Race, Poverty, and Spatial Accessibility in New York City | ISERP

Race, Poverty, and Spatial Accessibility in New York City | ISERP

A couple researchers here at Columbia (one at ISERP, one in Planning) are doing some very interesting research on the role of poverty and the built environment, particularly in the context of access to basic services. I'm not sure whether this research stands now, but the premise is quite interesting -

When city residents lack neighborhood access to grocery stores, banks, and other basic goods and services, they must pay more, travel farther, or do without–and thus face costs in terms of disposable income, time, and other domains such as health. Social scientists and urban planners have long assumed poor neighborhoods are "under-retailed." A recent national study, however, finds that high-poverty neighborhoods actually have higher access to basic goods and services. Project investigators hypothesize that this counter-intuitive pattern is a legacy of historical patterns of urban development, in which low-income city residents lived mostly in older, denser, mixed-use neighborhoods. If this is so, changes in residential patterns due to gentrification or housing policy could alter these patterns of access to stores and services. This research investigates the role of the built environment in patterns of spatial accessibility by race and poverty in New York City.