Public Health and the Abandonment of Primary Prevention: Investigating Gentrification’s Impact on Lead Poisoning and Youth Violence in New York City

Using mixed-methods (GIS analysis, spatial regression models, walking ethnographies, semistructured open-ended interviews), my dissertation explores gentrification’s distribution across New York City. Specifically, I consider the relationship between childhood lead poisoning and youth violence rates across neighborhoods in the city, and what explains variations (if any) in these rates across different gentrified and un-gentrified neighborhoods. My findings challenge the claims of so-called “pragmatic” public health researchers and municipal policymakers that gentrification may facilitate the reduction or elimination of lead poisoning and street crime. In fact, my quantitative analysis revealed no correlation between gentrification and youth violence, and also identified an outlier neighborhood (i.e., Greenpoint) that challenged the predictions of the existing gentrification-health literature by demonstrating high rates of both gentrification and lead poisoning. My qualitative research here revealed that, rather than reduce or eliminate lead poisoning, gentrification obscures it through developer-state relations that hide the true extent of lead toxins in the soil.