At D CEO Healthcare, our Will Maddox brings us closer to Dallas’ disparities in life expectancy by zip code and race, using data from the UT Southwestern Medical Center Department of Population and Data Sciences.
We’ve talked previously about how zip code impacts someone’s expected life span. The wide gap is on display here in UT Southwestern’s data, as well. Uptown and East Dallas’ 75204 zip code comes in at a life expectancy of about 90 years. South Dallas’ 75215 is at 67.6 years. More from Will:
Predictably, the study found that as the number of people living below the poverty line increased, life expectancy went down. If your ZIP code has less than five percent poverty, the life expectancy is 82.4 years, whereas ZIP codes with more than 20 percent of people living in poverty had a life expectancy of 76.4 years.
Last we discussed, we were working off a search tool from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It showed life expectancy swung from 83.8 years old in Lakewood to 65.9 in Fair Park. UT Southwestern’s analysis pushes those gaps out even further, basing its findings off data from state death records. And it provides the ability to sort by race and gender.
Perhaps telling of the segregated city in which we live: there aren’t many Dallas zip codes with enough data to analyze differences in life expectancy among blacks, whites, and Hispanics within a single neighborhood. Across the state, the median life expectancy for Hispanics is 79.1, for whites is 77.2, and for blacks is 72.1
Researchers continue to push for more granular data as we work through the economic and racial divides that are present in so many American cities and so pronounced in ours. If you’re interested, take a look at UT Southwestern’s interactive, and read more analysis and reporting from Will on it here.
