Katherine Allen, UF/IFAS Suwannee County Extension
Contributor
Walking past a vacant site with trash rustling in the breeze can make your heart beat a little faster. In addition to the surge of adrenaline increasing your stress level, studies suggest that blighted or dilapidated physical environments tend to attract crime.
Neighborhood physical conditions, including vacant or dilapidated spaces, trash and lack of quality infrastructure, such as sidewalks and parks, are associated with depression. All of these factors take a toll on the mental health of residents in vacancy-hit neighborhoods.
Picking up garbage and turning lots into green spaces can change the places where people live, work and play. Researchers are suggesting that, in addition to making neighborhoods look more attractive, it may have broad population-level effects on mental health outcomes.
In Philadelphia, a project by researchers found that turning vacant lots into green spaces alleviated the feeling of depression among residents who lived on 541 lots in the poorest neighborhoods. People felt vacancies and abandoned houses created fractures between neighbors and affected the social environment of the neighborhood.
What did they do?
One group graded the land and planted grass and trees. Individual property lots in this cluster also had low fences installed (three feet or lower), which is believed to create a delineation of property while eliminating the impression of a barrier. It was found to have a beneficial effect. Another group only mowed the grass and cleaned up trash and debris. The third, the control group, received no treatment.
What they found was that, in neighborhoods below the poverty line, greening interventions decreased residents’ feelings of depression by more than 68 percent. Meanwhile, residents near lots that only had trash removed saw little improvement in their feelings of depression.
The study’s finding is in line with what researchers have observed in other studies. Linking people with nature, such as strolling through the woods or a park, led to more positive emotions. In a study in London, study participants living near trees were prescribed fewer antidepressants. It is commonly believed that green spaces help us recover from mental fatigue.
Be all and end all?
Greening will not solve America’s mental-health troubles, but it is a low-cost treatment option for those who can access parks or green spaces. However, the lots require maintenance. Who pays for that? How could an individual who wants to do help beautify or cleanup, do so, whether providing financial help or material and supplies?
Final results.
The study has limitations. Researchers did not measure long-term impacts, nor did they measure how residents interacted with the spaces. Some questions for the future include how much space and how long is needed in the green space for the best result?
Suwannee County has lovely parks. Take advantage of visiting them and/or become active in taking care of them. Suwannee County UF/IFAS Extension's Master Gardener volunteers training program is one of the best in the state! For more information on how to improve local communities, contact Katherine Allen at UF/IFAS Suwannee County Extension, an Equal Opportunity Institution, at nrgkate@ufl.edu.
Reference: JAMA Network Open. 2018;1(3):e180298. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.0298