Background: Although research has shown that low socioeconomic status (SES) and minority communities have higher exposure to air pollution, few studies have simultaneously investigated the associations of individual and neighborhood SES with pollutants across multiple sites.

Objectives: We characterized the distribution of ambient air pollution by both individual and neighborhood SES using spatial regression methods.

Methods: The study population comprised 6,140 participants from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). Year 2000 annual average ambient PM_2.5 and NO_x concentrations were calculated for each study participant’s home address at baseline examination. We investigated individual and neighborhood (2000 U.S. Census tract level) SES measures corresponding to the domains of income, wealth, education, and occupation. We used a spatial intrinsic conditional autoregressive …