Walking, talking, and opportunity

I am an American living in Canada and have spent the past week glued to the news, learning and thinking about racial inequality and injustice in the United States. The problems are huge and require urgent, system-wide change.

Much more limited in scope, I’ve been thinking about how the design of our cities and neighbourhoods contributes to inequality. Like many others, I think we should be investing our shared resources to improve schools, parks, libraries, community centers, public transportation, public housing. 

Today, I want to talk about neighbourhood walkability—the ease with which people can live their lives on foot. It’s another neighbourhood feature that can increase or lessen inequality but has seemingly received less attention than other neighbourhood features.

I’m not pretending to have any big answers. My hope is that learning about the positive impacts of walkability could be useful as we think about changes we want to make in our communities going forward.

What got me thinking is a Montreal initiative that closed off car traffic on certain streets. In dense areas of the city, true social distancing was impossible, and people were constantly ducking into the street to pass each other on the sidewalk. In an already-walkable neighbourhood, this initiative has still completely transformed the character of the streets that were shut down. Kids play in the middle of the road. People linger, chatting with neighbours from a distance. There’ve been some yard chairs. I wonder how many new friendships can be attributed to a bunch of duct-taped sandbags and pylons.

A Montreal initiative blocks car traffic on certain streets to create a place for walking, biking, and playing. 

In a previous post on the link between public spaces and community, I talked about how public spaces can support neighbours getting to know each other and increase the feeling of belonging in a community. Today, I want to talk more generally about neighbourhood walkability and how it can change us and the opportunities available to us.

Americans have long prided themselves on living in a land of opportunity where a child can grow up to succeed (financially) in spite of a poor family background. But the American dream shines brighter in some communities than others. One striking study compared the rates of upward mobility across the country and found stark geographic differences for its prospect. 

In this study, upward mobility was defined as the odds of growing up in a household in the bottom quintile (i.e., bottom 20%) of income nationwide and reaching the top quintile of income by 30 years old. The dataset included millions of children born in the U.S. between 1980 to 1982, aka Xennials, who filed income taxes as 30-32 year-olds in 2011-2012. The researchers matched the Xennials' tax records with those of their parents while they were growing up. This worked out surprisingly well, as approximately 95% of children could be matched with their parents. The Xennials were also assigned to the area they lived in growing up using the parents’ tax records. 

In some areas of the country, upward mobility was possible. For example, in San Jose, children from the bottom quintile of household income had a 12.9% chance or reaching the top quintile by age 30. Other cities with high upward mobility included New York, Seattle, Salt Lake City. These areas’ odds of upward mobility were as good as the average odds in countries with the highest social mobility in the world, like Denmark and Canada.

But in other areas of the country, like Charlotte, Milwaukee, or Atlanta, the odds of upward mobility were much lower—under 5%. These areas had lower odds of upward mobility than the average of any developed country the researchers could compare them with.

Image source. Income mobility across generations in Denmark and the United States. Family wealth breeds child wealth in the U.S: parents' income is more predictive of children’s adult income in the United States than in Denmark.

Image source. Distribution of upward mobility, defined as the probability of a child growing up in a household in the bottom 20% of income of reaching the top 20% of income by age ~30, in the United States. Lighter colours indicate higher upward mobility.

What factors contributed to some areas supporting upward mobility and others not? The study found five main factors that made a difference:

• Segregation. Upward mobility was lower in areas with a larger portion of the population identifying as Black or African American. This effect also held for white children who grew up in these areas, suggesting a community-wide effect. Historically, areas with a larger Black or African American population tended to be more segregated by race and income, preventing children growing up in these communities from accessing opportunities available to others.

• Inequality. Areas with greater income inequality had a lower rate of upward mobility.  Those who grew up poor in very unequal areas had little chance of catching up.

• Quality of the K-12 school system. Areas with lower school dropout rates, better test scores, and higher local tax rates (local taxes are important for funding public schools) had higher rates of upward mobility. Good-quality education could make a difference. 

• Strength of social networks and community involvement. Areas with higher voter turnout, increased census participation, and greater involvement in community organization had higher rates of upward mobility. We’ll return to the importance of community ties below.

• Single parents. Upward mobility was lower in areas with a higher percentage of single parents. This effect also held for children who grew up living with two parents in these areas. The difficulties of raising children alone can affect entire communities.

Using the same dataset, a recent study investigated whether neighbourhood walkability is another factor that could make a difference for upward mobility. 

Why would walkability matter? There are at least two reasons, likely more. 

First, walkable areas might help equalize access to jobs. In places that are not walkable, not being able to afford a car severely limits job opportunities - you can only take jobs that you can get to by walking or by public transportation. 

Second, walkable areas can lead to increased social interaction with neighbours and an increased sense of community. If you live in a walkable area, you can walk to the grocery store, to the park, or the post office and run into neighbours along the way. Over time, you can get to know your neighbours and form weak ties, which open up job and other advancement opportunities. In addition, we have a basic motivation to feel a sense of connection and belonging, and a strong sense of belonging may be especially important for people trying to overcome adversity. For example, a social belonging intervention improved minority college students’ academic performance and self-reported health and well-being. Feeling a sense of community may help us see daily hardships differently.

The study used the Walk Score to estimate areas’ walkability. The Walk Score is calculated based on factors like access to amenities, population density, and intersection density. It turns out to be a pretty good objective measure of walkability.

Upward mobility was higher in areas of the U.S. that had a higher Walk Score, even after taking into account the five factors listed earlier (demographics, income inequality, K-12 school quality, community involvement, single parents), and other possible confounding factors, like political affiliation, median income, violent crime, and government spending per person.

Another study used the same dataset to investigate a related factor—urban sprawl. Measures of urban sprawl include factors like density of development, land use mix, how centered the population and places of employment are, and how connected the streets are to one another. Within the U.S., cities like New York or San Francisco are the most compact, while cities like Atlanta have the greatest sprawl. This study found that upward mobility was higher in more compact areas of the country, in line with the findings on walkability. 

No car? No problem. And walking and talking.

An analysis of data from over 3.6 million Americans who participated in the American Community Survey examined the possible link between car ownership, employment, and income.

In general, people who had cars were more likely to have a job and a higher income than non-car-owners. But this link was weaker in walkable areas. So, there’s support for the idea that upward mobility is higher in walkable areas because not having a car is less of a barrier to getting a (good) job.

How about the idea that walkable areas support upward mobility by getting people to meet each other and forge community ties? There’s support for that, too.

People who live in walkable areas tend to know more of their neighbours than those who live in less walkable areas. They also tend to have a greater  sense of belonging to their community (see, e.g., here or here).

If walking encourages more social interaction… then could living in a walkable area make us more outgoing? A recent study examined the link between an area’s walkability and residents’ personality (using the OCEAN model — openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, see here for a previous post on the link between personality and environment). The dataset included personality measures of 5141 people from all parts of Japan and the Walk Score of the 4581 neighbourhoods they lived in. (As a research methods aside, either because the team wanted to avoid paying a pretty penny for the Walk Score API, or because the second author was a research hero/martyr, “for each of the 4581 neighbourhoods, the respective Walk Score was looked up individually by the second author”. My mouse-clicking hand hurts from just thinking about that.)

The study found that people in more walkable areas were more extraverted, even after controlling for a large set of possibly confounding variables, including the length of time that people had lived in the neighbourhood and whether they lived in their hometown (in case extraverted people had moved to a more extraverted area of the town or country, as they like to do!).

So, what can you do if walking gets you to be more social, to know more people in the neighbourhood, and to have a greater sense of community? Well, get a job for one — weak ties, like neighbourhood acquaintances can help people find jobs.

There’s also evidence that walkability can increase sense of belonging in a community, which can in turn increase upward mobility. In one large, nationally-representative survey of Americans, researchers collected the walkability of people’s neighbourhoods by asking how long it would take them to walk to nine useful places (a job, school, supermarket, restaurant, gym or fitness centre, library, post office, park, coffee or tea shop, and a bank or ATM) and how frequently they actually walked to these useful places. People also reported their feeling of belonging to the community. Upward mobility was measured by comparing people’s reported socioeconomic status with the socioeconomic status of their parents when they were growing up. 

People who lived in more walkable areas had stronger feelings of belonging to the neighbourhood and this, in turn, was linked with increased upward mobility. The same relationship held for frequency of walking to neighbourhood spots (a finding also replicated in a large South Korean sample) – walking frequently was related to increased sense of belonging, which was related to increased upward mobility.

While increasing walkability can’t right wrongs, I hope we consider putting our shared resources toward making it easier to live our lives on foot to help equalize opportunities across the U.S.

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