Currently under review at Housing Policy Debate after being invited for special issue on gentrification, housing, and health. Working paper available upon request.

Neighborhood disadvantage erodes residents’ mental and physical health. But whether rapid reductions in disadvantage spurred by gentrification attenuate or exacerbate these effects remains unknown due to mixed theoretical expectations and empirical results. To help clarify these dynamics, I propose a novel theoretical account that casts gentrification as a carcinogen. As neighborhoods receive inflows of richer and whiter residents, influxes of private vehicles may come with them. In turn, residents become exposed to higher vehicular emissions, and their cancer risk climbs. To assess these possibilities, I link Urban Displacement Project data identifying Los Angeles County neighborhoods that gentrified during the 2000s to tract-level data on vehicle ownership and residents’ cancer risk– the latter from EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment. First-difference models suggest gentrifying tracts’ cancer risk increased by ~0.5 standard deviations more than disadvantaged neighborhoods that did not gentrify. Nearly half of this effect may be explained by increasing vehicle density.

Keywords: gentrification, segregation, health disparities, carcinogens, transportation

w/ Geoffrey T. Wodtke; working paper available upon request.

Race- and class-based gaps in academic achievement remain stubbornly large among American children, despite decades of K-12 educational reforms aimed at mitigating them. Recent studies suggest that these reforms may be targeted too late in the course of child development, as large disparities in academic skills are already firmly entrenched before elementary school even begins. Building upon research linking residential segregation, environmental health hazards, and early childhood development, we investigate whether race- and class-based disparities in school readiness are due to differences in exposure to neurotoxic lead, which often contaminates poor, racially isolated neighborhoods. To this end, we link longitudinal survey data from 1,266 children born in Chicago to ecological measures of lead contamination from the city’s department of public health. Using these data, we integrate methods of causal inference with supervised machine learning to estimate the extent to which residential lead contamination is responsible for class and racial gaps in vocabulary skills and attention problems at the time of school entry. Our results show that disparities in lead exposure are closely linked with sociodemographic gaps in school readiness, and they suggest that environmental interventions during infancy, in particular, may be important for remediating them.