LAUSR

SignificanceExposure to air pollution within one's residential neighborhood has detrimental consequences on health and well-being. Yet, this effect may be mitigated or exacerbated because individuals spend much of their time outside of their residential neighborhood to travel to neighborhoods across a city for work, errands, and leisure. Using mobile phone data to track neighborhood mobility in large US cities, I find that residents from minority and poor neighborhoods travel to neighborhoods that have greater air pollution levels than the neighborhoods that residents from White and nonpoor neighborhoods visit. These results reveal that minority and poor residents face environmental inequalities at three geographic scales: the neighborhoods they live in, their bordering neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods they visit.