Boston is one of the country’s most expensive housing markets, which has ripple effects on communities like Chelsea, Lynn, and New Bedford. Luxury condos arise where supermarkets might be needed, and fancy coffee shops displace mom and pop stores.
“Gentrification doesn’t just happen around you,” says Gail Rodrigues. “It’s something you feel in your body.”
Rodrigues is the coordinator of community health and wellness at the Southcoast YMCA (New Bedford) and a Site Coordinator with the Healthy Neighborhoods Study (HNS). Her observation ties together the two hypotheses recently tested by the HNS:
- Financial security is a pathway through which gentrification affects health
- Stress is a pathway through which gentrification affects health
Together with Andrew Binet, a post-doc at MIT’s DUSP, and others in the Healthy Neighborhoods Study Consortium, Rodrigues presented the findings (which were also published in Cities and Health) to a HNS’s 30+ Resident Researchers. Residents Researchers are community organizers, activists, and leaders in nine gentrifying Eastern MA neighborhoods who have actively helped shaped HNS research and can immediately apply it in their community work.
While it’s easy to imagine that the greatest harm of gentrification is when long-time residents are pushed out of their neighborhoods by rising rents and real estate prices, this research looked more deeply at the impacts of gentrification on individuals and communities by focusing on financial security and stress – and their relationships to health.
150 individuals living in HNS neighborhoods were interviewed, and the analysis focused on 40 who were most financially vulnerable. That could mean they had a household income below $30,000; or they found it “somewhat hard” or “very hard” to cover monthly bills; or they were unemployed.
Interviewees, asked about their experience living in a gentrifying neighborhood, what financial pressures they faced, and the role of stress in their lives… “overwhelmingly reported that the physical, social and economic changes happening in their neighborhoods exposed them to financial risks.” They identified those risks as unaffordable housing, economic inequality, a rising cost of living, and difficulty in saving.
The health effects of gentrification can be very direct, said the respondents, citing the scarcity and unaffordability of nutritious food, the exhaustion brought on by having to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, the lack of time for exercise or other forms of self-care.
But often respondents described a more winding path to poor health: gentrification leads to financial problems, which results in stress, which produces ill health.
One respondent described the impact of financial pressure this way: “It just doesn’t leave us with the mental capacity to take care of ourselves and notice, ‘Hey, I’m not doing so well.’” A respondent from Chelsea said “I’m always stressed. Stressed so much…which kind of carries on into my ability to seek help, and stuff like that.” Another reported “At one point, I got really stressed out, and I couldn’t eat, and I was a mess.”
While gentrification increases financial stressors, it simultaneously eats away at the buffers that typically allow individuals and communities to cope with stress and hard times, namely jobs, social cohesion, and collective efficacy.
Buffers are extremely important and tend to be collective rather than individual: a sense of identity and belonging; churches; neighborhood associations; and family and friend relationships. A woman in Roxbury said, “One big barrier we have in our community is social cohesion…because of economics, money…It’s sad because things are so expensive and money is short. And people can become isolated and they don’t want to come out.”
The lack of social cohesion can make it hard or impossible for communities to fight gentrification or mitigate its harms.
Rodrigues suggested in her presentation that communities can regain a sense of control over the changes happening in their neighborhoods by urging policymakers to invest in buffers such as rent control, affordable housing, social and cultural institutions, and well-paying jobs. “It’s the collective that suffers, not just the individual,” she said. And the solutions will also be collective.