Exploring ownership of change and health equity implications in neighborhood change processes: A community-led approach to enhancing just climate resilience in Everett, MA.

Traditional planning processes have perpetuated the exclusion of historically marginalized communities, imposing vulnerability to climate (health) crises. We investigate how ownership of change fosters equitable climate resilience and community well-being through participatory action research. Our study highlights the detrimental effects of climate gentrification on community advocacy for climate security and health, negatively impacting well-being.

Ownership of change: Participatory development of a novel latent construct for neighborhoods and health equity research.

Processes of neighborhood change are important determinants of health. One salient dimension of the experience of neighborhood changes is a person's evolving sense of empowerment over the changes around them, such as development of new housing or shifts in economic opportunity. Community residents collaborating on a Participatory Action Research study developed the novel construct "ownership of change" to capture this psychosocial process, and hypothesized that it may help explain the relationship between neighborhood change and health.

Gentrification pathways and their health impacts on historically marginalized residents in Europe and North America: Global qualitative evidence from 14 cities.

As global cities grapple with the increasing challenge of gentrification and displacement, research in public health and urban geography has presented growing evidence about the negative impacts of those unequal urban changes on the health of historically marginalized groups. Yet, to date comprehensive research about the variety of health impacts and their pathways beyond single case sites and through an international comparative approach of different gentrification drivers and manifestations remains scarce. In this paper, we analyze qualitative data on the pathways by which gentrification impacts the health of historically marginalized residents in 14 cities in Europe and North America.

Rising home values and Covid-19 case rates in Massachusetts.

We explore whether housing displacement pressure could help explain place-based disparities in Massachusetts COVID-19 prevalence. We use qualitative data from the Healthy Neighborhoods Study to illustrate how rising and unaffordable housing costs are experienced by residents in municipalities disproportionately affected by COVID-19. We then predict municipal-level COVID-19 case rates as a function of home value increases and housing cost burden prevalence among low-income households, controlling for previously identified community-level risk factors.

Designing and Facilitating Collaborative Research Design and Data Analysis Workshops: Lessons Learned in the Healthy Neighborhoods Study.

One impediment to expanding the prevalence and quality of community-engaged research is a shortage of instructive resources for collaboratively designing research instruments and analyzing data with community members. This article describes how a consortium of community residents, grassroots community organizations, and academic and public institutions implemented collaborative research design and data analysis processes as part of a participatory action research (PAR) study investigating the relationship between neighborhoods and health in the greater Boston area. We report how nine different groups of community residents were engaged in developing a multi-dimensional survey instrument, generating and testing hypotheses, and interpreting descriptive statistics and preliminary findings.

Community change and resident needs: Designing a Participatory Action Research study in Metropolitan Boston.

The health implications of urban development, particularly in rapidly changing, low-income urban neighborhoods, are poorly understood. We describe the Healthy Neighborhoods Study (HNS), a Participatory Action Research study examining the relationship between neighborhood change and population health in nine Massachusetts neighborhoods. Baseline data from the HNS survey show that social factors, specifically income insecurity, food insecurity, social support, experiencing discrimination, expecting to move, connectedness to the neighborhood, and local housing construction that participants believed would improve their lives, identified by a network of 45 Resident Researchers exhibited robust associations with self-rated and mental health.