Your neighborhood is not my neighborhood: A mapped comparison of the food environments of public housing with those of other neighborhoods in Boston

Components of a neighborhood provide insight into people's daily life and needs. Limited food access can subsequently adversely affect health status. Challenges to environmental accessibility to healthy foods and transportation are drivers of obesity. Therefore, the immediate environment of people who live in public housing developments may not be conducive for residents to purchase and eat healthy foods, and be physically active. Mapping Boston's public housing developments and defining key asset characteristics of the neighborhoods surrounding them is a powerful strategy to visually depict regions which are known as “food deserts” due to the limited accessibility to healthy foods. Food deserts proximal to public housing developments may then be major factors in the occurrence of obesity in urban at-risk populations. We will demonstrate the relevant differences between neighborhoods containing public housing developments and those which do not. In conjunction with the use of mapping to portray a picture of the food environment surrounding the housing developments, we conducted interviews of mother-daughter pairs in ten housing developments concerning their consumption of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains in order to examine the social food environment within the home. Our findings will discuss a possible means by which such differences in the food environments of public housing developments might be associated with poor eating behaviors in the home.