Aging in place or left behind: The geography of urban minority older adults

Background. A growing body of work has pointed to the role of the social and physical environment in explaining health disparities. For older adults, the neighborhood and city environment may play a role in shaping health trajectories and successful aging. However, we do not have basic surveillance data of the prevalence of and trends in geographic contexts for older adults, nor how that geography differs by race. A history and description of the contexts in which minority adults are aging is important to our understanding of health disparities in late life.

Methods. We provide an ecological, longitudinal description of the geography of older minority adults, with a focus on African-Americans. We use data on the entire population of US, urban, census tracts from 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 to describe neighborhood composition, quality, and neighborhood change. We present results from trend analyses of neighborhood types over time, stratified by race.

Results. We anticipate our findings to be that more African-American elderly live in lower quality neighborhoods than whites, but that this disparity will be temporally bounded, displaying correlations with other large population migratory trends and changes in urban policy.

Conclusions. Our research provides a model for using geographic description in public health surveillance. While this paper focuses on the domestic context, urban populations and the urban elderly are growing around the globe. Our analysis is a useful first step in beginning to gain some empirical traction on understanding how the urban elderly are affected by changing geographic and social landscapes.