Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine
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Gun-related violence exposure is a significant public health problem for urban youth. Few studies have implemented methods to estimate the spatial influence of activity spaces on gun violence exposure constrained by the physical configuration of walkable street networks. The present research uses computational network and local indicators of spatial autocorrelation methods to explore gun violence exposure along the walkable streets near schools in Compton, California. ⋯ Almost all schools had at least one shooting within a 5-min walk (i.e., about 400 m); 37.8% of schools had an average shooting distance of less than 400 m; about 250 incidents occurred within 5 min of schools; and about 30 schools had a shooting within a 5-min walking distance. Determining the spatial extent of violence exposure in proximity to key activity spaces for youth, such as schools, has substantial implications for the health and wellbeing of youth living in violence-prone areas. The public health and legal implications of this study are discussed in context.
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The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted several challenges that cities face that can affect the health of urban populations. These challenges are an opportunity for sharpening of our urban health scholarship, to rethink the questions the field should be asking, and how the answers to those questions should guide practice. The central role of inequities in cities, the politics of urban health, communication for health, the deployment of health care, and the future of urban living are all areas that merit attention by scholars and practitioners in the field in coming decades.
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Gun violence imparts a tremendous human and financial toll on local communities. Researchers have documented extensive mental and physical health consequences of generalized violence exposure but few studies have analyzed the particular impacts of gun violence on community well-being using nationally comprehensive data. We leverage a unique database of almost 16,000 neighborhoods in 100 US cities (2014-2019) to examine how year-over-year rates of gun violence correspond to overall neighborhood well-being and three aspects of community health: (1) health behaviors, (2) physical and mental health status, and (3) health prevention efforts. ⋯ The results demonstrate that gun violence is associated with poorer community health in subsequent years, particularly health behaviors and mental/physical health status. Furthermore, we find substantial reciprocal effects for both gun violence and community health in their relationship to neighborhood concentrated disadvantage. These findings highlight the consequential role of gun violence in perpetuating cycles of harm in local communities.
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The Great Migration was a movement of roughly eight million Black Southerners relocating to the North and West from 1910 to 1980. Despite being one of the most significant mass internal migrations during the twentieth century, little is known about the health outcomes resulting from migration and whether migrators' destination choices were potential mechanisms. This study measured the association between destination county disadvantage and odds of low birth weight during the last decade of the Great Migration. ⋯ After adjusting for individual risk and protective factors for infant health, there was no relationship between county opportunity measures and low birth weight among migrators. Although high socioeconomic opportunity is typically associated with protection of low birth weight, we did not see these outcomes in this study. These results may support that persistent racial discrimination encountered in the North inhibited infant health even as migrators experienced higher economic opportunity relative to the South.