Walkability and Mental Health Resiliency During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigates if local walkability helped mitigate the well-documented mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Walkability may improve mental health by facilitating walking (which our data suggest occurred during the pandemic), as well as through other avenues such as time spent outdoors and improved social ties. However, estimating the causal effects of walkability is challenged by its lack of exogenous time variation. Our empirical approach uses the pandemic as a geographically-variable and arguably-random shock to mental health which, when combined with Census tract measures of walkability and mental health, sheds light on the possible impact of local walkability on mental health resiliency. Focusing on within-county, over-time variation in mental health and controlling for a wide set of local factors, results suggest that those living in a more walkable community experienced smaller declines in mental health. The magnitudes are reasonable; increasing walkability by one standard deviation is associated with a 4 percent reduction in the average pandemic-related deterioration in mental health. These findings are robust to many sensitivity checks and falsification tests. Although the pandemic is the random shock studied here, this research has implications for the potential role of walkability in diminishing the mental health effects of other stressors.