Geography Matters for Low-Income Latino Families

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For many low-income Americans, the place they call home is literally a matter of life or death. A report from The New York Times found that low-income individuals in major cities, such as New York (29% Latino population) and Los Angeles (49% Latino population), and in smaller ones, such as Birmingham, Ala. (3.52% Latino population), live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen a rising life expectancy.

In parts of the country where adults with the lowest incomes, these individuals die on average as young as people in much poorer nations such as Rwanda and their life spans are getting shorter. Of the more than 13.4 million families with children living on incomes less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, nearly 30% are Latino.  A report by the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families determined that two-thirds of U.S. Latino children live in low-income households and nearly one-third live in poverty.

The Times cited data from a report by The Journal of the American Medical Association. One of the conclusions from the information was that the gap in life spans between rich and poor individuals widened from 2001 to 2014. The top 1% of income among American men live 15 years longer than the poorest 1%.

“You want to think about this problem at a more local level than you might have before,” said Raj Chetty, a Stanford University economist and lead author of the study. “You don’t want to think about why things are going badly for the poor in America. You want to think specifically about why they’re going poorly in Tulsa and Detroit.”

Tulsa (15% Latino population) and Detroit (7% Latino population) are two of the largest cities that have two of the lowest life expectancy levels for low-income residents. A common thread amongst the cities with smaller longevity gaps between rich and poor residents was population density.

The cities where the poor men live the longest are New York and San Jose, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, and Los Angeles. Poor women live the longest in Miami, New York, Santa Barbara, San Jose, and San Diego. As for cities where the life expectancy is lowest for men Gary, Ind., Indianapolis, Detroit, Louisville, and Tulsa lead the list. For women, the cities are Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Honolulu, and Detroit.

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