Rachel Keith: So, Anna, let's start with you. Tell us why sharing life expectancy averages in New Hanover County can be misleading sometimes.
Anna Casey: New Hanover County has the 11th highest average life expectancy out of all 100 North Carolina counties, but there's actually a huge difference between neighborhoods here, in fact, the highest neighborhood is around 17.5 years higher than the lowest neighborhood for life expectancy.
RK: And what are those neighborhoods?
AC: The lowest life expectancy neighborhood is going to be around the Portia Hines Park area, so near the lower Northside. And then the high-life-expectancy neighborhood is in Woodberry Forest, east of 117.
RK: Renee, in your report on this, what were some of the people, your sources, saying as to why this is occurring, this large discrepancy, this large disparity, between these two neighborhoods?
Renee Spencer: Well, a lot of them were generally saying that it had to do with the social determinants of health, all the non-medical factors that play into a person's health and life expectancy. J’vanete Skiba, the director of the New Hanover Resiliency Task Force, had some really great things to say about how housing stability and just general stressors, the stressors of the housing instability and poverty, can play into a person's health
RK: Anna, also, in your data reporting, this life expectancy metric breaks down by race in our county.
AC: Black residents live, on average, seven and a half years less than white residents in New Hanover County.
RK: And in your data report for Cape Fear Collective, you looked at other metrics, some of these social determinants of health between these two neighborhoods, and what were some of those that you looked at?
AC: The lowest life expectancy track, over 1/3 of households face severe housing problems and food insecurity, and these are from the literature, chronic stressors that are leading causes of premature death.
RK: Renee, I wanted to explore this because your sources suggest it's not necessarily due to their personal responsibility, but rather to something much larger and systemic that affects life expectancy.
RS: They were talking about how it just comes from decades of exclusion and historical trauma that we've seen in New Hanover County, which is still going on today. It remains pervasive in our area.
I was in a neighborhood not too far from Portia Hines Park, and I was talking to somebody, and they're like, ‘Look, there's no grocery store. There's a mini mart.’ People can't go get fresh vegetables. It's not readily available. You've got the whole transportation system [issue]. Well, maybe the bus doesn't run during the hours you're free to go, and it's just a scheduling issue. They're stuck in a cycle.
RK: Anna, when we look at it, there was this statistic that you reported that this 17.4-year difference makes our county the ninth highest in the state for geographic disparity, because a lot of the time when we listen to politicians, when we listen to the Chamber of Commerce, we know that New Hanover County is a wealthier county. But there is a divide in this small geographic area. We have high disparity rates, and this zip code map shows that.
AC: We are even actually in the top 7% of all US counties for that life expectancy disparity.
RK: Because you all are doing a collaboration about health in our county, I mean, what kind of solutions are you hearing? Given the data, what should we do?
RS: I think that these stories, Anna's data story, and this Star News report, are just the first pieces here. We're getting the data out there so people can start talking about it, have these difficult discussions, and explore the whys, so that, hopefully, we can come up with those solutions.
One thing the collaborative is doing is we're getting ready to host some listening sessions so that we can hear from people in these affected communities about their experiences and what they feel, what they need, so that we can hopefully start to look at how to fix these problems, because that's really what we're striving to create, a community that is healthy and thriving because that's what we want.
RK: Anna, as a data scientist, do you feel like your main role is to show policymakers and people in government: ‘Hey, this is the data. This is what we're seeing. It's up to you to make policies to potentially fix these issues.’ Or how do you view your role in sharing some of this information?
AC: I think that's a good way to put it. Yeah, I want to get the story out there. And I'm not a policy expert, right? So what I really want to do is make people aware of what's going on, especially the decision-makers, and sometimes that means making them aware of the problems. But the collaborative is also about solutions-based journalism, so it's about helping them see what the solutions could be. But I feel like that's less about policy recommendations and more about what other people are doing and how they are solving these problems.
RK: And I wanted to back up a little bit. Where does the data come from? For some of these statistics that you're pulling?
AC: Life expectancy data came from a project that the National Center for Health Statistics did with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It's actually from a 2018 release, so it is a little bit of older data, but I will say these things don't change very quickly. They're very slow-moving problems. And then, some of the social drivers: the data is from CDC PLACES, and we also have data from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
RK: And Renee, did anything surprise you or jump out at you when you were delving into this topic with the data and then trying to explain a little piece of why this is occurring?
RC: I was shocked whenever I saw the disparity in life expectancy, particularly for two areas that are less than six miles apart, such a short distance, but such a big difference in the social determinants of health and health for the people in those communities.
RK: You've been working on this for a while, Anna, studying our county and looking at the numbers. I mean, what jumped out to me as a reporter was that divide. We have a zip code that's doing quite well because it has a lot of resources: [higher levels of] education, health insurance, and low levels of poverty, versus another zip code not too far away, as Renee mentioned, that isn't doing as well. I mean, is this consistent with what you've been studying in the county?
AC: New Hanover County, in particular, is a place where averages don't always tell the full story. I would say, over and over again, as we dig into the data in New Hanover County, that the average is pretty high. We're doing pretty well on a lot of metrics, but when you start looking at neighborhoods, when you start looking at racial disparities, that's when you start to see, ‘Okay, whatever is happening is not lifting all boats.’
Just to piggyback on what Renee was saying earlier around the collaborative, I also wanted to say there is more data digging to do as well, and I'm very excited to dig more into what could be driving these life expectancy differences, not just in these two neighborhoods, but across New Hanover County.
RK: And I would be remiss not to bring this up, but sometimes in this political climate we're hearing: ‘We're not going to discuss or look at these numbers in terms of racial disparities.’ It's become a contentious subject of late. But I mean, the numbers are the numbers, and Cape Fear Collective is committed to examining how different demographics are doing across metrics like life expectancy, poverty, and education levels.
AC: This isn't political to me. This is, I mean, the numbers are the numbers, like you were saying. We also look at geographic disparity. We look at education disparity, all sorts of disparities, but racial disparity is definitely one of them.
RK: Well, thank you so much, Renee Spencer and Anna Casey.
RS/AC: Thank you. We really appreciate you having us.
Links
- StarNews report – Where you live in New Hanover County impacts how you live, data shows
- Cape Fear Collective - It Matters Where You Live: The 17-Year Gap
- For future reporting and multimedia projects, visit the Coastal Journalism Hub
