Highlights:
- The notion that place can determine health is not a new one. A key premise in medicine’s recent focus on the social determinants of health is that zip code is a better indicator of health and wellness than genetic makeup.
- “In the past decade increasingly strong evidence indicates that there has been a causal relationship between children’s neighborhood environment and educational attainment, employment, income, and health outcomes,” the researchers said. “In addition, a large body of research has documented high levels of racial residential segregation in US metropolitan areas and high levels of geographic concentration of both poverty and affluence.”
- In other words, opportunity gaps were greatest within a singular community, the researchers said. All said, 91 percent of the opportunity gaps happen within a single metropolitan area, as opposed to between two different metropolitan areas. In 35 percent of metropolitan areas, the Child Opportunity Gap is higher than gaps between two different metropolitan areas.
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