ZIP Code DestinyReading the patterns15 of 19

Scene 15 of 19, Neighborhoods a few kilometers apart can differ by years of life expectancy. Step 1 of 2, One pair.

Pairs of census tracts in the most populous counties

Neighborhoods a few kilometers apart can differ by years of life expectancy

In 17 large counties, the pair of tracts within 5 kilometers with the widest ADI difference had higher life expectancy in the less deprived tract in 15, and a median gap over the pairs of 5.4 years

  • More deprived tract
  • Less deprived tract

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

Neighborhoods a few kilometers apart can differ by years of life expectancy

Scene 15 of 19, step 1 of 2: One pair. Pairs of census tracts in the most populous counties.

What to say

Keep the selection rule on screen: proximity and the difference in rank chose the pairs. The intervals on each tract are wide; the chapter reports which pairs do not follow the dominant ordering.

About the chart

In 17 large counties, the pair of tracts within 5 kilometers with the widest ADI difference had higher life expectancy in the less deprived tract in 15, and a median gap over the pairs of 5.4 years

In most rows the filled dot lies right of the open dot, and in 12 rows the 95% interval for the gap excludes zero. Each row is the pair of tracts in a county, no more than 5 kilometers apart, whose ADI differs most, among tracts with at least 2,000 residents and a standard error of at most 2.0 years. The open dot is the more deprived tract, the filled dot the less deprived, and the last column is the difference.

  • The two tracts of a pair are chosen on the ADI, not on life expectancy, so the differences are not the largest that could be found among noisy estimates. A county with no pair that reaches an ADI difference of 50 percentile points is left out (3 of the 20 counties).
  • Life expectancy is the native estimate for the 2010 tract, used only where the boundary did not change by 2020, meaning that the 2010 and 2020 tracts with one GEOID share at least 99% of the land area of each, so the ADI and the ACS population of the 2020 tract describe the same ground. Distances are straight lines between the Census internal points of the tracts, and the data hold no transit routes. Intervals are normal-approximation 95% intervals from the standard error; the gap treats the two errors as independent. Institutional tracts are excluded.

Source

USALEEP life expectancy at birth on 2010 tracts, 2010-2015, with standard errors; Area Deprivation Index, 2023; ACS 2019-2023; modeled estimates

Open in Chapter 8.4, Place and the length of a lifeThe chapter’s report, with every estimate and table

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