On the Relationship between Poverty Segregation and Homelessness in the American City and Suburb

Although existing scholarship notes that homelessness thrives in concentrated poverty, models estimating the association between the intensity of residential poverty segregation and local homelessness rates across communities remain absent from the literature. To fill this gap, the author considers this relationship for 272 homelessness Continuums of Care covering urban and suburban spaces spanning 43 states and the District of Columbia. Models suggest that poverty segregation is positively associated with the expected homelessness rate of a Continuum of Care, a relationship that remains significant when controlling for a range of established drivers of the condition. The author discusses this finding within a framework qualifying residential poverty segregation as both a cause and a consequence of the local prevalence of economic disadvantage that predicts homelessness via its relationship with disadvantage and unique spatial effects.

Thinking ethically about pandemics: a matter of public health and social ethics

This essay argues that any ethical approach to mitigating the negative effects of pandemics must give detailed and sustained attention to those who are on the margins of society. This means tackling widespread racism and concentrated poverty in our body politics. The challenges resulting from pandemics are not merely ones of public health but are simultaneously matters of social ethics. The aim of this essay is to highlight important values from religious social ethics for responding ethically to pandemics. In this work, I do not undertake the task of formulating and prescribing national policies that egalitarian democratic societies should adopt in pandemic situations. Instead, the paper focuses on how religious social ethics can help reimagine social life and communal practices by focusing on the margins to mitigate some of the negative effects caused by public health disasters.

Poverty and mental health: policy, practice and research implications

SummaryThis article examines the relationship between poverty and mental health problems. We draw on the experience of Glasgow, our home city, which contains some of Western Europe's areas of greatest concentrated poverty and poorest health outcomes. We highlight how mental health problems are related directly to poverty, which in turn underlies wider health inequalities. We then outline implications for psychiatry.

Weak and uneven associations of home, neighborhood and school environments with stress hormone output across multiple time scales

ABSTRACTThe progression of lifelong trajectories of socioeconomic inequalities in health and mortality begins in childhood. Dysregulation in cortisol, a stress hormone that is the primary output of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, has been hypothesized to be a mechanism for how early environmental adversity compromises health. However, despite the popularity of cortisol as a biomarker for stress and adversity, little is known about whether cortisol output differs in children being raised in socioeconomically disadvantaged environments. Here, we show that there are few differences between advantaged and disadvantaged children in their cortisol output. In 8- to 14-year-old children from the population-based Texas Twin Project, we measured cortisol output at three different time-scales: (1) diurnal fluctuation in salivary cortisol (n = 400), (2) salivary cortisol reactivity and recovery after exposure to the Trier Social Stress Test (n = 444), and (3) and cortisol concentration in hair (n = 1,210). These measures converged on two moderately correlated, yet distinguishable, dimensions of HPA function. We then tested differences in cortisol output across nine aspects of social disadvantage at the home (e.g., family socioeconomic status), school (e.g., average levels of academic achievement), and neighborhood (e.g., concentrated poverty). Children living in neighborhoods with higher concentrated poverty had higher diurnal cortisol output, as measured in saliva; otherwise, child cortisol output was unrelated to any other aspect of social disadvantage. Overall, we find limited support for alteration in HPA axis functioning as a general mechanism for the health consequences of socioeconomic inequality in childhood.