ZIP Code DestinyAdult life10 of 19

Scene 10 of 19, More deprived places have less traffic pollution nationally, but more within their own county. Step 1 of 2, Across the country.

Census tracts, weighted by population; modeled estimates

More deprived places have less traffic pollution nationally, but more within their own county

Traffic pollution ranks at a mean national percentile of 75 in the least deprived tenth of tracts and 39 in the most deprived

Mean national percentile of the tract (0 to 100)

Scenes

Where the comparison starts

  1. Life expectancy falls with each step toward more deprived neighborhoods
  2. Inside each New York borough, neighborhoods differ widely in life expectancy
  3. Home values set most of the deprivation ranking

Growing up

  1. Babies in more deprived counties are more often born small or early
  2. Test scores rise with county income, and gaps between groups remain inside districts
  3. Black and white children raised in the same neighborhood reach different adult incomes
  4. Former students of for-profit colleges earn the least a decade after entry

Adult life

  1. Where local jobs are scarce, residents hold better-paid jobs than the county offers
  2. Whether rent burden rises with deprivation depends on the comparison
  3. More deprived places have less traffic pollution nationally, but more within their own county
  4. Young adults report more distress than a decade ago, and the top income bracket the least at every age
  5. Smoking falls as income rises, while binge drinking climbs
  6. People rate their lives lowest in midlife, while stress declines with age

Reading the patterns

  1. The most deprived places usually stand farther from the national value than the least deprived
  2. Neighborhoods a few kilometers apart can differ by years of life expectancy
  3. Most differences in life expectancy lie inside counties, not between them
  4. Neighborhood types line up on outcomes but blur into one another
  5. Mobility beyond what census measures predict clusters by region
  6. These comparisons describe places, not what moving would do

Read the bookExplore the figuresMethods

More deprived places have less traffic pollution nationally, but more within their own county

Scene 10 of 19, step 1 of 2: Across the country. Census tracts, weighted by population; modeled estimates.

What to say

More deprived tracts are more often rural and far from major roads; the chapter shows the rural share by decile. Changing the comparison changes the statistic, not the pollution. Traffic is also the one main gradient that the standardized index changed.

About the chart

Traffic pollution ranks at a mean national percentile of 75 in the least deprived tenth of tracts and 39 in the most deprived

Every line falls from the least deprived decile on the left to the ninth decile and edges up in the tenth, and the traffic and diesel lines fall furthest. A line plots the population-weighted mean national percentile of the tracts in each decile, tracts tied on the ADI rank share a decile, and the bands are 95% intervals from a bootstrap over counties. Across the tracts with both values the correlation with the ADI rank is −0.41 for traffic, −0.38 for diesel PM, −0.18 for NO₂ and −0.18 for PM₂.₅.

  • National percentiles rank modeled values, so a gap in percentiles is not a gap in concentrations: the mean PM₂.₅ concentration is 9.6 micrograms per cubic meter in the least deprived decile and 8.1 in the most deprived.
  • Each point rests on the tracts of a decile that have a value for the indicator, and the tooltip gives the count. The 1,524 tracts with residents in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico have no PM₂.₅ or ozone estimate and are outside the analysis, and 810 tracts in it have no ADI rank.
  • The Area Deprivation Index descends from an index that includes median home value and median gross rent, so it rates dense, high-cost metropolitan tracts as less deprived than their incomes suggest.

Source

EPA EJScreen 2024, Area Deprivation Index 2023 and ACS 2019-2023; population-weighted means, modeled estimates

Open in Chapter 6.1, Air pollutionThe chapter’s report, with every estimate and table

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