Health Preferences and Sorting in the City

There are large health inequalities between neighborhoods in many cities of the world. This paper studies individuals' sorting based on health amenities and exposes an important connection between health preferences and the housing market. I estimate a neighborhood choice model using geolocated data from a health survey in New York City and neighborhood characteristics from different data sources. I find that individuals with higher preferences for being healthy are more likely to choose neighborhoods close to health amenities such as parks, and this sorting explains a large part of observed geographical inequalities in health behaviors. Moreover, the model predicts that a higher demand for health amenities capitalizes into house prices and displaces poor individuals to neighborhoods further from these amenities. This implies that health awareness campaigns might actually worsen the inequality in access to public health amenities.