The Good (City) Life: Why New York's Life Expectancy Is the Highest in the Nation

[n2doc]

Most of us take for granted that urban dwellers are more stressed than country dwellers. Hey, it's even proved by science! Not only that, their day-to-day existence is polluted, crime-ridden, and filled with hedonistic temptations. So they must have lower life expectancies, right? Wrong. In fact, the latest data from the Bureau of Vital Statistics shows New York City—my hometown—has the highest life expectancy in the country. Babies born in 2009 can expect to live a record 80.6 years. That's almost three years longer than a decade ago, and more than two years longer than the current national average of 78.2 years.

Mayor Bloomberg is attributing the good news to policy: anti-smoking and anti-obesity campaigns, higher taxes on cigarettes, and calorie-count requirements for fast food restaurants. The city has also expanded testing and treatment of people with HIV and upped the quality of obstetric and pediatric care. But once you look past the press releases, there are far more wide-ranging reasons for why New Yorkers are lasting longer.

First, we don't spend our entire lives in cars. We walk everywhere. With narrow streets, an abundance of stores, and a dearth of parking, the city is practically designed to make us walk. Before we get on the subway, we walk there, and after we arrive at our stop, we climb numerous flights of stairs. We also walk faster than the average American; in a recent study, New Yorkers were ranked as the fastest pedestrians in the country. To some, that's a sign that we're rude and obnoxious. To scientists, it's a sign we're going to live longer.

Our old people also have it much better than the elderly in bucolic settings. The essentials—food, medicine, laundromats, parks—are usually mere blocks from their homes. The hospital is likely a shorter distance away, too. High population density means a plethora of neighbors who can look after each other. When people live on top of each other, the likelihood of social isolation plummets—and the age of death rises.


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http://www.good.is/post/the-good-city-life-why-new-york-s-life-expectancy-is-the-highest-in-the-nation/

[SixthSense]

1. and the real reason

it's too expensive for poor people to live there and it's well known that life expectancy scales with income

[David__77]

2. Manhattan, yes; but there are plenty of poor people in NYC.

Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens are the large majority of the city. And NYC is definitely less caucasian than the US average. I think that you'd need a rigorous regression analysis to impute causality, however. These articles encourage people to be flippant in thinking correlation = causation, and assuming the direction of causality.

[Donnachaidh]

3. Ding ding ding -- we have a winner!

Bloomberg will be happy when he drives all the poor into New Jersey. Then he can lie with abandon about NY. His nanny state utopia is fake.

[Odin2005]

4. Funny they leave that out!