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Primary Submission Category: Methodological approaches to studying public health
Creating a Nationwide Atlas on Urban Population and Capital Flight: A Tool for Extending Population Health Research ‘Beyond Redlining’
Authors: Richard Sadler, Alan Harris, Samantha Gailey, Danielle Beatty Moody, Don Lafreniere,
Presenting Author: Richard Sadler*
Legacy urban development processes and decisions have had hugely detrimental impacts on the quality of our cities and the health of their residents. While studying redlining’s impacts has received attention as a way to build an evidence base to remediate past wrongs—including building public trust in science by enumerating impacts on population health—additional aspects must be studied to drive more meaningful change. Here we discuss the added value of considering patterns of white flight (often from real estate blockbusting) from American cities during the later 20th century (in particular, from the 1968 Fair Housing Act through the 1980s). In our initial work on this topic, we have consistently found impacts on population health and smaller survey-based health outcomes stronger than those found for redlining. This suggests a need to reorient work on the broader topic of structural racism in the built environment; doing so may further help confront the rise in scientific skepticism around this topic by more accurately defining the processes that drive urban decline and how they negatively impact on key populations. Likewise, it could promote local understanding of additional urban development processes ‘beyond redlining’ and the need for more equitable approaches. We have built a nationwide blockbusting atlas (work that includes engagement with key partners, data processing, design work, and further outreach efforts), as a means of empowering researchers to push the boundaries of population health science. The atlas allows users to visualize every tract where significant white flight occurred from the 1950s to the 2010s. Our intention is to provide a resource for blockbusting similar to the one created for redlining and those being created for restrictive covenants. In so doing, we hope that population health scientists can more easily include this phenomenon in their work and contribute further important findings to this growing body of research.