Author: Jae-Wan Ahn

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 115

ISBN-13:

The United States is a highly urbanized nation. Today, with a growing number of people living in cities, a better understanding of how changes within urban areas impact the well-being of residents has important implications for policymakers and communities. The urban spatial structure of these cities is continually evolving, and in different ways across cities. This changing urban environment has substantial impacts on health and well-being. This dissertation takes a comprehensive view of social welfare from a policy perspective, including questions related to environmental degradation and public health, in order to scrutinize how urban gradients and urban spatial structures yield different consequences and affect residents in various ways. My first chapter explores how changing urbanization patterns in the United States influences air quality outcomes. Specifically, I seek to answer whether more compact forms of residential development result in better air quality relative to more sprawling patterns. I use spatially explicit data on air pollution and residential development, including over 6 million observations on new housing from tax assessment data, across large metropolitan areas to reveal a causal link between urban sprawl and air pollution from vehicle traffic. I find that compact cities experience a larger reduction in nitrogen dioxide and ozone compared with sprawling cities. In my second chapter, I explore the health benefits of urban green space. In order to better understand the impacts of urban green space on health outcomes, I examine the effects of city park area on mortality rates from cardiovascular disease among the elderly. I combine city park data with data on mortality rates, behavioral risk factors, and socioeconomic characteristics to conduct comparative case studies utilizing a synthetic control method. I select cities with significantly increased and reduced park area and examine how health benefits vary compared to cities where park area has not expanded. My results indicate that cities with increased park area experience a larger reduction in cardiovascular mortality for the elderly compared to their synthetic counterparts, although cities with reduced park area fail to show that there is a negative causal link between the reduction of parkland and cardiovascular mortality. In my third chapter, I study spatial variations in housing market resilience within and across U.S. metropolitan areas. I investigate how residential housing markets respond to the economic boom and bust periods before, during and after the Great Recession across urban, suburban, and exurban areas. Using over 15 million observations of housing sales across the largest 51 metropolitan areas of over one million population, this essay focuses on variations across census tracts to trace the path of housing prices at the neighborhood level. The results indicate that, relative to suburban and exurban areas, housing markets in urban areas were harder hit during the recession but recovered faster after the market crash. Urban and exurban housing markets within cities with high geographical restrictions fell to a similar extent during the bust. I also find that the West region was particularly volatile during this sample period.