PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — While communities and officials across Philadelphia have been seeking solutions to the ongoing gun violence crisis, a new study from the University of Pennsylvania shows evidence that making the most deprived neighborhoods more green could lead to nearly 10% fewer shootings.
Several studies in the past have confirmed that, in Philadelphia and across the country, communities with higher incomes have more green space than those with lower incomes, and that these greener neighborhoods are more safe.
Jonathan Jay, lead author on the recent study from Penn, says researchers used data analysis to measure two distinguishing factors: neighborhood privilege and tree cover.
“Tree equity is the idea that cities will adopt targets where they say that no neighborhood can have a tree cover below a certain threshold,” he explained.
“If a city achieves tree cover, then what they have done is they've effectively eliminated the gap between the best-off neighborhoods and the ones that currently don't get as much exposure to tree cover.”
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He said they tested the effect on the number of shootings in neighborhoods in the study that had been brought up to a baseline tree canopy standard.
“We looked at how tree cover and residential segregation relate to one another, and how those things combine to produce gun violence,” said Jay.
“Second, in relation to trees, we looked at what would happen if tree cover were increased in a way that reduced the gaps between more-privileged neighborhoods that currently have high tree cover, and more socially deprived neighborhoods that currently have much lower tree cover.”
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He said they evaluated six cities: Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Virginia and Syracuse, New York.
“We found that bringing the neighborhoods that have the lowest tree canopy up to the standard of the neighborhoods that have the most tree canopy would reduce gun violence. That reduction would be the biggest in the neighborhoods that experienced the most disadvantaged, the deepest impacts of structural racism,” said Jay.
“In those neighborhoods, there would be 9% reduction in gun violence from achieving this baseline tree equity target.”
Jay said that improving tree equity would also lead to other benefits, including reducing heat and improving chronic disease outcomes.
“There's many reasons to try to close the gap in tree cover between the most privileged and the most deprived neighborhoods,” he said. "But one of them is that so many of those inequities have been generated through discriminatory action over time, so this is one step that can help to close those gaps and address that injustice.”
Dr. Eugenia South, faculty director of the Urban Health Lab and Emergency Medicine at Penn, led the months-long study. The National Institutes of Health awarded South $10 million to study how investing in Black Philadelphia neighborhoods can help address structural racism and its effects on health.
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