Why Fighting Gentrification — And ‘Planning To Stay’ — Is Key For Community Health

“Who’s going to walk these stairs?”

That question from Lourdes Rodriguez, Director of the Center for Place-Based Initiatives at Dell Medical School, was originally posed regarding improvements she was helping to lead in a North Manhattan park that had been neglected and fallen out of use with local residents.

The obvious and fairly achievable goal would be to secure funds to clean up and modernize the park, open the gates and let the community enjoy the shiny new civic asset they’d been deprived of for years. After all, following the years-long dual epidemics of crack addiction and the rise of AIDS residents of the neighborhoods in Harlem and Washington Heights had become woefully inactive and out of shape. Having an attractive park nearby was an ingredient in helping to get people moving again.

But Rodriguez and her team of community health workers knew that an almost inevitable consequence of sprucing up a central gathering place for a long-downtrodden area is that economic development is soon to follow. And that business activity can very easily force out longtime residents if steps aren’t taken to prepare the area to make sure the park and its surroundings can be enjoyed by the people they were designed for.

Because physical surroundings and the nearby socio-economic circumstances contribute to half of a person’s state of health, going through the process of making their environment walkable and open to recreation does little good if they’re displaced as a result. That’s why Rodriguez and Raj Patel, a research professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs with a deep background in food insecurity, stressed that getting residents thinking about “planning to stay” is a key part of combating gentrification as a community improves.

That dynamic is key as Austin grows, and especially so in the city’s eastern crescent region where longtime residents are already being forced out by rising property values.

The work the Dell Medical School and assorted community health organizations are doing to improve health care and wellness in that region is needed. Patel led a study in 2015 that found 25 percent of Austin households experience some level of food insecurity, with the scourge of food deserts or lack of access to nutrition as a large factor in malnutrition and other vectors of poor health.

What’s needed is a strategy that can help stabilize the health of Austin’s most fragile and distressed communities while also ensuring they’ll be able to take part in the prosperity that is flooding into the region as a whole.

Austin leaders have recently placed an emphasis on affordability, so that new economic development includes components of affordable housing that will ensure a mixture of demographics are able to enjoy growing areas and shiny recreation attractions like parks.

As important is a recently announced focus on job training and bringing middle-class jobs and small businesses into the eastern crescent region so residents there have options and opportunity at upward mobility that will give them the ability to enjoy the neighborhoods they grew up in even as they grow and change. It’s a way they can “plan to stay” in the places they know, and have the benefit of increased physical activity and plentiful food options readily available as a result.