Intersections of Place, Race and Health: Exploring Gentrification's Racialized Health Implications and the Case for Comprehensive Reparative Strategies
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Public Health
First Advisor
Keene, Danya
Abstract
As a multi-staged and racialized process of urban change that often occurs in historically disinvested neighborhoods, gentrification is a significant determinant of health. Gentrification may increase the accessibility and availability of health promoting resources such as supermarkets, public infrastructure, and parks and other recreational facilities for some, while rupturing social networks, increasing the cost of housing and other goods, and initiating experiences of displacement for others. Given the inherently racialized nature of urban change and ongoing legacy of racial capitalism in the US, Black communities are increasingly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of gentrification, including multiple forms of displacement (e.g. cultural, political, and residential), on health. Despite these implications for the health of Black people, there is limited research examining how Black residents experience the effects of gentrification on their health and wellbeing that considers diverse geographic contexts or that employs a critical race lens. This research is necessary as it can help us better understand the complex dynamics of gentrification processes and work towards mitigating the risks associated with urban change for Black communities. As gentrification scholarship expands, researchers have investigated its impact on various neighborhood-level factors, including crime. However, the existing literature mostly focuses on crimes like robbery, burglary, homicide, and assault, thus overlooking violent crimes that can occur in interpersonal relationships. It is crucial that gentrification research recognizes the potential influence of socioeconomic changes—which are often triggered by gentrification processes—on violence, particularly in relationships. Furthermore, while neighborhood-level solutions have been implemented to mitigate unequal development, these solutions do not fully address the structural factors driving place-based health inequities caused by gentrification and other urban change processes. Racial justice interventions like reparations have surfaced in recent years as a potential solution for the harms of racism and have been acknowledged as a tool to reduce the racial health gap. Yet there has been little to no research examining the role of reparations in closing the racial health gap. Given these notable gaps in the current literature, this dissertation employs a mixed methods approach to: 1) broaden our collective understanding of how gentrification is conceptualized in health literature, 2) explore the ways that Black residents experience gentrification and its impacts on their health and well-being, 3) investigate the influence of gentrification on interpersonal violence, specifically IPV, and 4) contribute to the knowledge base regarding the potential effectiveness of racial justice interventions in mitigating racial health inequities. In Chapter 1, I use concept mapping, a participatory mixed methods technique, to identify pathways between gentrification and health for Black residents in New Haven, Connecticut, and explain how those pathways are informed by an ongoing legacy of racial capitalism. Concept mapping integrates both qualitative and quantitative methods to represent participant ideas or concepts via interrelated, two-dimensional maps. For this study, 53 Black residents aged 18 or older and living in New Haven, Connecticut generated, sorted, and rated statements concerning their experiences with gentrification across the city. Nine themes or clusters emerged linking gentrification to health and well-being for participants: 1) loss of homeplace, 2) impacts of profit-based rental and housing systems that want to remove Black people from neighborhoods, 3) anticipatory and actual experiences of housing insecurity, 4) dispossession of Black spaces and the purposeful exclusion of “the have nots,” 5) direct experiences of stress, trauma and emotional distress, 6) scarcity of resources due to neglect from city leadership and government, 7) structural violence as well as cultural, physical and environmental harms, 8) unequal opportunities for Black and low-income residents and communities and 9) superficial positives of gentrification that harm Black communities. Ultimately, this work underscores the potential for gentrification to exacerbate health disparities within Black communities, which have historically endured the burden of racial capitalism. In Chapter 2, I use Bayesian spatial analysis to examine spatial variations, at the census tract level, in the relationship between different types of gentrification (i.e., complete gentrification, continued gentrification, nongentrifying, nongentrifiable) and rates of 911 calls for IPV in Baltimore, Maryland between 1980 and 2011. Data from the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) and the US Census were integrated for analysis. Results indicated that nongentrifiable tracts reported an increase in 911 calls for IPV compared to gentrifying tracts between 2000 and 2011 and that nongentrifying tracts as well as tracts with continued gentrification reported a decrease in 911 calls for IPV compared to gentrifying tracts between 1980 and 2011. These findings demonstrate that gentrification is a potential predictor for interpersonal violence, suggesting the need for further research to explore contextual factors associated with specific gentrification typologies that can explain these effects. Lastly, Chapter 3 examines reparations as a potential policy to address the impacts of racism. Here, I model the effects of three separate reparations payments models on Black health using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979. This exploratory analysis uncovers that as reparations payments increase for Black respondents, so does their probability of reporting excellent/very good health. These results reveal that reparations payments have the potential to counteract the effects of economic injustice caused by racism. Yet, we argue that a program of reparations should go beyond offering financial compensation to right the harms of racism and oppression.
Recommended Citation
Whittaker, Shannon, "Intersections of Place, Race and Health: Exploring Gentrification's Racialized Health Implications and the Case for Comprehensive Reparative Strategies" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1352.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1352
