Gentrification, Health, and Well-Being across the Life-Course in Urban and Rural Context in the United States

How is gentrification associated with health and well-being across the life-course in urban and rural neighborhoods in the United States? Long considered an urban phenomenon, gentrification increasingly occurs in rural areas. This process of neighborhood change alters natural, built, and social environments, and can impact social relationships and cohesion as well as health behaviors and health and well-being more broadly. Effects may vary across urban and rural communities for myriad reasons including access to health-promoting material and social resources. More broadly, the relationship between gentrification and physical and mental health is not well developed and extant results are equivocal. Studies that examine gentrification’s connection to subjective well-being are rarer. Additional research is needed that examines the relationship across different health outcomes and different individual demographics. This work examines the relationship between gentrification and health with a focus on impacts across the life-course. Theory suggests that a life-course approach matters for understanding urban-rural differences because of varying vulnerability across age with regard to both health and community change.

This research uses 1) restricted data from the 2018 United States General Social Survey and 2-3) the 2006-2010 and 2015-2019 American Community Survey 5-year estimates. Census tract identifiers locate respondents in urban and rural counties. Counties are classed as not gentrifiable (too affluent), gentrifying, and not gentrifying. This work examines subjective well-being as well as physical and mental health outcomes. Predictors are gentrification status of the neighborhood, urban-rural status, and age. Controls span theoretically relevant demographic and social variables, including social relationships, which may be impacted by gentrification, particularly among older adults. Analysis will include ordinal, logistic, and/or multinomial logistic regression as appropriate to each outcome.

Discussion will focus on urban and rural gentrification and health and well-being generally and in neighborhood context with attention to differences across the life-course.