displacement by natural disaster may limit the generalizability of our findings to other circumstances or residents experiencing gentrification

Gentrification, Neighborhood Change, and Population Health: a Systematic Review

Abstract Despite a proliferation of research on neighborhood effects on health, how neighborhood economic development, in the form of gentrification, affects health and well-being in the USA is poorly understood, and no systematic assessment of the potential health impacts has been conducted. Further, we know little about whether health impacts differ for residents of neighborhoods undergoing gentrification versus urban development, or other forms of neighborhood socioeconomic ascent. We followed current guidelines for systematic reviews and present data on the study characteristics of the 22 empirical articles that met our inclusion criteria and were published on associations between gentrification, and similar but differently termed processes (e.g., urban regeneration, urban development, neighborhood upgrading), and health published between 2000 and 2018. Our results show that impacts on health vary by outcome assessed, exposure measurement, the larger context-specific determinants of neighborhood change, and analysis decisions including which reference and treatment groups to examine. Studies of the health impacts of gentrification, urban development, and urban regeneration describe similar processes, and synthesis and comparison of their results helps bridge differing theoretical approaches to this emerging research. Our article helps to inform the debate on the impacts of gentrification and urban development for health and suggests that these neighborhood change processes likely have both detrimental and beneficial effects on health. Given the influence of place on health and the trend of increasing gentrification and urban development in many American cities, we discuss how future research can approach understanding and researching the impacts of these processes for population health