jay gw
7th November 2006, 08:39 AM
By living in a well-to-do neighborhood, poor people increase their risk of death, according to a new study by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers to be published in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
"We tend to assume that people living in a high socioeconomic status neighborhood are well off," said Marilyn Winkleby, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and lead author of the study.
Instead researchers found that death rates were highest among people of low socioeconomic status who also lived in affluent neighborhoods. That finding surprised the researchers, but "every way we looked at the data, we found the same result," said co-author Catherine Cubbin, PhD, a former research associate at Stanford who is now a researcher at UC-San Francisco and University of Texas-Austin. The researchers said the findings also indicate that this particular group of people might be medically underserved and need more targeted services and attention by health policy makers.
Previous studies had shown that neighborhood plays an important role in an individual's health. Most studies have found that people fare better in high-income neighborhoods. The Stanford study is unique because it combined individual economic status with neighborhood status to gain a more refined look at the issue.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=55548
Issues this addresses:
* Gentrification is turning older, poorer neighborhoods into richer ones by purchasing the properties and redeveloping. The big problem with this is that once the development is finished, all the real estate around the neighborhood goes up in value. So do all the store prices.
* One of the proposed solutions to the ghettoes and slums that exist in the US and everywhere is to engineer mixed income neighborhoods, so the poor aren't "concentrated". This is a bad idea, and makes more trouble for the poor than they already had.
* Outside of the market size and competition factors, land developers rarely consider the consequences of development on surrounding neighborhoods.
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"We tend to assume that people living in a high socioeconomic status neighborhood are well off," said Marilyn Winkleby, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and lead author of the study.
Instead researchers found that death rates were highest among people of low socioeconomic status who also lived in affluent neighborhoods. That finding surprised the researchers, but "every way we looked at the data, we found the same result," said co-author Catherine Cubbin, PhD, a former research associate at Stanford who is now a researcher at UC-San Francisco and University of Texas-Austin. The researchers said the findings also indicate that this particular group of people might be medically underserved and need more targeted services and attention by health policy makers.
Previous studies had shown that neighborhood plays an important role in an individual's health. Most studies have found that people fare better in high-income neighborhoods. The Stanford study is unique because it combined individual economic status with neighborhood status to gain a more refined look at the issue.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=55548
Issues this addresses:
* Gentrification is turning older, poorer neighborhoods into richer ones by purchasing the properties and redeveloping. The big problem with this is that once the development is finished, all the real estate around the neighborhood goes up in value. So do all the store prices.
* One of the proposed solutions to the ghettoes and slums that exist in the US and everywhere is to engineer mixed income neighborhoods, so the poor aren't "concentrated". This is a bad idea, and makes more trouble for the poor than they already had.
* Outside of the market size and competition factors, land developers rarely consider the consequences of development on surrounding neighborhoods.
-