Historical Structural Racism in the Built Environment and Contemporary Children's Opportunities

January 9, 2024

"Structural racism relates to fewer opportunities for children's healthy development"

Key Takeaways

  • Historical redlining, blockbusting, and urban renewal were largely associated with fewer contemporary educational, socioeconomic, and health opportunities and explained up to 47.4% of the variance in children's opportunities
  • Legacy impacts of structural racism in the built environment may include less availability of early childhood education, fewer K-12 educational resources, higher rates of poverty, increased toxic exposures including industrial pollutants and extreme heat; and less access to health insurance coverage.

map of pittsburgh 1930 1980 According to a new study, structural racism in the built environment is strongly related to children's opportunities for healthy growth and development.

The study found that Allegheny County, Pennsylvania neighborhoods with a history of structural racism provide fewer opportunities for children living in those same neighborhoods today. As much as 47% of differences in opportunities related to health, education, and socioeconomic mobility are associated with specific historical policies, systems and processes that disrupted communities — practices far beyond redlining, the scientists said. The study, by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Michigan State University, published in the January 9, 2024, issue of Pediatrics.

"We found that measures of historical structural racism in the built environment — namely redlining, blockbusting, and urban renewal — were largely negatively associated with children's present-day educational, socioeconomic, and health opportunities in Allegheny County," said first author Lorraine Blatt, a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology with the Learning Research & Development Center at Pitt. "This descriptive work adds to a robust literature highlighting the enduring impact of systemically racist neighborhood disinvestment and supports ongoing calls to repair harm."

Their findings have implications for how Americans think and policymakers approach structural racism in the built environment — such as the historical denial of mortgages or financial services known as redlining, the panic-selling of homes and accompanying white flight via the process known as blockbusting, and the destruction of older neighborhoods through urban renewal.

"Over the last few years, a lot of health and social-science researchers have been talking about the legacy impacts of redlining," said Richard Sadler, a co-author and associate professor in public health and family medicine at Michigan State. "But redlining was outlawed in 1968, and we know that a slew of other factors may have impacted inequalities in the evolution of the urban environment.

"Part of the purpose of this paper was to examine some of those other factors, which include but are not limited to blockbusting, urban renewal, and urban freeway construction. We really are at the forefront of expanding consideration of these other structural racism-related determinants."

These findings, similar to highways that overlay urban or former neighborhoods across the country, lay a groundwork for future policies relating to equitable, community-lead redevelopment and further research pinpointing potential ways "to repair longstanding harm perpetuated" by such historical measures, the researchers said.

Four other Pitt doctoral students, research associates, and faculty were co-authors: Emily Jones, Portia Miller, Daniesha S. Hunter-Rue and senior author Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, chair of Pitt psychology.

Using geospatial data from the Census, Mapping Inequality Project and other sources, they constructed historical measures of redlining, blockbusting, freeway displacement and urban renewal. Those were linked with data from the Child Opportunity Index 2.0 to measure educational, socioeconomic, and health-related opportunities. The result: "inequitable neighborhood conditions and disproportionate access" that included a shortfall of such staples as food, high-quality housing, access to health care and childcare, and more.

Viewed collectively, redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal "explained more variance in children's opportunities than redlining alone," the researchers wrote.

These three measures were a change from previous research that focused exclusively on redlining or composite data regarding segregation and disadvantage. "Yet no [prior] empirical research examines how these other historical measures relate to children's contemporary opportunities for educational attainment, socioeconomic mobility, and healthy development," the researchers wrote. The researchers note that freeway displacement wasn't found to be significantly associated with children's opportunities as the other three measures.

Read the full paper published in Pediatrics

LRDC Featured Brief "Historical Structural Racism in the Built Environment and Contemporary Children's Opportunities" adapted from press release prepared by the University of Pittsburgh Media Relations Department.