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Thesis advisor: David T. Takeuchi / Thesis advisor: Graciela Teruel-Belismelis / Poverty and violence within cities frequently concentrate in the same places and evidence suggests these exposures have deleterious consequences on health. The 2007 homicide increase in both rich and poor Mexican municipalities and the available biomarkers in a public panel study offer a unique opportunity to test each contextual effect in isolation on an innovative health outcome. Using an ecological framework, the main hypothesis of the dissertation is that, in urban environments, exposure to higher levels of contextual violence works as a stressor that wears down the body by increasing the levels of cardiovascular risk. This effect was hypothesized to be independent from poverty but with significant interactions and with heterogeneous effects among subpopulations. Multilevel cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses were conducted treating the data as a natural experiment using the homicide rate increase as treatment. The outcomes were two indices and single biomarkers that reflect cardiovascular risk in three waves of data corresponding to the years 2002, 2006, and 2012. Results showed that three complementary statistical approaches provided evidence indicating that exposure to cumulative violence at the municipality level yielded higher cardiovascular risk when controlling for individual covariates like victimization and household expenditure. The significant threshold for homicide rates was 35 and the differences between exposed and unexposed municipalities was between 1.5% & 8.3%, while the threshold for changes in the homicide rates between 2006 and 2012 was 10, with an effect size of 7%. Poverty and violence were not correlated in Mexico during the homicide rate spike, so the effects were independent. Unexpectedly, they did not show interaction effects: affluent and violent municipalities were the most stressful contexts. These effects were higher in women, in individuals in the two lowest socioeconomic quintiles and had significant impact in cohorts younger than 40 years old. The dissertation expands the ecosocial approach by exploring independent effects that shape multiple stressful contexts. It demonstrates that violence is a public health concern in Mexico that has indirect effects in the whole population, which not only worsens the obesity epidemic, but also demands a new perspective on assessing the burden of violence on everyday life. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

Nationwide, housing authorities demolish public housing communities and relocate the existing residents in an attempt to create more favorable neighborhood environments and to promote safer and more efficacious social interactions for public housing residents. Yet, studies of public housing relocation do not find strong evidence of beneficial social interaction occurring between relocated residents and new neighbors. Despite increased safety and relative increase in neighborhood economic standing, studies find relocated residents socialize outside of their new neighborhoods or else limit existing neighborhood interactions as compared to living in public housing communities. This raises the question of why relocated residents either do or do not choose to interact with their new neighbors within their new residential settings. In an effort to answer this question, I have conducted a study focused on neighborhood social interactions using public housing residents relocated from six of Atlanta, Georgia’s public housing communities. As a backdrop to the study, I present relevant literature concerning both the study of neighborhoods and the study of prior relocation endeavors. I argue that neighborhoods do provide important social landscapes for attempting to benefit public housing residents, though more research and a different framework of analysis are needed in order to manifest theorized outcomes of relocation for all residents involved. I then employ the use of both quantitative survey data from 248 relocated residents and qualitative in-depth interview data from 40 relocated residents to provide further insight into social interaction patterns after relocation from Atlanta’s public housing. This research finds that prior to relocation residents in public housing communities differed in terms of their ideal zones of action and preferred levels of inclusion and engagement in the neighborhood setting and in terms of their surrounding community scene. By examining these different ideal-types of residents in detail, I argue that prior to moving the residents, a better fit between resident and neighborhood can be constructed by housing authorities such that more beneficial social interaction outcomes can be achieved overall in the relocation process.

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This paper will explore the social and economic impacts of public housing revitalization on households with minor children. The research traces the relocations of families from two public housing complexes to other public housing complexes or market housing, using Housing Choice formerly Section 8 vouchers. We contrast and compare the socioeconomic characteristics of the original neighborhoods to the relocation sites from the census tract level, exploring changes in resources available to families.

Adverse birth outcomes have many causes but there is increasing awareness that air pollution is one of them. This study examines the effects of air pollution on infant health and mortality using data from the State of Georgia. The estimation methods control for potential endogenous variables such as the length of gestation and the demand for prenatal care. Moreover dummy-fixed effects are used to control for unobserved neighborhood characteristics using the place of residence of the mother. In addition, the model uses a comprehensive framework, which considers birth weight, length of gestation, and mortality, thus allowing pre and postnatal assessment of the impact of air pollution on health. The empirical results show moderate evidence of an effect of air pollution on low birth weight and length of gestation and found a more substantive effect on infant mortality.

In 2008, Atlanta was the first city in the United States to completely eliminate its high-rise public housing projects. Georgia State University professors Drs. Ruel, Oakley, and Reid undertook a three-year study to determine the health, behavior, and attitudes of residents both before and after relocation. This study sought to determine whether residents' self-esteem and self-efficacy improved after relocation into areas that have lower levels of social disorder and poor housing conditions. Overall, results show that while housing conditions, social disorder, and fear of crime had little or no significant effect on changes in residents' self-esteem, an improvement in these indicators in residents' new neighborhoods had a significant effect on self-efficacy. The significance of decreased social disorder and poor housing conditions, as well as fear of crime on residents' self-efficacy (but not self-esteem) has important implications for future research regarding neighborhood and housing effects as well as public housing relocation.