Is Gentrification a Carcinogen? Neighborhood Change and Cancerous Vehicle Emissions in Los Angeles County

Neighborhood disadvantage erodes residents’ mental and physical health. But whether rapid reductions in disadvantage spurred by gentrification attenuate or exacerbate these effects remains unknown due to mixed theoretical expectations and empirical results. To help clarify these dynamics, I propose a novel hypothesis that casts gentrification as a carcinogen. As neighborhoods receive inflows of affluent, White residents, influxes of private vehicles may come with them. In turn, stationary residents become exposed to higher vehicular emissions, and their risk of cancer—especially lung cancer—climbs. As an initial empirical test of these theoretical possibilities, I link Urban Displacement Project data identifying Los Angeles County neighborhoods that gentrified during the 2000s to tract-level data on vehicle ownership and cancer risk profiles—the latter from the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Air Toxics Assessment. Descriptive regressions that include a lagged dependent variable and municipal fixed effects suggest gentrifying tracts’ levels of cancer risk factors increased by ∼0.5 standard deviations more than those of disadvantaged neighborhoods that did not gentrify. Sobel tests of mediation indicate nearly half of this association may be explained by a pathway related to increasing vehicle density. The study thus motivates future research leveraging individual-level data and quasi-experimental methods to solidify whether gentrification is indeed a carcinogen.