Predicting Community Reaction to Mental Health Facilities

The move to community-based mental health care in North America and Europe has meant that the reactions of residents in host neighborhoods have considerable importance for the planning and location of facilities. This paper describes the development and testing of a model to predict aggregate neighborhood responses to facilities in Toronto in terms of ecological, demographic, and socioeconomic variables. Three composite neighborhood factors—transience, scarcity of children, and economic status—are the strongest predictors of attitudes toward facilities. A typology of neighborhoods is developed that reveals a distance-decay in facility acceptance away from the center of the city.