Neighborhood effects on health research has grown over the past 20 years. While the substantive findings of this literature have been published in systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and commentaries, operational details of the research have been understudied. We identified 7,140 multi-level neighborhoods and health papers published on US populations between 1995–2014, and present data on the study characteristics of the 259 papers that met our inclusion criteria. Our results reveal rapid growth in neighborhoods and health research in the mid-2000s, illustrate the dominance of observational cross-sectional study designs, and show a heavy reliance on single-level, census-based neighborhood definitions. Socioeconomic indicators were the most commonly analyzed neighborhood variables and body mass was the most commonly studied health outcome. Well-known challenges associated with neighborhood effects research were infrequently acknowledged. We discuss how these results move the agenda forward for neighborhoods and health research.

Despite a proliferation of research on neighborhood effects on health, how neighborhood economic development, in the form of gentrification, affects health and well-being in the U.S. is poorly understood, and no systematic assessment of the potential health impacts has been conducted. Further, we know little about whether health impacts differ for residents of neighborhoods undergoing gentrification versus urban development, or other forms of neighborhood socioeconomic ascent. We followed current guidelines for systematic reviews and present data on the study characteristics of the twenty-two empirical articles that met our inclusion criteria and were published on associations between gentrification, and similar but differently termed processes (e.g., urban regeneration, urban development, neighborhood upgrading), and health published between 2000 and 2018. Our results show that impacts on health vary by outcome assessed, exposure measurement, the larger context specific determinants of neighborhood change, and analysis decisions including which reference and treatment groups to examine. Studies of the health impacts of gentrification, urban development, and urban regeneration describe similar processes, and synthesis and comparison of their results helps bridge differing theoretical approaches to this emerging research. Our article helps to inform the debate on the impacts of gentrification and urban development for health and suggests that these neighborhood change processes likely have both detrimental and beneficial effects on health. Given the influence of place on health and the trend of increasing gentrification and urban development in many American cities, we discuss how future research can approach understanding and researching the impacts of these processes for population health.

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The health implications of urban development, particularly in rapidly changing, low-income urban neighborhoods, are poorly understood. We describe the Healthy Neighborhoods Study (HNS), a Participatory Action Research study examining the relationship between neighborhood change and population health in nine Massachusetts neighborhoods. Baseline data from the HNS survey show that social factors, specifically income insecurity, food insecurity, social support, experiencing discrimination, expecting to move, connectedness to the neighborhood, and local housing construction that participants believed would improve their lives, identified by a network of 45 Resident Researchers exhibited robust associations with self-rated and mental health. Resident-derived insights into relationships between neighborhoods and health may provide a powerful mechanism for residents to drive change in their communities.

There are 16.9 million Americans living in poverty in the suburbs-more than in cities or rural communities. Despite recent increases in suburban poverty, the perception of the suburbs as areas of uniform affluence remains, and there has been little research into health care barriers experienced by people living in these areas. The objectives of this study were to compare patterns of insurance coverage and health care access in suburban, urban, and rural areas using national survey data from 2005 to 2015 and to compare outcomes by geography before and after the Affordable Care Act took effect. We found that nearly 40 percent of the uninsured population lived in suburban areas. Though unadjusted rates of health care access were better in suburban areas, compared to urban and rural communities, this advantage was greatly reduced after income and other demographics are accounted for. Overall, a substantial portion of the US population residing in the suburbs lacked health insurance and experienced difficulties accessing care. Increased policy attention is needed to address these challenges for vulnerable populations living in the suburbs.3

Despite substantial debate about the impacts of gentrification on cities, neighborhoods, and their residents, there is limited evidence to demonstrate the implications of gentrification for health. We examine the impacts of gentrification on several health measures using a unique individual-level longitudinal data set. We employ data from the Resilience in Survivors of Hurricane Katrina (RISK) project, a study of low-income parents, predominantly non-Hispanic Black single mothers, who participated in a New Orleans-based study before and after Hurricane Katrina. After Katrina, all participants were displaced, at least temporarily, from New Orleans, and had little or no control over neighborhood placement immediately following the storm. This near-random displacement after Katrina created a natural experiment. We employ a quasi-experimental intent to treat design to assess the causal effects of gentrification on health in the RISK population. We do not find evidence of significant main effects of being displaced to a gentrified neighborhood on BMI, selfrated health, or psychological distress. The analysis employs a quasi-experimental design and has several additional unique features--homogeneous population, limited selection bias, and longitudinal data collection--that improve our ability to draw causal conclusions about the relationship between gentrification and health. However, the unique context of displacement by

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Differences in vaccination coverage can perpetuate COVID-19 disparities. We explored the association between neighborhood-level social vulnerability and COVID-19 vaccination coverage in 16 large US cities from the beginning of the vaccination campaign in December 2020 through September 2021. We calculated the proportion of fully vaccinated adults in 866 zip code tabulation areas (ZCTA) of 16 large US cities: Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose (CA); Chicago (IL); Indianapolis (IN); Minneapolis (MN); New York City (NY); Philadelphia (PA); and Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio (TX). We computed absolute and relative total and Social Vulnerability Index(SVI)-related inequities by city. COVID-19 vaccination coverage was 0.75 times (95% CI 0.69-0.81) or 16% (95% CI 12.1-20.2%) percentage points lower in neighborhoods with the highest social vulnerability as compared to those with the lowest. These inequities were heterogeneous, with cities in the West region generally displaying narrower inequities in both the absolute and relative scales. The SVI domains of socioeconomic status and household composition & disability showed the strongest associations with vaccination coverage. Inequities in COVID-19 vaccinations hamper efforts to achieve health equity, as they mirror and could lead to even wider inequities in other COVID-19 outcomes.