Towards Well-Being in Old Residential Areas: How Health-Promoting Environments Influence Resident Sentiment Within the 15-Minute Living Circle

Building healthy communities is crucial for creating healthy cities and improving residents’ well-being. Old residential areas, with their substantial stock and elevated health risks, require urgent environmental upgrades. However, the relationship between community health promotion factors and resident sentiment, a crucial indicator of subjective well-being, in old residential areas remains poorly understood. By integrating big data-based community health promotion factors and Weibo data within the 15-min living circle of old residential areas in Xi’an, we developed an XGBoost model and employed SHAP analyses to interpret predictive outcomes. Results show that healthy facilities were dominant influencing factors in old residential areas. Densities of parking, supermarkets, education, package stations, and scenic spots exhibit nonlinear relationships with positive sentiment, indicating clear threshold effects and saturation effects. Two dominant patterns were observed in interactions between dominant factors and their strongest interacting factors. Four environment–sentiment patterns were identified for targeted planning interventions. It is recommended that planners and policymakers account for density phases and synergistic combinations of the dominant factors to optimize community health within old residential areas. The findings offer empirical support and planning insights for fostering healthy, sentiment-sensitive retrofit in old residential areas within the 15-min living circle.