Modeling the Social and Spatial Proximity of Crime: Domestic and Sexual Violence Across Neighborhoods

The Role of Infant Health Problems in Constraining Interneighborhood Mobility: Implications for Citywide Employment Networks

Infant health problems are a persistent concern across the United States, disproportionally affecting socioeconomically vulnerable communities. We investigate how inequalities in infant health contribute to differences in interneighborhood commuting mobility and shape neighborhoods' embeddedness in the citywide structure of employment networks in Chicago over a 14-year period. We use the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics' Origin-Destination Employment Statistics to analyze commuting networks between 2002 and 2015. Results from longitudinal network analyses indicate two main patterns. First, after the Great Recession, a community's infant health problems began to significantly predict isolation from the citywide employment network. Second, pairwise dissimilarity in infant health problems predicts a lower likelihood of mobility ties between communities throughout the entire study period. The findings suggest that infant health problems present a fundamental barrier for communities in equally accessing the full range of jobs and opportunities across the city-compounding existing inequalities.

Narrative minireview of the spatial epidemiology of substance use disorder in the United States: Who is at risk and where?

Drug overdose is the leading cause of death by injury in the United States. The incidence of substance use disorder (SUD) in the United States has increased steadily over the past two decades, becoming a major public health problem for the country. The drivers of the SUD epidemic in the United States have changed over time, characterized by an initial heroin outbreak between 1970 and 1999, followed by a painkiller outbreak, and finally by an ongoing synthetic opioid outbreak. The nature and sources of these abused substances reveal striking differences in the socioeconomic and behavioral factors that shape the drug epidemic. Moreover, the geospatial distribution of the SUD epidemic is not homogeneous. The United States has specific locations where vulnerable communities at high risk of SUD are concentrated, reaffirming the multifactorial socioeconomic nature of this epidemic. A better understanding of the SUD epidemic under a spatial epidemiology framework is necessary to determine the factors that have shaped its spread and how these patterns can be used to predict new outbreaks and create effective mitigation policies. This narrative minireview summarizes the current records of the spatial distribution of the SUD epidemic in the United States across different periods, revealing some spatiotemporal patterns that have preceded the occurrence of outbreaks. By analyzing the epidemic of SUD-related deaths, we also describe the epidemic behavior in areas with high incidence of cases. Finally, we describe public health interventions that can be effective for demographic groups, and we discuss future challenges in the study and control of the SUD epidemic in the country.

Paws on the Street: Neighborhood-Level Concentration of Households with Dogs and Urban Crime

The formative work of Jane Jacobs underscores the combination of "eyes on the street" and trust between residents in deterring crime. Nevertheless, little research has assessed the effects of residential street monitoring on crime due partly to a lack of data measuring this process. We argue that neighborhood-level rates of households with dogs captures part of the residential street monitoring process core to Jacobs' hypotheses and test whether this measure is inversely associated with property and violent crime rates. Data from a large-scale marketing survey of Columbus, OH, USA residents (2013; n = 43,078) are used to measure census block group-level (n = 595) rates of households with dogs. Data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study are used to measure neighborhood-level rates of trust. Consistent with Jacobs' hypotheses, results indicate that neighborhood concentration of households with dogs is inversely associated with robbery, homicide, and, to a less consistent degree, aggravated assault rates within neighborhoods high in trust. In contrast, results for property crime suggest that the inverse association of dog concentration is independent of levels of neighborhood trust. These associations are observed net of controls for neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics, temporally lagged crime, and spatial lags of trust and dog concentration. This study offers suggestive evidence of crime deterrent benefits of local street monitoring and dog presence and calls attention to the contribution of pets to other facets of neighborhood social organization.

Socially Connected Neighborhoods and the Spread of Sexually Transmitted Infections

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the United States have been increasing at record levels and exhibit unequal spatial patterning across urban populations and neighborhoods. Research on the effects of residential and nearby neighborhoods on STI proliferation has largely ignored the role of socially connected contexts, even though neighborhoods are routinely linked by individuals' movements across space for work and other social activities. We showcase how commuting and public transit networks contribute to the social spillover of STIs in Chicago. Examining data on all employee-employer location links recorded yearly by the Census Bureau for more than a decade, we assess network spillover effects of local community STI rates on interconnected communities. Spatial and network autoregressive models show that exposure to STIs in geographically proximate and socially proximate communities contributes to increases in local STI levels, even net of socioeconomic and demographic factors and prior STIs. These findings suggest that geographically proximate and socially connected communities influence one another's infection rates through social spillover effects.