Life Expectancy in Chicago: Racial & Spatial Disparities and Correlates

Life expectancy (LE) in the United States has been steadily increasing for both men and women and for all race/ethnicities (R/E) and reached 77.9 years in 2007, but substantial gaps persist. For instance, Non-Hispanic Whites (NHW) in the U.S. have an LE of 78.2; the Non-Hispanic Black (NHB) LE is 73.2. We employed death certificate files to calculate 3-year average (2005-2007) LEs for Chicago by R/E and also for the 77 officially designated community areas (CA). The LE for Chicago is 76.7; the NHW LE is 78.7 and the NHB LE is 71.2. Thus, the racial gap in LE is even larger in Chicago than in the U.S. These differences by R/E become even more striking when we examine the LEs by CA. While the B:W gap in LE in Chicago is 7.5 years, the gap between the CAs with the highest and lowest LEs is double that – 15.1 years. Within Chicago, there is a strong negative correlation between the proportion of a CA that is NHB and the LE (-0.86, p<0.0001). Conversely, there is a strong positive correlation between the proportion of a CA that is NHW and the LE (0.68, p<0.0001). In fact, the 19 CAs with the lowest LEs are predominantly NHB. For the city of Chicago, there is a strong positive correlation between median household income and LE (0.63, p<0.0001). In Chicago CAs that are predominantly NHB (N=28), the relationship holds (0.47, p<0.05). However, for predominantly NHW (N=13) CAs, the relationship is non-significant (0.22, p=0.48).