Descriptive characterization of sound levels in an environmental justice city before and during a global pandemic.

Many environmental justice communities face elevated exposures to multiple stressors, given biases in urban and environmental policy and planning. This paper aims to evaluate sound level exposure in a densely populated environmental justice city in close proximity to major roadways, a nearby airport and high levels of industrial activity. In this study we collected various sound level metrics to evaluate the loudness and frequency composition of the acoustical environment in Chelsea, Massachusetts, USA.

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.