Poor Neighborhoods Create Health "Double Jeopardy" for Minority Kids

Of all poor children, those who are black or Hispanic are much more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, according to a new study from health researchers at Harvard School of Public Health.

The study authors argue that it is neighborhood segregation - more than family income - that keeps minority children out of resource-rich communities.

The researchers analyzed neighborhood-level U.S. Census data for the 100 metropolitan areas with the largest child populations. The authors used different indicators including rates of poverty, rentership and unemployment to determine whether a community was an “opportunity neighborhood.”

Across the areas studied, about 76 percent of all black children and 69 percent of all Latino children — whether their families were poor or not — lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates higher than those found in the neighborhoods of the worst-off white children.

The researchers defined the “worst-off white children” as the 25 percent of white children who live in the highest-poverty neighborhoods for all white children.

The study appears in the current edition of the journal Health Affairs.

“It’s not that white kids don’t suffer disadvantage — of course they do — but the experience of multiple layers of disadvantage is something very unique to blacks and Latino kids,” said lead study author Dolores Acevedo-Garcia.

Acevedo-Garcia, an associate professor in the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Society, Human Development and Health, led the development of the Web site DiversityData.org, a site that gauges quality of life and health for different racial and ethnic groups in the United States.

“What we are showing is that many kids get this poison we call poverty, but the black and Hispanic kids also get the poison of growing up in poor neighborhoods,” Acevedo-Garcia said.

The authors call it “double jeopardy.” The layers of disadvantage in a low-income neighborhood often include poor-performing schools, crime, substandard housing and limited access to grocery stores with healthy food choices. Acevedo-Garcia said earlier research has established that these social determinants matter, accumulate over the course of a life and can be detrimental to health.

“Minority children have limited access to neighborhoods with opportunities such as good schools and after-school programs, safe streets and playgrounds, and positive role models,” the authors write.

Acevedo-Garcia said residential segregation cuts minority children off from those advantaged neighborhoods, and she said family income does not fully account for the differences in access to opportunity neighborhoods and the resources they offer.

“The nature of poverty for blacks and Latinos, generally, is qualitatively different and of a far harsher, unrelenting variety than the poverty experienced by the typical white person,” said Susan Eaton, research director in the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Eaton was not involved in the segregation study.