Oct. 15, 2020


Redlining as a Driver of Health Inequality


A paper I worked on with my DUSP colleague, Mariana Arcaya, as well as Nancy Krieger, Emily Wright, Jarvis Chen, and Pamela Waterman at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, is now in print in the American Journal of Epidemiology. We analyzed the lasting public health effects of the racialized risk categories articulated in the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation residential security maps—better known as ‘redlining’ maps—as digitized by the Mapping Inequality project. We find that residence in a previously redlined area imposed higher risk for late-stage cancer diagnosis, even in those areas where urban renewal, gentrification, and reinvestment have remade those areas into zones of contemporary privilege.

Nancy Krieger, Emily Wright, Jarvis T Chen, Pamela D Waterman, Eric Robsky Huntley, Mariana Arcaya. 2020. “Cancer Stage at Diagnosis, Historical Redlining, and Current Neighborhood Characteristics: Breast, Cervical, Lung, and Colorectal Cancers, Massachusetts, 2001–2015.” American Journal of Epidemiology 189 (10): 1065-1075. DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwaa045.

If you would like a copy but don’t have institutional access to the AJE, let me know.


  • Eric Robsky Huntley
  • ehuntley@mit.edu
  • They/them/theirs.*

  • Eric Robsky Huntley is a Lecturer in Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT where they maintain affiliations with the Data + Feminism Lab and the Healthy Neighborhoods Study. They also serve as a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School …