Evaluating gentrification’s relation to neighborhood and city health

Abstract

Gentrification has been argued to contribute to urban inequalities, including those of health disparities. Extant research has yet to conduct a systematic study of gentrification’s relation with neighborhood health outcomes nationally. This gap is addressed in the current study through the utilization of census-tract data from the Center for Disease Control’s 500 Cities project, the 2000 Census and the 2010–2014 American Community Survey to examine how gentrification relates to local self-rated physical health in select cities across the United States. We examine gentrification’s association with neighborhood rates of poor self-rated physical health. We contextualize this relationship by evaluating gentrification’s relation with city-level self-rated health inequalities. We find gentrification was significantly and positively related with self-rated physical neighborhood health outcomes. However, the presence and magnitude of gentrification within a city was not associated with health outcomes for cities overall. Based on these findings, we argue that gentrification’s health benefits for cities are limited at best, though gentrification does not appear to be associated with deepening city-level health inequalities, either.