Read any news report on the housing market, and inevitably it will include facts or figures from the real estate data giant Zillow.com. The company initially set out to solve two key economic frictions in the real estate industry information asymmetry and the principal-agent problem by empowering users to access real-time housing data and eliminating the need for realtors. The company soon realized, however, that American homeowners and buyers were not willing to give up the traditional real estate agent model and changed course. In the end, Zillow decided to join rather than replace the middlemen in the real estate industry.
Abstract
Objectives
To examine whether neighborhood income and neighborhood safety concerns influence multisystem physiological risk after adjusting for genetic and environmental selection effects that may have biased previous tests of this association.
Methods
We used structural equation modeling with a genetically informed sample of 686 male and female twin pairs in the Midlife in the United States Study II (2004).
Results
Controlling for additive genetic and shared environmental processes that may have biased neighborhood–health links in previous examinations, higher neighborhood safety concerns were associated with less physiological risk among women but not men.
Discussion
Our findings suggest a possible causal role of neighborhood features for a measure of physiological risk that is associated with the development of disease. Efforts to increase neighborhood safety, perhaps through increased street lighting or neighborhood watch programs, may improve community-level health.
Dispatches from the neighborhood watch: Using citizen science and field survey data to document color morph frequency in space and time
