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Neighborhood Urban Form, Social Environment, and Depression

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Abstract

We examined whether neighborhood urban form, along with the social environment, was associated with depressive symptoms in a sample of Miami residents. Using a validated measure of depressive symptoms, we found that living in neighborhoods with higher housing density was associated with fewer symptoms. A larger acreage of green spaces was also linked to fewer depressive symptoms but did not reach significance in the full model. Our results suggest that how residents use the environment matters. Living in neighborhoods with a higher density of auto commuters relative to land area, an indicator of chronic noise exposure, was associated with more symptoms.

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Notes

  1. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewer who suggested this measure instead of the one we originally included.

  2. Consistent with the generally slow progress of any public land acquisition, we determined that there were no significant green space acquisitions or sales within the study area between 2002 and 2009 that could have altered our results.

  3. As with most other studies, data availability constrained the measures we could include. If data had been available, we would have liked to include other important built environment characteristics of neighborhoods such as: internal and external housing conditions, and number of structural fires in the neighborhood.

  4. We created a second indicator of access to green spaces: proximity to green space measuring the distance between the census tract centroid and the nearest accessible green space. The findings were consistent with those using the acreage of green space within the tract and within a quarter-mile border of the tract, so we report only the latter here. Green space area within defined distances of where people live appears to hold up better than distance to nearest green space when measuring the effect of green space on mortality (Coutts et al.).37

  5. Data availability constrained the measures we could include. Had they been available, we would have liked to include other neighborhood social indicators and in particular measures of the different forms of social capital.

  6. Varimax is used to maximize the variance of the squared loadings. Varimax is an orthogonal rotation method which simply rotates the axes of the first factor to a variable or group of variables and then rotates the subsequent factors to be at right angles (uncorrelated) with the first. It thereby removes the effects of variables which could be highly loaded on the first factor. Compared with the unrotated factor solution, an orthogonal rotation minimizes the number of samples needed to account for the variation of distinct groups of variables.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, 32306-2280, USA

    Rebecca Miles & Christopher Coutts

  2. Georgia Southern University, College of Public Health, Statesboro, GA, USA

    Asal Mohamadi

Authors
  1. Rebecca Miles
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  2. Christopher Coutts
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  3. Asal Mohamadi
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Correspondence to Rebecca Miles.

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Miles, R., Coutts, C. & Mohamadi, A. Neighborhood Urban Form, Social Environment, and Depression. J Urban Health 89, 1–18 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-011-9621-2

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