The Department of Housing and Urban Development has tracked volunteers living in public housing since 1998. One group was given vouchers that allowed them to live in middle-class neighborhoods, another received vouchers for rent but stayed put, and the third was a control group:
The health of people who received rent subsidies but did not move showed no significant improvement. But the people who moved to middle-class neighborhoods were about 5% less likely to be obese and show signs of diabetes than were people in the control group, the team reports today in The New England Journal of Medicine. "These are pretty big effects," Ludwig says, "comparable in size to the long-term effects on diabetes we see from targeted lifestyle interventions or from providing people with medication that can prevent the onset of diabetes."
(Image: "Cities" by Atelier Olschinsky)
The Dish 