Gentrification and the Health of Low-Income Children in New York City

Although the pace of gentrification has accelerated in cities across the US, little is known about the health consequences of growing up in gentrifying neighborhoods. We used New York State Medicaid claims data to track a cohort of low-income children born in the period 2006-08 for the nine years between January 2009 and December 2017. We compared the 2017 health outcomes of children who started out in low-income neighborhoods that gentrified in the period 2009-15 with those of children who started out in other low-income neighborhoods, controlling for individual child demographic characteristics, baseline neighborhood characteristics, and preexisting trends in neighborhood socioeconomic status. Our findings suggest that the experience of gentrification has no effects on children’s health system use or diagnoses of asthma or obesity, when children are assessed at ages 9-11, but that it is associated with moderate increases in diagnoses of anxiety or depression—which are concentrated among children living in market-rate housing.