Neighborhood
A neighborhood is where people live and interact with their community.
Neighborhoods impact every aspect of quality of life—health, education, employment, and overall well-being.
Healthy neighborhoods have good air quality, safe drinking water, low pollution, and low crime rates. These neighborhoods are built to meet residents’ needs for walkability and green spaces.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
How Neighborhood and Built Environment Impacts Olivia
Meet Olivia—grateful to have a home with her aunt after experiencing homelessness, but dreaming of a place with more nearby amenities. Her old car could break down at any moment, so Olivia hopes to find affordable housing with walkable shops and public transport.
Get to Know OliviaHow Neighborhood and Built Environment Impacts The Jackson Family
Meet the Jacksons—living in a safe, diverse neighborhood where they enjoy parks, community centers, and time together. Nichelle loves the nearby resources for her kids, Marcus is a foodie who appreciates easy access to the grocery, and Jayden enjoys walking with his grandma Evelyn through the neighborhood. Yet, they remain mindful of their surroundings.
Get to Know The Jackson FamilyHow Neighborhood and Built Environment Impacts The Garcia Family
Meet Elena—a widowed mom living in rural Indiana who faces long commutes, limited internet access, and rising fuel costs. Without nearby resources or safe places to walk, she struggles to balance work, errands, and family time. She dreams of a fresh start in a neighborhood with better access to child care, internet, and other amenities.
Get to Know The Garcia FamilyHow Neighborhood and Built Environment Impacts Chris
Meet Chris—a substitute teacher who relies on housing vouchers, rideshares, and public transit. Accessibility issues in his apartment and the lack of safe, walkable spaces nearby make daily life challenging. Despite using public transit and paratransit, Chris hopes for a future where transportation is less of a daily struggle.
Get to Know Chris
Terms to Know
Environmental health focuses on the relationship between people and their surroundings, ensuring everyone has a safe place to live, learn, work, and play.[1]
Environmental justice ensures fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in decisions affecting their health and environment. It aims to protect against systemic racism, climate change, and other hazards.[1]
Food deserts are areas that lack access to healthy, affordable foods. These areas have limited grocery stores or are inconveniently located. Food swamps are areas that only have stores that primarily sell unhealthy foods.[1]
[1] U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, National Institutes of Health
Neighborhood violence is public, interpersonal violence by non-relatives. This can include bullying, fights, shootings, homicides, robberies, and sexual assault. Those exposed to it often feel unsafe and fear harm.[1]
Key
Facts
- A person’s ZIP code can be a stronger predictor of health and life expectancy than genetics.
- In the past five years, 38% of housing discrimination complaints submitted in Indiana were based on disability, and 29% were based on race.
- More than 1,600 Hoosiers died prematurely from air pollution in 2019.
- In Indiana, 17% of urban residents and 26% of Black Hoosiers live in food deserts.
Neighborhood Historical Context
Housing Discrimination
Indiana law protects the right to rent or buy housing without consideration of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or disability. Yet, more than 1,300 housing discrimination complaints have been reported across Indiana in the past five years.[1] The most common reports were based on disability, followed by race.
People with lower incomes and those from ethnic and racial minorities are disproportionately living in unsafe neighborhoods with fewer places to exercise and limited access to healthy foods.[2] These disparities stem from structural racism and historically discriminatory housing practices like redlining and gentrification.
[1] FHCCI State of Fair Housing Report
[2] Neighborhood Environment and Disparities in Health Care Access Among Urban Medicare Beneficiaries With Diabetes: A Retrospective Cohort Study. Inquiry
Redlining is the systemic denial of financial services, such as banking and mortgages, based on race. It can also involve withholding essential services like grocery and health care facilities.[1]
Historical redlining is one of the primary reasons for the current landscape and composition of many neighborhoods in the U.S., which are segregated by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The pervasive effects of redlining can be linked to the increased health risks and worse health outcomes people of racial and ethnic minorities experience today.[2]
[2] Modern Day Consequences of Historic Redlining: Finding a Path Forward. Journal of general internal medicine
Steering is an illegal practice and form of housing discrimination where home buyers and renters are encouraged or discouraged by real estate professionals or landlords to live in certain neighborhoods or apartments based on their race, religion, or other protected factors.[1] Despite being illegal, people seeking housing can be unaware of the practice or unable to recognize when it is being done to them.
Gentrification is the economic transformation of a historically disinvested neighborhood. Long-term residents are often displaced due to rising costs, which prevent them from benefitting from new investments in housing, nutritious food access, or infrastructure.[1]
Today, outdated zoning codes and laws still affect housing markets and reinforce racial discrimination. For example, public housing—a form of rental assistance—is often located in racially segregated and under-resourced neighborhoods due to systemic discrimination.[2] The resulting stigma makes people perceive public housing development as undesirable.[3]
[1] Urban Displacement Project
Community Resources
The resulting neighborhood demographics and composition from housing discrimination continue to impact communities and their access to resources. The tax base and socioeconomic status of a neighborhood impact the availability and quality of community services provided.
[1] NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
Examples
- Less tax base revenue from low-income neighborhoods mean fewer resources for public safety and amenities.
- Children’s books are scarce in poor neighborhoods due to underfunded public libraries and book affordability.[1]
- Poorer neighborhoods often have underfunded schools, resulting in inequitable education and worse development outcomes for children.[2]
Neighborhood Safety
Neighborhoods that have fewer resources, higher rates of poverty, and are highly segregated are disproportionately affected by violence.[1] Individuals can be exposed to neighborhood violence in multiple ways, whether they experience, witness, or hear about the violence. This exposure can lead to injuries, chronic diseases, or premature death.[2]
Violence creates a cycle that leads the community to decay. High levels of neighborhood violence discourage community development and participation. It limits business growth and strains neighborhood services like education, health care, and justice, making it harder for the community to address the root causes of violence.[1]
Some experts consider police presence in neighborhoods a tool for community policing, serving as a deterrent to crime and an opportunity to build trust with residents through positive experiences with law enforcement.[1]
However, proactive police stops are often intentionally concentrated in disproportionately Black neighborhoods.[2] In neighborhoods where police use lethal force, residents are more likely to have issues like high blood pressure and poor mental health.[3] Even without physical intervention, just the surveillance and heightened interactions with police are linked to residents experiencing symptoms associated with mental illness, such as depression, anxiety, trauma, and stress.
[1] Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
[2] Neighborhood Proactive Policing and Racial Inequities in Preterm Birth in New Orleans, American Journal of Public Health
[3] Policing Is a Public Health Issue: The Important Role of Health Educators. Health education & behavior : the official publication of the Society for Public Health Education
Environmental Health
Ethnic and racial minorities are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate hazards, such as extreme heat, storms, and flooding.[1] They are disproportionately more likely to live in heavily polluted areas and die prematurely because of environmental causes. [2]
- Black Americans are 40% more likely to die from extreme heat.[3]
- Nearly 50% of Hispanic and Latino residents live in areas that have poor air quality.[4]
- Hispanic and Latino children are 40% more likely than other groups to die from asthma.[5]
- More than half of the residents who live near hazardous waste are people of color.[6]
These neighborhood health disparities are linked to the ongoing impact of historical discrimination in housing, health care, education, and employment.
[1] United State Environmental Protection Agency
[2] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
[3] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
[4] American Public Health Association
[5] U.S Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health
Food Access
People face serious health problems when they can’t access nutritious foods. It increases their stress and anxiety and makes it harder for them to do well in school or at work.
People who live in low-income neighborhoods are less likely to have affordable, accessible nutritious foods. In Indiana, 17% of urban residents and 26% of Black residents live in food deserts.[1]
Barriers
- High cost
- Lack of reliable transportation
- Proximity of grocery stores versus convenience stores
Key
Takeaways
- Safe, well-resourced neighborhoods are essential for improving health outcomes and quality of life.
- Historical and systemic discrimination have led to disparities in neighborhood resources and conditions, particularly affecting communities of color and low-income residents.
- Solving issues like environmental health, food access, and safety requires addressing systemic inequalities that perpetuate these problems.
Other
Surroundings
Topics
Built Environment
The built environment consists of the human-made structures or surroundings where people live and work. Its design affects safety, healthy living, and access to amenities like grocery stores and internet infrastructure.
Housing value: Individuals who live in neighborhoods where most residents are Black have historically devalued homes.[1] Homeowners in these neighborhoods would likely be unable to sell their homes at competitive market values, build equity, or accumulate generational wealth.
Food access: Poorer neighborhoods tend to lack full-service grocery stores or other healthy eating options. Adults and children who live in a food desert and experience food insecurity face higher risks of obesity, developing a chronic disease, and experiencing poor mental health.
[1] The Brookings Institution
Access and quality: Poorer neighborhoods often have underfunded schools, leading to inequitable education and worse outcomes for children. A child living in such a neighborhood may not be able to access the necessary preparation for continuing their education after high school.
Access: Black and Hispanic residents have lower incomes and higher rates of Medicaid coverage or lack insurance. Few office-based health care providers locate in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods due to concerns about Medicaid reimbursement or their patients’ ability to pay out-of-pocket costs.[1]
[1] Residential segregation and disparities in health care services utilization. Medical care research and review
Segregated neighborhoods: Historical housing discrimination continues to impact the racial and financial makeup of neighborhoods, as well as their built environment. Communities of color are more likely to live in polluted, unsafe areas. Neighborhoods with fewer resources and high poverty are more affected by violence.
Walkability: Residents who live in neighborhoods with high crime rates may fear and avoid walking to exercise or access community resources.
Zoning: Affordable housing is often located in racially segregated and under-resourced neighborhoods. The stigma of programs like public housing can make people view the development of these projects as undesirable and therefore try to restrict where public housing is
ACEs and trauma: A child who lives in a neighborhood with high rates of crime may develop Adverse Childhood Experiences from witnessing or experiencing violence.