CH O I CES H E A LTH
Neighborhood Watch
Your surroundings can have a big impact on your health
to get around stapleton, colorado, all you
really need are your feet. Residents of the
4,700-acre Denver suburb stroll or cycle to
downtown offices and schools within minutes,
weaving through forested greenways and
bike trails. Along the way, they can stop for
a coffee or gaze at public art. On weekends,
they can chat with neighbors while buying
arugula at the local farmers’ market, take a
bus to downtown Denver, or just settle into
the grass of the 80-acre “Central Park,” an
emerald gem of open space at the town’s core.
The community’s mix of single-family homes,
townhouses, and apartments—with units
reserved for lower-income citizens—all meet
state environmental building standards.
It’s no surprise the town touts itself as a
model of smart growth and environmentally
sensitive development. But recent research
suggests that communities like Stapleton are
not just more eco-friendly, they’re also healthier
places to live. “We hadn’t really looked into
the way neighborhoods can impact health until
recently, but it’s starting to look like one of the
missing pieces to the public-health puzzle,” says
Laura Brennan Ramirez, an assistant professor
74 | Feb/Mar/07 plentymag.com
BY CHRISTINE DELL’AMORE
at Saint Louis University who recently authored
a study on the issue.
To understand what makes a healthy
neighborhood, it helps to know what makes
an unhealthy one. In the past few years,
public-health experts have been researching
the effects of urban sprawl and car-dependent suburbs. What they’re finding is that
people living in these areas—where homes
and businesses are spaced far apart along
roadways that require cars to get from place
to place—face more health problems than
those living in more compact neighborhoods
that allow easy walking and biking.
The bulk of that research has focused on the
relationship between neighborhoods and the
levels of physical activity and obesity of their
residents. People living in low-density neighborhoods, it turns out, are more sedentary and
heavie