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4
Physical Activity and the
Built Environment
T
he second panel of the workshop examined organizations and move-
ments related to physical activity and the built environment. These
groups are even more diverse than those discussed during the previ-
ous panel on food and agriculture, with interests ranging from community
development, to transportation policy, to outdoor activity, to police–youth
programs, to the use of national parks to promote the public health. Yet
each has the potential to contribute to obesity prevention.
COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
The Federal Reserve has a deep commitment to the economic health
of low-income communities across the country, said David Erickson, direc-
tor of the Center for Community Development Investments at the Federal
Reserve Bank of San Francisco.1 Each of the 12 Federal Reserve banks
across the country has a community development department dedicated
to fostering local development and the maximum employment possible.
The Federal Reserve2 also is a bank regulator in charge of enforcing anti-
redlining laws, which require banks to lend back to the communities where
people make deposits. “There’s a social welfare component baked into the
1 For more information on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, see http://www.frbsf.
org/index.html.
2 For more information on community development and the Federal Reserve, see http://www.
federalreserve.gov/communitydev/default.htm.
25
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26 ALLIANCES FOR OBESITY PREVENTION
DNA of the Federal Reserve,” said Erickson. “People don’t often realize
that.”
Community development is an effort to empower local communi-
ties to take the reins of their economic destiny. Instead of a top-down
approach emanating from Washington, DC, networks of both governmen-
tal and nongovernmental players are involved in neighborhood community
development corporations and local advocacy groups. These networks
build affordable housing, finance small businesses, and support community
facilities. Since the low-income housing tax credit was enacted in 1986, for
example, 3 million high-quality apartments housing about 15 million low-
income families have been built nationwide.
Many groups are involved in the support of these programs, including
the federal government, banks, foundations, socially motivated investors,
pension funds, and insurance companies. “The point I’m trying to make,”
said Erickson, “is that there is a lot of money here. It is not sufficient to the
needs, but when we think about alliances . . . we have an income stream
that we can work with.”
Recently, the Federal Reserve has been partnering with the Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation to examine and improve the social determinants
of health. For example, a series of conferences held across the country
has brought together people interested in public health and in community
development. These conferences often feature a comparison of two maps:
one that shows the prevalence of a health problem such as childhood obe-
sity in the local communities across a region and another that shows the
prevalence of economic hardship in the same communities. Invariably, the
maps are almost identical: as economic hardship increases, the prevalence
of childhood obesity also increases. “You can hear a pin drop in these meet-
ings at this moment,” said Erickson. “It’s obvious that we in community
development and those who worry about public health are working side by
side in the same communities, but we don’t know each other.”
Erickson closed by briefly mentioning three programs that he believes
would be valuable allies in reducing childhood obesity: the Healthy Foods
Financing Initiative3 for building grocery stores in food deserts; transit-
oriented development; and small business development of companies that,
for instance, provide locally sourced organic food.
3 For more information on the Healthy Foods Financing Initiative, see http://www.acf.hhs.
gov/programs/ocs/ocs_food.html.
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27
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
TRANSPORTATION POLICY
Recently, the American Public Health Association4 interviewed public
health professionals about the transportation profession and transportation
professionals about public health professionals (Finkelstein, 2011). The
results were not encouraging, said James Corless, director of Transporta-
tion for America,5 a coalition of more than 400 organizations working to
promote a new national transportation policy that is smarter, safer, and
cleaner and provides more choice. Public health experts made statements
such as “transportation planners’ emphasis is on moving cars, not people,”
and “it’s common for planners to say they’ll ‘improve the roadways,’ when
all they’re doing is widening the road, which creates more barriers to
other modes of transportation, forcing more people into cars, and creat-
ing a future need to widen the road.” Meanwhile, transportation planners
characterized public health advocates as “unrealistic,” “mostly benign and
somewhat naïve and uneducated about ‘the way things are,’” and “heavy-
handed in pushing their agenda and demanding things to be done their
way.”
The transportation and public health professions are at almost opposite
ends of a spectrum in terms of not only what they do but also how they
think, said Corless. Transportation is a field with little regulation. The
federal transportation program gives money to state departments of trans-
portation and lets them decide what to do with it. Transportation planners
resist even applying to transportation projects useful techniques such as
health impact assessment—which could potentially expedite projects or
garner more funding if the results were positive—because they believe “it
is simply another box to check,” Corless commented.
However, the transportation profession has slowly been changing, said
Corless, and change will be accelerated in the future because the profession
is in a state of crisis. A lack of money is one prominent reason, but so is
a lack of political support for projects the profession wants to undertake.
An emphasis on safety, which is a core mission of the transportation
profession, is gradually changing the way transportation planners think.
Corless quoted a recent statement from the Institute of Traffic Engineers6:
“Neighborhood streets need to be designed to reduce traffic speeds. . . .
Rather than adapting children to traffic, the traffic environment can be
adapted to accommodate children” (Jacobsen et al., 2000, p. 73). Simi-
larly, by a significant margin, Americans say that safer streets should be
the primary objective of increased infrastructure support: in a 2011 poll,
4 For more information on the American Public Health Association, see http://www.apha.
org/.
5 For more information on Transportation for America, see http://t4america.org/.
6 For more information on the Institute of Traffic Engineers, see http://www.ite.org/.
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28 ALLIANCES FOR OBESITY PREVENTION
respondents ranked “safer streets for our communities and children” well
above such goals as “a faster commute to and from work” and “high-
speed intercity travel” (Rockefeller Foundation, 2011). Such results create
opportunities for dialogue between the transportation and public health
professions.
Corless discussed three components of a healthy transportation agenda.
The first is measuring the benefits of decisions made by transportation plan-
ners. The public health community has much to offer, Corless believes, in
terms of cost-benefit analyses and quantification of performance measures.
To illustrate, he asked, “What are you actually getting as an outcome of
your investments?” The second element of the agenda is participating in the
transportation planning process. Different land use scenarios can be ana-
lyzed, and health impact assessments can be added to projects and plans.
The third element is translating walking and bicycling into cost savings. A
more active population can save money overall, and research that examines
these savings can generate powerful advocacy messages.
The important issues in the short term, Corless concluded, are safe
routes to school, crash reduction, complete streets7 policies, and health
agencies advocating for active transportation policies and land use plan-
ning. A more long-term (which Corless defined as 5-10 years) objective is
to make health an outcome in transportation. Health should be a part of
transportation cost-benefit analyses, Corless said, and health professionals
should work inside transportation agencies.
BRINGING BACK RECESS
KEEN8 is a company based in Portland, Oregon, with a philosophy
of HybridLife, said KEEN brand marketing manager Linda Balfour. She
explained that the philosophy connotes “creating possibilities, caring for
the world around us, and getting outside and playing.” The company
believes the outdoors is any place without a ceiling, and everyone should
have access to the outdoors regardless of age, ethnicity, or location.
When KEEN surveyed its customers about how they engage with the
outdoors, a theme of the responses was that the world is moving faster, and
people have less time to get outside and play. The company also found that
adults were not teaching children how to play.
KEEN’s response was to launch its Recess Is Back campaign,9 which
was based on several observations from a poll conducted by Harris Interac-
7A complete street is a road designed and operated to be safe for all users, including drivers,
bicyclists, transit vehicles and users, and pedestrians of all ages and abilities.
8 For more information on KEEN, see http://www.keenfootwear.com.
9 For more information on the Recess is Back initiative, see http://recess.keenfootwear.com.
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PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
tive. First, 70 percent of U.S. working adults said they had never taken a
paid recess-type break outside of lunchtime. More than half said that if a
daily 10-minute outdoor recess break were initiated at their workplace, it
would make them healthier, happier, or more productive employees (Busi-
ness Wire, 2011).
The Recess Is Back initiative was based on both a top-down and a
bottom-up approach, according to Balfour. It reminded people that 10
minutes a day spent outside is not something from the distant past—it can
still be part of their daily lives. The initiative held events across the United
States in five major cities, created tools that people could use to spread the
word about recess with their friends, and created a website with suggestions
to inspire recess breaks. The website suggests different ways to experience
recess, from 10-minute breaks walking the dog or a yoga break at a desk
to longer weekend breaks such as a camping trip.
In addition to encouraging individuals, the initiative sought to enable
companies to institute recess by creating an Instant Recess Toolkit.10 As
part of this campaign, KEEN partnered with Toni (Antronette) Yancey,
professor of health services and co-director of the Center to Eliminate
Health Disparities in the University of California, Los Angeles, School of
Public Health and one of the five members of the planning committee for
the workshop, to create a Recess Cost-Benefit Calculator11 that would dem-
onstrate to businesses the returns they would realize by instituting a daily
10-minute recess for their employees.
Yancey explained the calculator in more detail. It is based on a synthe-
sis of business case studies and scientific research, including randomized
controlled trials and cross-sectional studies examining the cost of injuries
and of people remaining inactive versus engaging in short stints of activity.
With the calculator, employers enter their number of employees, the average
hourly wage, the average number of hours worked per week, the industry
type, and whether the 10-minute recess will be mandatory or voluntary.
The toolkit produces a conservative estimate of return on investment for
10 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity, disaggregated into
savings from reduced absenteeism; reduced presenteeism; performance
enhancement; and, after 1 year, lower medical costs. The returns per dollar
invested are approximately $1.50 to $2.00 and begin to accrue within as
little as 3 months, Yancey said. She noted further that, based on a more
thorough analysis done after the calculator was created, a more realistic
estimate of returns per dollar invested may be in the $4.00 range.
10 For more information on the Instant Recess Toolkit, see http://recess.keenfootwear.com/
recess-at-work/.
11 For more information on the Recess Cost-Benefit Calculator, see http://calculator.keen
footwear.com/.
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30 ALLIANCES FOR OBESITY PREVENTION
WORKING WITH THE POLICE
The National Association of Police Athletic/Activities Leagues, Inc.
(PAL)12 is a non-school-hour youth crime prevention program that brings
police and youth together in a positive environment so they can develop
trust and respect for each other. The program originated in New York City
in 1914 as a response to juvenile crime and became a national program
in 1940. It has more than 350 chapters nationwide and in the U.S. Virgin
Islands, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Nigeria. By bringing youth under the
supervision and positive influence of law enforcement, the program expands
awareness of the role of law enforcement officers in the local community,
and reinforces responsible values and attitudes instilled in young people by
their parents. “Kids, cops, and community is a winning combination,” said
PAL’s executive director, Sergeant Michael Dillhyon, “because if all those
things are working together it’s positive for the whole community.”
PAL is based on the conviction that if young people are reached early
enough, they can develop strong, positive attitudes toward the goals of
maturity and good citizenship, said Dillhyon, and obesity prevention is a
natural component of that mission. PAL has been developing a program
to address childhood obesity and inactivity, called Strive4Fitness®.13 This
program involves working with children to encourage and inspire them to
look and feel their best, perform better in sports, and excel in the class-
room. PAL also has a mentoring program so youth will have an exercise or
fitness buddy. And local PAL chapters around the country have a variety
of programs with a nutritional component, such as culinary programs in
which youth work in restaurants in Pinellas County, Florida, and Howell
Township, New Jersey.
HEALTHY PARKS, HEALTHY PEOPLE
Almost 300 million visitors a year come to America’s national parks
(National Park Service, 2011), and open spaces in natural places have
always played an important role in human health and well-being. The
national parks provide a prime opportunity to promote public health activi-
ties, said Captain Chuck Higgins, director of the Office of Public Health
for the National Park Service. Higgins recently has been leading an effort
to extend the role of the national parks in public health. Known as Healthy
Parks, Healthy People,14 the initiative is organized around four focus areas:
demonstration and pilot projects, education, research and evaluation, and
alignment and synergy.
12 For more information on PAL, see http://www.nationalpal.org/.
13 For more information on Strive4Fitness, see http://www.strive4fitness.com/.
14 For more information on Healthy Parks, Healthy People, see http://www.nps.gov/
public_health/hp/hphp.htm.
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PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
With regard to demonstration and pilot projects, Higgins described a
program at Gulf Islands National Seashore that is attracting children to
participate in the Park Service’s mission in some way. “What if we could
get kids out to Gulf Islands National Seashore and help us find and mark
and protect sea turtle nests? That would be fun [for the kids] . . . and they
[would] have just walked two miles outside.” Another example involves
making the national park concessions, one of the largest food service sup-
pliers in the country, a model of sound nutrition, although “we have a long
way to go,” said Higgins.
The second focus area is education, and the National Park Service has a
large educational staff whose job is to interpret the historical, cultural, and
natural meaning of the parks for visitors. The Park Service has tested some
public health messaging, and the tests have gone well, according to Higgins.
The third focus area is research and evaluation. The Park Service plans
to develop a research agenda that will identify research gaps related to the
connection between natural spaces and public health. As a way to fill those
gaps, it then plans to offer the 395 national park units in the United States
as a living laboratory for research.
Finally, in the area of alignment and synergy, the Park Service will
examine its own policies to ensure that they support the Healthy Parks,
Healthy People initiative and are aligned with other federal efforts.
PLACES TO PLAY
The City Project15 is ultimately a civil rights law firm, said its executive
director, counsel, and founder, Robert García. It is premised not on a legal
problem, but on the lives of children. Considerable social science research
demonstrates the importance of physical activity and access to parks. But in
communities of color and low-income communities, children have relatively
few places to play. By providing children with safe places for outdoor play
and opportunities for physical activity, The City Project seeks equal justice,
democracy, and livability for all.
The organization has used five strategies in pursuing its goals. The
first is organization and coalition building. Participating in the workshop
serves this mission, said García. It gives organizations like The City Proj-
ect an opportunity to interact with organizations like PAL. The programs
promoted by both organizations help reduce obesity and also give children
positive alternatives to participating in gangs, crime, violence, and drugs.
The second strategy is translating research into policy, law, and sys-
temic change. The City Project recently published a report comparing the
density of parks with poverty at the census tract level. The report showed
that in nine counties in Southern California, children of color living in
15 For more information on The City Project, see http://www.cityprojectca.org/.
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32 ALLIANCES FOR OBESITY PREVENTION
poverty with no access to a car have the worst access to parks; the worst
access to playing fields; the highest levels of obesity; and the greatest risk
of gang and drug activity, violence, and crime (García et al., 2009). This
report has influenced legislation and guidelines in California with respect to
prioritizing where park funds should be spent, García observed.
The third strategy involves conducting strategic media campaigns. The
week before the workshop, the public television station in Los Angeles
aired on a news show a 9-minute segment called “Park Poor.” The Los
Angeles Times and other newspapers have given extensive coverage to The
City Project’s campaigns. García noted that the organization is using social
media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to disseminate its messages.
The fourth strategy is policy and legal advocacy outside the courts.
For example, more than half of school districts in California fail to enforce
physical education requirements that call for an average of 20 minutes per
day in elementary school and 40 minutes per day in middle and high school,
García commented. The City Project persuaded the Los Angeles Unified
School District to observe the requirement without resorting to legisla-
tion. Instead, advocates argued that it is the right thing to do based on the
social science evidence and on the observation that if children of color and
low-income children do not receive physical education in school, they will
almost certainly not engage in physical activity outside of school.
The fifth strategy is seeking access to justice through the courts in the
context of a broader campaign. “We call it ‘access to justice through the
courts’ because foundations don’t like to fund litigation,” said García. “But
access to justice through the courts is a profoundly democratic means of
enforcing the rights of people of color and low-income people who other-
wise don’t have access to the legislative branch or the executive branch.”
The City Project’s goal-achieving strategies have met with considerable
success. When the City of Los Angeles and a developer wanted to locate
a commercial project in an abandoned rail yard with no environmental
review and no consideration of alternatives, The City Project organized a
campaign to create Rio de Los Angeles State Park. The park has led to the
greening of the Los Angeles River and has become a model for the federal
government’s urban waters initiative. The New York Times called the revi-
talization of the Los Angeles River a best-practice example of how cities
across the nation can revitalize their inner-city areas (Ouroussoff, 2009),
and the park was featured in President Obama’s report America’s Great
Outdoors (Salazar et al., 2011). “We are very proud that we made it into
that report,” said García. “On the other hand, we are disappointed that the
report does not talk about what it took to create that park—a community
organizing campaign, a lawsuit, an environmental justice argument. They
act as if these parks just spring up out of nowhere. They don’t.”
The City Project has had many other victories. After 3 years of liti-
gation, for example, Baldwin Hills will soon be the largest urban park
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PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
designed in the United States in more than a century. It is adjacent to an
active oil field, and the county has committed to conducting periodic public
health studies of the oil field’s effects (Lass, 2011).
García lauded the Institute of Medicine (IOM) for bringing together
such disparate groups to look for common ground. He noted that The City
Project is part of the peace movement, so for it to work with the retired
generals in Mission: Readiness is “an example of the lamb lying down with
the lion. Although, as Woody Allen pointed out, the lamb won’t get much
sleep.”
DISCUSSION
In response to a question about how to link transportation planners’
concern about safety to public health concerns, Corless noted that there
will continue to be a strong emphasis on safety, especially in an era of
shrinking resources. The challenge is to link quantitative metrics of health
to this emphasis on safety. Corless also pointed out that the way streets are
built is an important cause of excessive speeding. “I walk my kids every
day to school right here in Capitol Hill [in Washington, DC], and I know
what we could do to fix a couple of corners for probably $10,000 each.”
Linking more walkable streets to both safety and health is a way to merge
these concerns, he said.
Robinson asked Dillhyon what gets police officers excited about par-
ticipating in PAL. Dillhyon replied that the officers who participate the
most are those interested in community policing who recognize the long-
term benefit to the community. Officers with a background of working
with children, such as school resource officers and D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse
Resistance Education) officers, tend to gravitate toward the program.
Joseph Thompson, member of the IOM Standing Committee on Obe-
sity Prevention and the workshop planning committee, asked all of the pan-
elists which metrics they see as most important to health and how the use of
such metrics would align their disparate interests. Erickson responded that
an unconventional metric would be hope. Childhood obesity is worst in the
poorest neighborhoods, he observed, which reminded him of a smoking ces-
sation campaign in a low-income community. Although the campaign was
“flawless,” it had no effect. “The message that you might get lung cancer
when you are 50 didn’t resonate with kids who didn’t think they would live
to be 20. That is something that touches all of these issues.”
Higgins stated that Americans have come to accept a lower state of
health and well-being as normal. Empowering people to believe otherwise
and defining health as a state of physical, mental, and social well-being, not
just the absence of disease, would establish a new way to measure health
status, he suggested.
García observed that the point of building an alliance is to develop
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34 ALLIANCES FOR OBESITY PREVENTION
different messages for people who are interested in different things, which
implies the existence of different metrics. For instance, when The City Proj-
ect began to work on equal access to parks and recreation, it emphasized a
child’s right to play and have fun. However, advocating for fun did not have
enough traction among community organizers and government officials.
Only through a focus on the health implications of not having places to
play did a lack of parks become a first-order priority among these groups.
Corless said transportation safety is carefully measured and compared.
The problem is that the best way to reduce pedestrian fatalities is to stop
people from walking. More broad-based measures are needed, whether
miles traveled on foot or just general physical activity. As an example, a
smart phone application could measure how much people walk or bike each
day. “Let’s do a pilot test, if it’s not already being done,” he suggested, “and
figure [this measure] out community by community, and then of course
across age, income, and race.”
In response to a question about how to encourage children to walk
or bike to school, Higgins commented that the more physical activities
are integrated into daily life, the better off people will be. Many interest-
ing projects are under way, such as making sure that schools and parks
are located close together and are used as a unit, or linking schools and
parks with trails so that there is a way to walk to any school or park in
a community. The one caution, warned Corless, is that a balance must be
achieved between walkable schools and school choice for students’ educa-
tional attainment.
Finally, Kumanyika observed that all of the members of the first panel,
on food and agriculture, had common objectives centered on fixing the food
system. But the organizations represented by the physical activity and built
environment panel had somewhat different objectives. When the goals of
public health are in opposition to the usual way of doing business, what
must public health do to be a good partner?
Corless emphasized that the public health community has a great
deal to offer the transportation community. Having more people on well-
designed streets can improve safety in multiple ways, such as by reducing
both pedestrian accidents and crime. Corless said that in his experience,
public health officials have greater credibility than politicians or developers
in marshaling public support for transportation projects.
García also responded by pointing to the increasing recognition that
human health does not depend on personal choice and genetics. Rather, it
depends on social determinants, including transportation; land use; access
to food; and economics, encompassing income and poverty. Corless sug-
gested that the common theme for the members of both panels is that atten-
tion to the social determinants of health can drive progress.
