You’re walking down the street and you notice a new housing development in your neighborhood. It has a gym – for residents – and a dog park and a fancy coffee shop. You take a look at the condo prices. You may love your morning caffeine, but this building feels – not right. It feels like it was meant for some other neighborhood – one where people are used to paying top dollar for a one-bedroom condo. You go about your day a little disconcerted. Who brought this building here? Who is it for? And what’s next? In our communities this is far too familiar.
While past academic research includes measures of how much control people feel that they have in life and, separately, ways to study neighborhood characteristics, no measure had yet existed for measuring the experience of empowerment over neighborhood change processes specifically. Residents knew that ownership of change was a necessary component of urban development that supports community health but needed more evidence to be heard. As researcher Andrew Binet of MIT put it, “Naming it is the first step in moving the needle.”
The Healthy Neighborhoods Study’s (HNS) latest research findings, published in the September 2022 issue of Social Science and Medicine, connects this unease with the decision-making power and health of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods. Researchers created a tool for measuring and scoring what researchers have named “ownership of change.” Ownership of change: Participatory development of a novel latent construct for neighborhoods and health equity research, emerged as the result of workshops in which HNS Resident Researchers, like Celinet Sanchez of Lynn, described experiencing disconnection and alienation caused by some types of neighborhood changes, and hypothesized that experiencing such feelings could be associated with health.
The next step was to develop a tool that could measure ownership of change and compare it with measures of health and well-being already documented in HNS communities through our survey tool. Working with academics, resident researchers identified and refined four questions to ask respondents: whether they: 1) notice changes, 2) feel like these changes are “for them,” 3) feel like the average person in their community has a voice in these changes, and 4) are personally involved. Changes could be in any of seven domains, including housing, commerce, public spaces, jobs, parks, transportation, and policing. These dimensions reflect Resident Researchers’ lived experience of changes underway in their neighborhoods.
Taking answers from the HNS survey on well-being and using qualitative data from in-depth interviews, researchers found that people who report having higher levels of ownership of change are more likely to also have higher levels of physical health, mental health, and happiness than people who report having lower levels of ownership of change.
Celinet Sanchez is a Resident Researcher originally from the Dominican Republic. She has experienced gentrification both in her childhood home of Washington Heights in Manhattan, and in her adult home of Lynn, Massachusetts, where she works on housing for disenfranchised people, especially non-English speakers. With other researchers, she helped develop the research and survey questions, conduct the surveys, score the measure, and make meaning of the data.
Sanchez describes rapid changes in downtown Lynn, including high-priced condos, specialty shops, and cosmetic changes that don’t speak to her culture or offer things that long-term residents can afford. Neighbors say to her, “I don’t see myself purchasing products from these places. I don’t see myself purchasing a condo.” When she asks them, “Do you see yourself in this community in 5 years?” many say no, expressing that in five years, Lynn may no longer be a place “for them.”
Residents have learned from other gentrifying communities’ experiences that changes as big as a condo development or as small as a little free library mean something. They are signals, of sorts, about who changes are for.
Co-Principal investigator Mariana Arcaya says that experience and related feelings of exclusion is exactly what this research establishes as a “real thing” with inequitable health impacts. The HNS team created a theory of how people experience ownership of change that helps explain how these inequalities can be produced. “Most importantly, the theory shows structural racism, particularly anti-Black racism, affects neighborhood conditions, people’s individual circumstances, and the way people understand changes in their neighborhoods based on history,” she says Resident Researchers really wanted to show that people have learned from past experiences of not being considered, and that history helps residents make meaning out of the changes they see. Too often, the history has been that Black and other communities of color lose out while people with money make more money.
When people see changes, they assess how well the changes align with the neighborhood’s needs, what information they have, and how much power they feel over the changes. Arcaya points to “decades of research showing that experiences of belonging and being valued and included versus those experiences that leave people feeling powerless over things happening to them, stressed, and excluded have important impacts on our psychological states and physical bodies.” In conceptualizing and naming ownership of change, HNS has uncovered that it is not just what changes in a neighborhood that matters for health, but how these changes occur and who has control over them.
When we think about the relationship between health and place, we must think about power and how to redistribute it. To feel ownership, communities need to know how the changes they see will benefit them and feel confident that these benefits will be real and aligned with the community’s priorities. So how can this new tool be applied to increase equity and health? Advocates can now measure ownership of change to evaluate the impacts of neighborhood development and to work for health-promoting policies, programs and processes that increase ownership of change. Researchers aspire to enable explicit conversations about how and why structural racism shapes ownership of change. In the end, histories of exclusion must be repaired to increase levels of ownership of change.