Sprawl and Obesity: NYC as a case study

It is very difficult to live in Manhattan if you are not fit. All of the stairs, subways, walking blocks from stations and stops to your destination. I am sure that all the exercise helps those who are living there.

But if you create a place that is more difficult to be obese, sure, there will be fewer obese people living there. It is also very difficult to live there if you are older or weaker. The accommodations for handicapped are fewer and add significantly to the hardship of just getting from one place to another.

I like Manhattan, but it can be difficult to get around if your have any physical issues.

> Here's my educated guess: both poverty and sprawl correlate with obesity.

As long as it says "correlate", it is merely an observation on data. Easily verifiable but not very useful, maybe as a start for forming a proper hypothesis about causal relationships. Such a hypothesis would obviously be much harder to verify.

A good friend of mine is trying to solve the food desert problem in inner city Rochester, NY. It would be interesting to see food desert data overlaid with this data as well. It's obvious that Manhattan is not a food desert and one can easily get fresh produce. Not sure about certain places in the Bronx or Queens though. It would also be interesting to see gentrification as a contrast.

-edit- on an iPad now so can't see the flash based map, but data can be found here:http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-desert-locator/go...

I think it's wealth correlating with obesity more than sprawl. Do people who live in the Bronx or Queens really walk around less than those in Manhattan?