Healthly and Equitable Density

A recent post on CEOs for Cities from Stantec senior principle David Dixon entitled "To Make Your Community Healthier, Make It Denser" contains a number of meaty statistics about the connections between health, cars, equality, and cities... fueling the reality that density saves lives:

•  1999: The Centers for Disease Control reported that inactivity and poor diet caused 300,000 deaths in the United States, second only to tobacco (CDC)
•  2008: University of Utah researchers found that men who lived in walkable neighborhoods weighed 10 pounds less than men in low-density neighborhoods (NRDC)
•  2014: Cities with more compact street networks have lower levels of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease (Journal of Transport & Health)
• Per-capita auto fatalities rise roughly 400 percent along a continuum of density from typical urban to typical suburban (Accident Analysis & Prevention)
• The United States has three to five times the amount of traffic fatalities relative to other developed countries; auto fatalities represent the #1 cause of accidental deaths in the U.S. (Source)
•  Ten percent of U.S. households control 75 percent of all U.S. wealth - the wealthy are consuming the walkable neighborhoods at a voracious rate. 
• For the first time in this country's history, more poor people live in suburbs than in cities (Source) 

"The payback from density extends beyond physical health. Walkable neighborhoods promote economic health by attracting knowledge workers and investment and promote environmental health by creating an inviting alternative to sprawl... [Yet] as we employ density to create healthy neighborhoods, we also need to employ it to create equity."