The Link between Gentrification, Children’s Egocentric Food Environment, and Obesity

Abstract

While advocates argue that gentrification changes the neighborhood food environment critical to children’s diet and health, we have little evidence documenting such changes or the consequences for their health outcomes. Using rich longitudinal, individual-level data on nearly 115,000 New York City children, including egocentric measures of their food environment and BMI, we examine the link between neighborhood demographic change (“gentrification”), children’s access to restaurants and supermarkets, and their weight outcomes. We find that children in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods see increased access to fast food and wait-service restaurants and reduced access to corner stores and supermarkets compared to those in non-gentrifying areas. Boys and girls have higher BMI following gentrification, but only boys are more likely to be obese or overweight. We find public housing moderates the relationship between gentrification and weight, as children living in public housing are less likely to be obese or overweight.

Keywords:

• Gentrification
• food environment
• childhood obesity
• public housing

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the New York City Department of Education, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Spencer Shanholtz, Jeremy Sze, Meryle Weinstein, Giuseppe Germinario, Courtney Abrams, and Eric Zhou for providing data and support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Residential latitude and longitude coordinates.

2 Most studies define neighborhoods as “low-income” with the potential to gentrify as census tracts with low mean or median household income (Dragan et al. 2020; Ellen & O’Regan, 2011; Freeman, 2005; McKinnish et al., 2010). Neighborhoods are defined as gentrified if they have increases in median household income or college-educated population (Ding et al., 2016; Dragan et al., 2019, 2020; Ellen & O’Regan, 2011; Freeman, 2005; McKinnish et al., 2010; Owens, 2012).

3 An exception, Brummet and Reed (2019) find a modest increase in displacement. More recent studies have turned to examine whether residentially stable, low-income residents are harmed—or benefit—from gentrification as their surroundings change (Dastrup & Ellen, 2016; Dragan et al., 2019).

4 Corner stores are typically smaller stores than grocery stores or supermarkets. (Han et al., 2020). In this paper, supermarkets are defined as food stores larger than 3,000 square feet and corner stores as food stores with less than 3,000 square feet following previous work.

5 Urban households may experience greater challenges reaching stores if they do not own cars and live far from transit. While 95% of highest income households use a personal car to shop for food, only 65%–68% of lowest income households do (Ver Ploeg et al., 2015).

6 Previous descriptive works find that there are substantial race/ethnic disparities in BMI in the United States. Hispanic and Black children are disproportionately obese and have greater annual increases when compared to their White or Asian counterparts of the same socioeconomic status (Krueger et al., 2014; Ogden et al., 2014).

7 Sub-borough areas are geographical units similar to community districts.

8 Renters in subsidized housing spent less on health care than unassisted low-income renters did, suggesting that housing assistance leads to health benefits (Pfeiffer, 2018).

9 While owners may not be subject to rising rents due to gentrification, they are likely to have higher income than overall renters, including public housing tenants, and thus experience gentrification differently.

10 Approximately 12 percent of housing units in gentrifying areas of the city are public housing units and an additional one-quarter are privately-owned subsidized housing (Ellen, 2018). Neighborhoods in NYC with public housing that experienced gentrification between 1990 and 2000 remain racially and economically integrated in 2016. This contrasts sharply with those neighborhoods without public housing that gentrified in the 1990s and are now predominantly white and high-income (Ellen & Torrats-Espinosa, 2019). Simply put, neighborhoods without public housing that gentrified early are less diverse than gentrified neighborhoods with public housing.

11 We consider other buffers also widely used in the food environment literature, including 0.1 miles and 0.5 miles (160 and 800 meters), relevant for children and adolescents for robustness checks (Colabianchi et al., 2007; Currie et al., 2010; Duncan et al., 2014; Han et al., 2020; Timperio et al., 2004).

12 Note that to estimate this model with both a time trend and year fixed effects we omit two of the year fixed effects. 2010 and 2011 are the omitted years.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Award Numbers R01HD070739, R01DK097347, and R01DK108682. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Notes on contributors

Christopher Rick

Christopher Rick is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Environmental Health at Boston University.

Jeehee Han

Jeehee Han is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Service and Administration at Texas A&M University.

Brian Elbel

Brian Elbel is a Professor of Population Health and Health Policy at New York University.

Amy Ellen Schwartz

Amy Ellen Schwartz is the Dean of the University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy and Administration.