The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) received a two year planning grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to collect baseline data and design a longitudinal research study that will measure the impact of environmental conditions, particularly mixed-income, mixed-use, transit oriented real estate development (“TOD”) projects, on health in nine Eastern  Massachusetts neighborhoods. The research study will track environmental conditions and health in neighborhoods targeted for investment in such TOD projects compared to environmental conditions and health in control neighborhoods with similar demographics, built environments and health outcome characteristics over a five- to ten-year period. The study tracks neighborhood changes across multiple domains to include economic, social, behavioral, environmental, and health outcome indicators. Taken together, these indicators can help predict and track neighborhood change over time, and provide important new insights about the connections between the built environment, opportunity, behavior, and health. On February 15, 2017, members of the survey teams from Fall River and New Bedford met at the Fall River YMCA to a first report of the findings of the survey that they conducted. Click here for a 12-minute video of the beginning and end of the meeting. Click here, here and here for additional project web pages. For more information, contact YMCA Project Leader Gail Hartnett Rodrigues at 508-996-9622.