Racial/ethnic neighborhood change and the distribution of health-related urban amenities over time

Recent work has demonstrated that racial/ethnic minoritized neighborhoods across the United States are less likely to have health-promoting urban amenities. However, what is unclear from this work is whether this is part of a longitudinal process whereby changes in the racial/ethnic composition of neighborhoods lead to changes in the organizational composition. This study addresses this question by two means—examining counts of organizations by ZIP codes over time using the County Business Patterns (CBP) and the closure of establishments over a twenty-eight-year period using the restricted access version of that data, the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). We find that percent Black is related to a lack of a wide variety of key health-related establishments. Moreover, this is a dynamic process where, as the share of Black residents increases over time, they are more likely to experience closures of these types of organizations, even when controlling for area socio-economic indicators and establishment-level performance. The results for percent Latino and percent Asian were mixed and highly dependent on the organization type. However, the opposite is the case for White ZIP codes. A higher percentage of White residents is related to more of these resources and a reduced risk of closure over time.