Health

New study shows massive disparities in life expectancy among Boston neighborhoods

Though they are only a few miles apart, two neighborhoods in Back Bay and Roxbury have a nearly 23-year difference in life expectancies.

May 12, 2023

2 minutes to read

In Boston, your life expectancy can shrink by nearly a quarter-century, depending on the neighborhood you call home.

In one Back Bay neighborhood, the life expectancy is nearly 92 years — among the highest in the city. But walk two miles over to Roxbury, and you’ll find the part of Boston with the lowest life expectancy, just shy of 69 years.

Those starkly different figures are among the findings of a Boston Public Health Commission report released Friday, one of several issue-based Health of Boston studies.

“These disparities are quite striking,” Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, told Boston.com. “They’re disturbing, but they’re not necessarily surprising.”

According to Ojikutu, there are several neighborhood-level factors at play, such as socioeconomic status, housing, education, employment, and access to green space.

More on health inequities:

A $141,250 median household income for the Back Bay census tract, for example, versus $41,211 for the Roxbury tract. Nearly 91% of adults 25 and older have a college degree in the Back Bay neighborhood, compared to just under 44% in the Roxbury one.

And perhaps most notably, the Back Bay tract is nearly 82% white, while the Roxbury neighborhood is 87% people of color — predominantly Black and Latinx.

“I think what’s clear is that there’s a racial [and ethnic] divide in terms of how we’re looking at health outcomes and life expectancy,” Ojikutu said.

And these gaps aren’t new. In 2012, a report from the Center on Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University found a 33-year difference in life expectancy between similar census tracts in Back Bay and Roxbury.

The 2012 report prompted action, according to Ojikutu, who noted the Whittier Street Health Center’s Boston Health Equity Program as one impactful initiative. The BPHC also has programming that focuses on community partnerships and social determinants of health, she said.

“I think that has done some good,” Ojikutu said. “I think it definitely created change and improved life expectancy, but I think the point of highlighting these data and publishing this … is the fact that we need to do more. There’s still challenges; there’s still problems that remain.”

One major setback was the COVID-19 pandemic, which decreased Boston’s average life expectancy by nearly two-and-a-half years, according to the BPHC. The pandemic further fueled racial and ethnic health inequities, as Latinx, Black, and Asian Bostonians saw their life expectancies shrink at greater rates than their white counterparts.

However, the pandemic also offered some valuable lessons about community-led public health efforts, according to Ojikutu.

“One of the things people sometimes say about Boston is that we are resource rich, but we’re coordination poor, because we don’t necessarily collaborate across sectors,” she explained. “And we did that during COVID. So why not do that again and mobilize, and use the momentum of what we saw during COVID-19 to do things differently?”

Ojikutu said BPHC is partnering with Virginia Commonwealth University to better understand why Boston’s life expectancies differ from neighborhood to neighborhood.

“We’re trying to figure out a lot of pieces to the puzzle, and it just takes a really deep dive,” she explained. “So instead of just presenting the data, we really want to understand it in greater depth so that we can build on that knowledge.”