Health Disparities
The Racial Opportunity Gap and Fine Particulate Air Pollution in California Stacey Alexeeff* Stacey Alexeeff Joel Schwartz Rachel Morello Frosch Madeline Somers Jamal Rana Stephen Van Den Eeden
Background: Disadvantaged populations often live in neighborhoods with higher levels of pollution. The Racial Opportunity Gap (ROG) is a recently developed place-based measure of structural racism that reflects differences in intergenerational economic mobility by race. Its relationship to fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) has not yet been studied.
Methods: Annual PM2.5 data on a 1km grid was from a published ensemble model of Dr. Schwartz. We computed the 10-year average PM2.5 concentrations during 2007-2016 for each census tract and categorized as low (<=9.0), moderate (9.1-12.0), high (12.1-15.0) and very high (15.1-20.0) based on Environmental Protection Agency regulation levels. We obtained publicly available intergenerational income distribution data for white and black individuals in the same census tract born to parents at the 25th percentile of the national income distribution. We computed ROG, defined as the difference in these measures. We visualized the crude means by PM2.5 categories using bar plots. We fit a linear mixed effects model accounting for spatial correlation to estimate associations between economic mobility measures and PM2.5 concentrations.
Results: White children in families at the 25th income percentile moved up to much higher income percentiles in adulthood (43.8-46.3; Figure), but Black children only moved up to the 33.2-35.2 income percentile in adulthood, resulting in substantial gaps by race (p-values<0.0001). Census tracts with lower PM2.5 had greater economic mobility for white adults (Figure), and this difference was statistically significant in regression models (p-value=0.0046). Census tracts with lower PM2.5 also had slightly greater economic mobility for black adults, although this difference was not statistically significant (p-value=0.2352).
Conclusions: We found advantaged census tracts with lower air pollution and higher white economic mobility. The Racial Opportunity Gap was high in all PM2.5 categories.
