A study conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s found that living in poor neighborhoods can actually hurt your health.
Itir Sonuparlak reads the report:
"Initially an effort to research whether moving impoverished families to more affluent neighborhoods could improve employment and schooling, the study found an interesting relationship between women's physical condition and their surrounding environment.
Ten years after the vouchers were distributed, women in the study gave blood samples and provided their weight. "About 16 percent of the women who moved had diabetes, compared with about 20 percent of women who stayed in public housing," the Associated Press reports. "And about 14 percent of those who left the projects were extremely obese, compared with nearly 18 percent of the other women," concluding that a person's risk of diabetes or extreme obesity dropped by about 20 percent when in a higher-income neighborhood.
The experiment targeted women living in public housing units in neighborhoods where 40 percent or more of the residents were considered poor. "
Thanks to Jeffrey Riecke
FULL STORY: Does Living in a Poor Neighborhood Harm Your Health?
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City of Albany
UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research