Although socioeconomic disparities in cognitive ability emerge early in the life course, most research on the consequences of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood has focused on school-age children or adolescents. In this study, we outline and test a theoretical model of neighborhood effects on cognitive development during early childhood that highlights the mediating role of exposure to neurotoxic lead. To evaluate this model, we follow 1,266 children in Chicago from birth through school entry and track both their areal risk of lead exposure and their neighborhoods' socioeconomic composition over time. With these data, we estimate the joint effects of neighborhood poverty and environmental lead contamination on receptive vocabulary ability. We find that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods reduces vocabulary skills during early childhood and that this effect operates through a causal mechanism involving lead contamination.

Canada is undergoing a housing affordability crisis. Relatively little attention has been paid to ethno-racial variations in access to affordable housing in Canada. Using data from the 2016 Canadian Census, we assessed whether access to affordable housing varied by ethno-race and identified why these differences emerged. Our study showed that MENAs have the greatest difficulty and Whites have the greatest ease accessing affordable housing units. The high unaffordable housing rates of MENAs are largely attributable to their high unemployment rates. East and South Asians also have limited access to affordable housing in part because they reside in large urban areas with expensive housing prices. Foreign-born were generally more likely than Canadian-born co-ethnics to have limited access to affordable housing. Blacks and Southeast Asians deviated from this general pattern. As many governments take steps to address the housing affordability crisis, they should make efforts to curtail the influence of structural barriers that preclude ethno-racial minorities from getting access to affordable housing units. A particularly relevant housing policy for Canada may be to increase the supply of affordable housing in large urban cores where high shares of ethno-racial minorities are located.

A growing share of Canadian households are living in unaffordable housing (i.e., spending 30% or more of their pre-tax income on housing costs). During this time, the prevalence of multigenerational living has also increased. Ethnic minority families are more likely than White families to live in multigenerational households. These trends raise the questions: (a) is multigenerational living a strategy for families to navigate the housing affordability crisis? (b) do ethnic minority children benefit more from multigenerational living than their White peers?Using confidential data from the 2016 Canadian Census, we examine how multigenerational living shapes the housing experiences of children under the age of 16. Multigenerational living is associated with consistent reductions in children's odds of living in unaffordable housing. Yet, for those in single-parent families, this protective association is largest among White children.For those in dual-parent families, this protective association is largest among Black children.Socioeconomic disadvantage and a greater propensity for three-generation families to reside in metropolitan areas with expensive housing appear to suppress the benefits emerging from multigenerational living.

No abstract

Vaccine equity holds the key to ending the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Yet most prior work on vaccine equity has compared vaccine uptake across neighborhoods with varying sociodemographic composition or assessed whether vaccine disparity across neighborhoods has diminished over time. Researchers seldom examine the extent to which vaccination helps reduce inequalities in the prevalence of COVID-19 across neighborhoods. Using administrative data from the City of Toronto, the authors compare the vaccine trajectories of neighborhoods with low, moderate, and high COVID-19 rates. The authors also examine whether disparities in COVID-19 rates have narrowed or widened as vaccinations have become more available. By mid-June 2021, differences in vaccination rates by neighborhoods’ COVID-19 levels were small, but disparities in COVID-19 rates across neighborhoods persisted. Equality in vaccination rates is not a silver bullet to reducing inequalities in COVID-19 infections across neighborhoods with varying sociodemographic characteristics and likely variations in exposure to the COVID-19 virus.