4.6 Article

Historical redlining and food environments: A study of 102 urban areas in the United States

Journal

HEALTH & PLACE
Volume 75, Issue -, Pages -

Publisher

ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2022.102775

Keywords

Food environments; Racial disparities; Redlining; Residential segregation; Food environments; Racial disparities; Redlining; Residential segregation

Ask authors/readers for more resources

The study found that neighborhoods affected by historical redlining policies have unhealthier retail food environments, even in present-day economically and racially privileged census tracts. This highlights how structural discrimination and racial residential segregation have led to uneven food environments.
Objective: Unhealthy food environments are disproportionally concentrated in neighborhoods with clustering of racial/ethnic minorities and poverty. This disparity has been blamed, in part, on market self-regulation. This explanation risks overlooking past and current practices of racial segregation that have created and reinforced the obstacles blocking investments from food retailers in marginalized neighborhoods. We fill this gap by investigating how the long-term ramifications of redlining, discriminatory housing practices enacted by federal Home Owner Lending Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s, has evolved generations later to disproportionally exposing neighborhoods to unhealthy food environments.Methods: We overlaid historical redlining maps over 2010 food environment observations at the census tract level to identify areas with less healthy food environments and to assess the historical context of those areas. For 11,651 census tracts within 102 U.S. urban areas, we described the healthiness of food environments as measured by the modified retail food environment index (mRFEI). Using hurdle models with random effects, we further examined the association between redlining housing practice and food environments.Results: The results indicate that historically redlined neighborhoods show a higher likelihood for unhealthy retail food environments even for census tracts with present-day economic and racial privilege. Conclusion: The current evidence shows how structural discrimination manifested by unjust housing practices and racial residential segregation fueled an uneven food environment where minority neighborhoods disproportionally bore the brunt of restrictive food access. It highlights an urgent need to ameliorate patterns of housing inequality as a fix to unequal food environments.

Authors

I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.

Reviews

Primary Rating

4.6
Not enough ratings

Secondary Ratings

Novelty
-
Significance
-
Scientific rigor
-
Rate this paper

Recommended

No Data Available
No Data Available