“ Once thriving”: using Google street view virtual audits to measure neighborhood disinvestment in the Jackson, MS Tri-County area

Disinvestment in segregated, low-income Black communities is rooted in structural racism and racial capitalism and contributes to racial health inequities. Virtual audits have been used to capture visible signs of neighborhood disinvestment, however, these methods have been primarily used and validated in dense urban cities in the Northeast and Western U.S. We used Google Street View to conduct virtual audits in the Jackson, Mississippi tri-county metropolitan area-a mid-sized, urban area in the U.S. South. Our approach engaged residents and community organizers in conversations to inform our interpretation of the local context and utilized exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to develop a total disinvestment score for each observed street segment. In select neighborhoods, we also assessed neighborhood disinvestment longitudinally. We found that disinvestment scores were higher in historically Black neighborhoods and within Jackson city limits compared to surrounding, majority-white counties and increased over time in some neighborhoods. Our score was positively associated with housing vacancy, unemployment, residential segregation by race and income, and negatively associated with owner-occupied housing. Virtual audits can be valid tools for measuring physical signs of disinvestment in low-density cities in the US South, and for measuring contributions of the built environment to population health inequities.