Closing Chicago’s Life Expectancy Gap

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Mariah Wolfle (0:40)

Hey Chicago, I'm Mariah Wolfle, and this is In the Loop.

Be sure to listen all the way through the podcast for a breakdown of the day's top local stories. But first, I want to thank We will you all talk for about watching the life expectancy. gap in Chicago. Residents in Garfield Park live on average roughly 67 years old, while residents in the Loop can live up to 87

People in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods can live 20 years longer. What's the solution? A new book may have the answer. At the table with me was Dr. David Ansell, Professor of Medicine at Rush University Medical Center, out with his new book, Crossing the Gap, Healing Epidemics and Inequalities in a Divided City. And Pastor Marshall Hatch, he leads New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in West Garfield Park. I started by asking Dr. Ansell how life expectancy in Chicago compares to the rest of the country. Here he is.

David Ansell (1:42)

When we started this journey, there was this large gap between the Loop and West Garfield in particular. And you mentioned the life expectancy at the time, 67, 68, 69

Mariah Wolfle (1:56)

That's risen a little bit over the past few years.

David Ansell (1:58)

Yeah. Well, it's actually now getting a little bit better. But Chicago had the distinct honor of having the worst life expectancy gap in the country, about 20 years between neighborhoods. When you get down to census track levels, in areas about 4,000, it can be up to 30 years. And I was Chief Medical Officer at Rush in Chicago, and we presented this to our board in 2016

And we said, shouldn't we do something about it? And that led to the work in Garfield Park. But compared to the rest of the country, there are about 948 cities across the country in which this has been measured, cities and towns, and there's on average across all those 948 cities, about a 12-year life expectancy gap within town boundaries. And so this is a national problem. And we just decided to, what would it look like if we went into West Garfield Park in partnership with the community, particular Pastor Hatch, and try to fix it?

Mariah Wolfle (3:06)

And Pastor Hatch, I imagine this wasn't exactly news to you as someone who's so integrated into the West Side. Can you talk about your thoughts on this gap when you first started to learn about this statistic?

Marshall Hatch (3:19)

Well, you know, West Garfield Park is one of the poorest communities in the city.

And clearly, I've been there three decades, and I've seen just this sense of isolation of the community from the rest of the city. And then all of the pathologies that go along with poverty, we've seen it up close. When we closed 50 schools in Chicago, five of them were in West Garfield Park. So it's, you know, the stark disinvestment, obviously, you know, social determinants of health.

Mariah Wolfle (3:58)

In your book, Dr. Ansell, or no, I'm sorry, in a column for the Sun Times, you write, quote, For people to live longer, we must listen to communities and change the conditions where they live, work and pray. No hospital can treat or build its way out of these realities.

So, to the crux of what we're talking about here, what convinced you to shift the way we think about the role of hospitals?

David Ansell (4:20)

Well, I've been a doctor now in Chicago for almost 50 years.

Not quite. I started at Cook County and then Mount Sinai and then went to Rush. And the job at Rush was to make Rush one of the top hospitals in the country. And arguably it is. US. News, World Report, top 20 hospital, ranked first in the city in Illinois. And yet people are dying literally three stops beyond us on the green line and on the blue line from common conditions. So when you think of West Garfield Park, yes, it has a high concentration of homicide. Yes, it has a high concentration of overdoses.

It may be more than any neighborhood in the country. But the number one cause of premature mortality is heart disease and cancer. And they were things we could do something about. But we had to shift our positionality. We couldn't just wait till people got sick and came to the hospital. If we didn't treat, as Pastor noted, the social and structural determinants of health, like isolation, segregation from opportunity, as Pastor Hatch calls it. These are neighborhoods that were legally redlined. It was the law.