Improving neighborhood environments for children through community development and other interventions may help improve children's health and reduce inequities in health. A first step is to develop a population-level surveillance system of children's neighborhood environments. This article presents the newly developed Child Opportunity Index for the 100 largest US metropolitan areas. The index examines the extent of racial/ethnic inequity in the distribution of children across levels of neighborhood opportunity. We found that high concentrations of black and Hispanic children in the lowest-opportunity neighborhoods are pervasive across US metropolitan areas. We also found that 40 percent of black and 32 percent of Hispanic children live in very low-opportunity neighborhoods within their metropolitan area, compared to 9 percent of white children. This inequity is greater in some metropolitan areas, especially those with high levels of residential segregation. The Child Opportunity Index provides perspectives on child opportunity at the neighborhood and regional levels and can inform place-based community development interventions and non-place-based interventions that address inequities across a region. The index can also be used to meet new community data reporting requirements under the Affordable Care Act.

Neighborhoods influence children's health, so it is important to have measures of children's neighborhood environments. Using the Child Opportunity Index 2.0, a composite metric of the neighborhood conditions that children experience today across the US, we present new evidence of vast geographic and racial/ethnic inequities in neighborhood conditions in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the US. Child Opportunity Scores range from 20 in Fresno, California, to 83 in Madison, Wisconsin. However, more than 90 percent of the variation in neighborhood opportunity happens within metropolitan areas. In 35 percent of these areas the Child Opportunity Gap (the difference between Child Opportunity Scores in very low-and very high-opportunity neighborhoods) is higher than across the entire national neighborhood distribution. Nationally, the Child Opportunity Score for White children (73) is much higher than for Black (24) and Hispanic (33) children. To improve children's health and well-being, the health sector must move beyond a focus on treating disease or modifying individual behavior to a broader focus on neighborhood conditions. This will require the health sector to both implement place-based interventions and collaborate with other sectors such as housing to execute mobility-based interventions.A long tradition of social science research has examined how neighborhoods influence socioeconomic and health outcomes during the life course. 1 In the past decade increasingly strong evidence indicates that there has been a causal relationship between children's neighborhood environment and educational attainment, employment, income, and health outcomes. 2,3 In addition, a large body of research has documented high levels of racial residential segregation in US metropolitan areas and high levels of geographic concentration of both poverty and affluence. [4][5][6][7] Starting in the 1990s, groundbreaking work by George Galster and colleagues has connected these two research traditions, ar-guing that an unequal "geography of opportunity" in metropolitan areas-that is, differential access to neighborhood-based opportunityleads to inequities in outcomes by race and ethnicity. 8,9 Building on the geography of opportunity scholarship, [10][11][12][13] in 2014 we published the Child Opportunity Index to provide the child health field with a measure of children's neighborhood opportunity, which we defined as the context of neighborhood-based conditions and resources (for example, early childhood education, schools, availability of healthy food) that influence children's healthy development and long-term outcomes such as health and socioeconomic mobility. 14 Our goal was to facilitate analysis of the

: media-1vid110.1542/5799877332001PEDS-VA_2018-0261 : Extreme poverty and the associated effects, such as blight, housing insecurity, and crime, have debilitating consequences on child development. Health care institutions are largely ineffective in changing those outcomes 1 child at a time. We present a case study of a hospital treating the adjacent neighborhood as a "patient" to address social determinants. The community represents a largely impoverished and housing-unstable neighborhood that underwent an assessment by community partners and treatment with a multifaceted housing intervention. Marked improvement in vacancy rates occurred, although outcome assessments for children are still being gathered. Several case learnings are presented, but the involvement and investment of pediatric health care clinicians and institutions increased the speed and size of neighborhood development after 80 years of redlining and institutional racism.

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In the 1930’s, the Home Owner Loan Corporation (HOLC) drafted maps to quantify variation in real estate credit risk across US city neighborhoods. The letter grades and associated risk ratings assigned to neighborhoods discriminated against those with black, lower class, or immigrant residents and benefitted affluent white neighborhoods. An emerging literature has begun linking current individual and community health effects to government redlining, but each study faces the same measurement problem: HOLC graded area boundaries and neighborhood boundaries in present-day health datasets do not match. Previous studies have taken different approaches to classify present day neighborhoods (census tracts) in terms of historical HOLC grades. This study reviews these approaches, examines empirically how different classifications fare in terms of predictive validity, and derives a predictively optimal present-day neighborhood redlining classification for neighborhood and health research.