Recent research suggests that racial residential segregation may be detrimental to health. This study investigates the influence of neighborhood racial isolation on obesity and considers the role of neighborhood disorder as a mediator in this relationship. For the city of Philadelphia, we find that residence in a neighborhood with high black racial isolation is associated with a higher body mas...

BACKGROUND There is growing evidence that neighborhood environments are related to depressive mood in the general population. Older adults may be even more vulnerable to neighborhood factors than other adults. The aim of this paper is to review empirical findings on the relationships between neighborhood characteristics and depressive mood among older adults. METHODS A search of the literatur...

What makes a neighborhood space vital? This article explores the possibility that the presence of trees and grass may be one of the key components of vital neighborhood spaces. We report on 758 observations of individuals in 59 outdoor common spaces in a residential development. Twenty-seven of the neighborhood common spaces were relatively green, whereas 32 were relatively barren. Results indi...

The paper exams if and how much the educational attainment gap between blacks and whites are due to the difference in their neighborhoods. We study neighborhood effect by allowing the unobserved components to be correlated across the decisions to the educational attainment and to the residential mobility. Meanwhile, we assume two heterogeneous correlations: zero correlations and nonzero correla...

Many urban communities in the United States faced deteriorating physical infrastructure and social environment in the second half of the 20 century. To restore such inner city neighborhoods, many neighborhoods have adopted historic preservation as a means to both aesthetically and fiscally improve the condition. This paper studies a historic district in the Tree Streets neighborhood, Johnson Ci...

Researchers have yet to examine the impact of neighborhood disadvantage on early child behavior problems (BPs) longitudinally. We examined the impact of neighborhood disadvantage on overt BPs in a low-income, urban sample of 281 African American and European American boys followed longitudinally from toddlerhood to school entry. Measures included census data and maternal report of BPs, sociocul...

This study describes the results of a survey of 432 homeowners in Ohio, USA concerning their perceptions and practices regarding management of residential landscapes. The results reveal that outdoor residential environments are extremely important to homeowners, who tend to view their yards as serving multiple functions: a place to observe nature and to socialize as well as a place of beauty an...

Residential electrical wiring safety practices in the US result in the possibility of a small voltage (up to a few tenths of a volt) on appliance surfaces with respect to water pipes or other grounded surfaces. This "open circuit voltage" (V(OC)) will cause "contact current" to flow in a person who touches the appliance and completes an electrical circuit to ground. This paper presents data sug...

BACKGROUND There is limited longitudinal evidence confirming the role of neighborhood environment attributes in encouraging people to walk more or if active people simply choose to live in activity-friendly neighborhoods. Natural experiments of policy changes to create more walkable communities provide stronger evidence for a causal effect of neighborhood environments on residents' walking. O...

This paper focuses on analyzing the spatial pattern of residential burglaries in London, Ontario. It discusses the problems associated with using geo-referenced data on residential burglary incidents. The relative risk ratio is applied as a measure of the intensity of residential burglaries. The highest relative risks of residential burglaries are found in the core area of the city and the risk...