neighborhood health
kkrisberg | March 20, 2015For all you city-dwellers out there, next time you walk by a vacant lot that’s been refurbished with green gardens and budding trees, take note of your heart rate. You might find the pleasantly green view caused a welcome moment of relaxation and lowered stress.
At least that’s what researchers found in a new study published this week in the American Journal of Public Health. In monitoring the ambulatory heart of rate of study participants in Philadelphia before and after they walked by vacant urban lots that had received a “greening remediation treatment,” researchers found that seeing a…
kkrisberg | February 28, 2014It’s probably no surprise that people who experienced foreclosures during the Great Recession may have also experienced symptoms of depression. However, researchers have found that the mental health effects of foreclosure go beyond the individual to the community at-large.
“For the most part, discussion of foreclosure has focused on the individual experience, the people who are in this circumstance, who are at risk of losing their homes, of losing that nest egg,” said Kathleen Cagney, a professor within the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. “But we wanted to think about…