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

There are well-documented links between structural racism and inequities in children's opportunities. Yet, when it comes to understanding the role of the built environment, a disproportionate focus on redlining obscures other historical policies and practices such as blockbusting, freeway displacement, and urban renewal that may impact contemporary child development. We hypothesized that historical structural racism in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania's, built environment would be associated with fewer contemporary educational, socioeconomic, and health opportunities. We also hypothesized that these measures would explain more collective variance in children's opportunities than redlining alone. We used geospatial data from the US Census, Mapping Inequality Project, and other archival sources to construct historical measures of redlining, blockbusting, freeway displacement, and urban renewal in ArcGIS at the census tract level. These were linked with data from the Child Opportunity Index 2.0 to measure children's opportunities across domains of education, socioeconomic status, and health. We ran spatial regression analyses in Stata 18.0 to examine individual and collective associations between structural racism and children's opportunities. 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. The measures collectively explained more variance in children's opportunities than redlining alone. In support of our hypotheses, novel measures of structural racism were related to present-day differences in children's opportunities. Findings lay the groundwork for future research focused on repairing longstanding harm perpetuated by structural racism.