What’s this about?
The Built Environment & Health (BEH) project is an interdisciplinary program of research at Columbia University. Led by epidemiologist Andrew Rundle, BEH uses spatial data to examine the implications of the built environment, including land use, public transit, and housing, for physical activity, diet, obesity, and other aspects of health. With a focus on New York City, BEH research will inform public policy to promote health in the city and metropolitan area. BEH is affiliated with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program at Columbia.
Race, Poverty, and Spatial Accessibility in New York City
New Grant
When city residents lack neighborhood access to grocery stores, banks, and other basic goods and services, they must pay more, travel farther, or do without - and thus face costs in terms of disposable income, time, and other domains such as health. Social scientists and urban planners have long assumed poor neighborhoods are “under-retailed,” but the evidence on this point is mixed. In fact, some studies find that residents of poor neighborhoods have more access, not less. This may be a legacy of historical patterns of urban development, in which low-income city residents lived mostly in older, denser, mixed-use neighborhoods.
With new funding from the National Science Foundation, the BEH group will use data for New York City to describe how neighborhood access to everyday retail and services is patterned by race and poverty, and to examine change in these patterns over the past decade. The research will consider how gentrification, immigration, and public policy have affected spatial accessibility.
Participants in the new project include Kathryn Neckerman (Project Investigator), Lance Freeman, Marnie Purciel, James Quinn, and Samuel Field.
