Deadly Poverty

Chicago’s other predominantly black neighborhoods all had high YPLL rates as well. The ten communities with the lowest YPLL rates were predominantly white. Lincoln Park, 82 percent white, had the city’s best YPLL rate. Englewood’s YPLL rate was more than six times Lincoln Park’s.

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Our analysis of mortality rates parallels earlier findings on health in Chicago neighborhoods. In 2004, researchers from Sinai Urban Health Institute reported on the health of six community areas. Norwood Park, the predominantly white, middle-class community area in the survey, scored “overwhelmingly the best on the health measures,” the researchers found, whereas Humboldt Park and North Lawndale, the two poorest community areas surveyed, “almost always scored the worst.” The health measures included obesity, asthma, and smoking; North Lawndale had nearly twice the national average of all three. 

 

The health and mortality disparities here mirror the nation’s. In the most recent National Vital Statistics report, issued in December by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and covering 2009, the death rate for blacks was 1.3 times the rate for whites, and infant mortality was 2.4 times greater. 

 

Disparities in health between blacks and whites aren’t solely due to poverty. African-Americans have higher rates of diabetes than whites, for instance, even when their economic status is comparable. But the evidence points to poverty as the fundamental cause of health disparities. And a growing body of research suggests that racial segregation itself worsens health. The threat of violence in segregated, disadvantaged neighborhoods causes residents to spend more time indoors, which means they get less exercise. It may also weaken immune systems, which, combined with time spent in close quarters, may increase the spread of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

 

The stress of living amid violence and unrelenting poverty may also make residents more susceptible to disease. Inferior diets, smoking, alcoholism, and drug addiction all are more common in poor neighborhoods and are linked with higher rates of cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Unintentional injury, another leading killer in Chicago and nationally, is also associated with drug abuse: in Chicago, the number one underlying cause of death in this category was accidental drug overdose. (Three times as many people died of accidental overdoses in the five poorest neighborhoods as in their counterparts.)

 

A research review in the June issue of Health Services Research pointed to studies indicating that such neighborhoods have trouble attracting high-quality health care providers; offer less access to primary care for children; have fewer specialists available; and have longer wait times for kidney transplants. Pharmacies in segregated neighborhoods are less likely to stock sufficient medicines. End-of-life care is also inferior, with “substantial disparities in nursing home quality.”

 

In Chicago, the segregation responsible for these disparities didn’t happen by accident. As we wrote last month, it resulted from the enmity of whites toward blacks when they started moving here in larger numbers around 1910. This rancor was abetted by governmental policies that ghettoized blacks—policies that continued through most of the century.  

 

The malignant fruit of that enmity and those policies is still with us. Little attempt is being made to treat it. A hundred years later, in Riverdale, Fuller Park, Englewood, West Garfield Park, East Garfield Park, and the many Chicago neighborhoods like them, residents are still paying the price, day in and day out, in sickness and in premature death.

 

Sharon Lurye and Alison Marcotte  helped research this story.

 

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