While many may know that the leading cause of death in the U.S. is heart disease, life expectancy varies greatly by ZIP code. That’s right, zip code. You can live in one neighborhood in a city and live shorter than someone else in another zip code in the same city. For the first time in our history, the United States is raising a generation of children who may live sicker and shorter lives than their parents. Reversing this trend will of course depend on healthy choices by each of us. But not everyone in America has the same opportunities to be healthy.
In a new joint project from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation you can see the life expectancy in your neighborhood. Just click this link.
The U.S. Small-area Life Expectancy Estimates Project analyzed death records from 2010-2015 in every state except Maine and Wisconsin, where data was incomplete, to calculate a life expectancy for residents of every neighborhood.
The CDC’s life expectancy estimates are based on deaths in each census tract—the closest thing to a neighborhood—from 2010 to 2015. While some neighborhoods may have changed since then, particularly in places like San Francisco and New York, for the most part this remains a good estimate of how long the typical person residing in a given area might live. (For some places with a small number of deaths, the researchers used a statistical model to estimate life expectancy based on the trends in demographically similar neighborhoods.)
With a statewide average of 81.3 years, California’s 35-plus million residents enjoy the second-highest life expectancy in the United States (at an average 82 years, Hawaii residents live the longest). In wealthy suburbs, though, lifespans stretch longer.
What’s interesting is that number 9, 10 and 11 of the cities with the people who live the longest is in the state of