Racial health disparities continue to be a serious problem in the United States and have been linked to contextual factors, including racial segregation. In some cases, including breast cancer survival, racial disparities appear to be worsening. Using the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) database, we extend current spatial analysis methodology to derive new, spatially continuous indices of (1) racial bias in mortgage lending and (2) redlining. We then examine spatial patterns of these indices and the association between these new measures and breast cancer survival among Black/African American women in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin metropolitan area. These new measures can be used to examine relationships between mortgage discrimination and patterns of disease throughout the United States.
Keywords: Adaptive spatial filtering; Breast cancer survival; Home Mortgage Disclosure Act; Racial bias; Racial health disparities; Redlining.
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