That paper is not about the BWT, but about BWT applied to health outcomes. And the next sentence you didn't quote states that even in that case BWT has truth to it.
>Even where there is evidence that BWT impacts outcomes, it is driven by studies that measured disorder as the perceptions of the focal individual, potentially conflating pessimism about the neighborhood with mental health.
This states that the perception of disorder does not necessarily match up with reality and that the conclusion of said study is flawed
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html