Orleans Parish PLACE MATTERS Team Leader Andre Perry speaks to 89.9 WWNO about PLACE MATTERS and community advocacy in New Orleans.

A sense of place is powerful in New Orleans, where people tend to identify strongly with their neighborhoods. But while the culture and tradition of these neighborhoods may enrich the local lifestyle, a new initiative is analyzing how other particulars of place can have precisely the opposite effect. The program is called Orleans Place Matters and it takes a hard look at neighborhood-level factors ranging from housing and transportation to discrimination and the legacy of segregation.

“So we see and are not surprised by the Lower Ninth Ward, Central City, parts of Treme, parts of the Seventh Ward with extremely low life outcomes, because of the history, because of the inability to bring equity to those places,” says Andre Perry, an education policy expert at Loyola University. “Just to be clear, in some communities, the life expectancy rate is 55.5 years compared to 80 for others, so there’s a stark difference.”

Perry is the team leader for Orleans Place Matters. This local program is part of a national initiative from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research group based in Washington, D.C. In cities across the country, its Place Matters program gives community organizations the data and analysis they need, both to understand what factors impact health in their neighborhoods and to advocate for effective change.

“We’re going to continue to produce reports and produce data that community members can leverage to get better policy for their communities,” Perry says. “Families need data to go to city council and go to the mayor and say, look this is what’s happening. And so we want to provide that data for them.”

Read more and listen to the radio story at 89.9 WWNO.

This morning, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Health Policy Institute hosted members of Congress and a panel of local leaders for a congressional briefing on health inequities.  Panelists discussed their experience with the center’s PLACE MATTERS program, an initiative dedicated to helping local leaders to identify and improve social, economic and environmental conditions that shape health in their communities.

The PLACE MATTERS Program aims to advance health equity by acknowledging racial inequities as the “root cause” of health inequities in communities across the U.S. Research commissioned by the Joint Center estimated the cost of health inequalities experienced by African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos to be $1.24 trillion from 2003-2006, prompting a desire to further the analysis and advance creative policy solutions through the development of the PLACE MATTERS program, operated since 2006. Place Matters teams work in 24 jurisdictions in 10 states and the District of Columbia, using research to build a case around the root causes of health disparities and developing innovative policy solutions to improve health.

Representatives Barbara Lee (CA-9), Jim McDermott (WA-7) and Robin Kelly (IL-2) attended the briefing, acknowledging the connection between local conditions and community health. Rep. Barbara Lee told the group, “Our health really is determined by our environment – place matters.”

Read more at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Maybe it’s just the power of suggestion, but my throat felt raw and my lungs felt irritated after sitting in Esther Abeyta’s living room in Albuquerque’s San Jose neighborhood for an hour talking about the area’s Superfund sites, the tank farms full of gasoline and other petrochemicals, the asphalt plant, the concrete aggregate company.

Abeyta’s home belonged to her grandmother. Her mother lives two blocks away. Her property south of Downtown backs up to the railroad tracks that run north and south through the city. Tanker cars were parked by her backyard. Diesel-fueled train engines idle on the tracks by her house five or six days a week, sometimes for hours at a time.

Abeyta served as her neighborhood association’s president, and now she and her husband, Steve, are working to understand the environmental condition of the area that may or may not be shortening their neighbors’ lives.

The raw data are truly frightening. A study called Place Matters, put together by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C., says that in Bernalillo County the difference in life expectancy between census tracts can be measured in decades. Life expectancy in some census tracts in the South Broadway area, where San Jose is located, is from 66 to 70 years. In parts of the Northeast Heights and on the Southwest Mesa life expectancy is from 85 to 94 years.

Low birth weights as a share of all births can range from 12.3 percent to 17.5 percent in some neighborhoods to from 1.4 percent to 4.7 percent in other neighborhoods.

Place Matters measures “community-level health risks,” which include factors such as “educational attainment, violent crime rates, foreclosure rates, unemployment rates, and the percentage of overcrowded households” found in a census tract.

The index Place Matters created to measure those factors is worst in the San Jose area and other neighborhoods in the county. It is best in the far Northeast Heights, in the foothills, and in parts of the West Mesa.

Read more at the Albuquerque Journal.

Deborah Lewis is a licensed social worker serving court-referred elderly clients in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Her work takes her to two hospitals, each in different zip codes in the city. She recently sat in the outpatient waiting area in the two different hospitals within a 48-hour period.

She was shocked and dismayed by the stark contrasts in the "health" of the populations at each location.

The predominately middle-class, largely white, elderly outpatients at one hospital were walking without walkers. Most were clearly there for wellness and prevention services.

Across town in the largest hospital serving African-Americans and Latinos, Deborah recalled being overwhelmed by the high levels of debilitation among these outpatients -- wheelchairs, walkers, canes were the norm, not the exception. Most of these patients were struggling to manage chronic diseases.

It was for her, an African-American professional and a baby boomer, a painful reminder that where you live in America makes a significant difference in your risk for illness and premature death.

Here in the United States, a zip code can tell us a lot about how well and how long you'll live. So can census tracts. Most people are stunned to hear the differences:

• In Bernalillo County, N.M., home to Albuquerque, people in some census tracts live an average of 22 years less than those in other some tracts.
• In Boston, the difference in life expectancy by census tracts is 33 years.
• In Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, the difference is 18 years. (These figures come from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies' Place Matters reports.)

What's behind these differences in life expectancy? Disparities in neighborhood conditions. Our history of residential segregation has concentrated not just certain communities (typically communities of color), but also poverty.

Read more at The Huffington Post.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies today released a report documenting how neighborhood social and economic conditions in Baltimore powerfully shape racial and ethnic health inequities in the city.

The report, Place Matters for Health in Baltimore: Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All, finds that residents’ place of residence is an important indicator of their health and health risks. Importantly, because of persistent racial and class segregation, place of residence is an especially important driver of the poorer health outcomes of the city’s non-white and low-income residents.

The report, prepared by the Joint Center and the Baltimore Place Matters team, Equity Matters, Inc., in conjunction with the Center for Human Needs at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia Network for Geospatial Health Research, was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities(NIMHD) of the National Institutes of Health. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of the range of social, economic, and environmental conditions in Baltimore—particularly as it relates to the quality of housing and educational opportunities—and documents their relationship to the health status of the city’s residents.

Read more at KTRE-TV.

U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) today joined U.S. Congressman Elijah Cummings and members of The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies at a press conference about the Center’s report detailing health inequities among different Baltimore communities.   The report documented a nearly 30-year difference in life expectancy between minority, low-income neighborhoods and wealthy, more affluent neighborhoods.

The study was conducted by the Joint Center with a grant from the National Institutes of Minority Health and Health Disparities.  In the Affordable Care Act, Senator Cardin authored the provision elevating the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities to an Institute and establishing the Offices of Minority Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“This landmark report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies calls attention to the significant health inequities in Baltimore’s neighborhoods,” said Senator Cardin. “These gaps, such as the 30-year difference in life expectancy documented in the report, are unacceptable and preventable.    As the report shows, health disparities are linked to inequitable social and economic conditions in Baltimore, and we can and must take steps to eliminate them.  As a Senator with a long-standing record of working to promote health equity, including my legislation establishing Offices of Minority Health throughout HHS and elevating NIH’s National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities to an Institute, I welcome this study as another tool to help us move forward to ensure that every American has an opportunity to live a healthy life.”

Read more at the Office of Senator Ben Cardin.

The place where 3-year-old Antoine Graves grows into adulthood is likely to determine whether he lives to be very old or dies young, according to a new study.

According to a new report entitled Place Matters for Health in Baltimore: Ensuring Opportunities for Good Health for All, which contains research on health inequities in the city, researchers have concluded, yet again, that health disparities vary by neighborhood. The research shows that disproportionately it is people of color and the poor who live in neighborhoods that are likely to make them sick. The report was produced by the Washington D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that specializes in issues of interest to African Americans and Equity Matters, Inc.

“Forty to 70 percent of the reason people get sick is because of where they live, work and play,” said Michael Scott, chief equity officer and co-founder of Equity Matters, Inc. “The health disparities in Baltimore are caused by the institutional racism embedded in everything from housing to education.”

According to the report, the number of years a person is expected to live varied as much as 30 years, depending on whether they lived in a poor or wealthy neighborhood. The study was conducted between 2005 and 2009 and spanned the city. According to the data, the residents with the city’s highest life expectancy—81 to 86 years—live in the Inner Harbor/Federal Hill and Greater Roland Park Poplar areas. The areas with the lowest life expectancy include the Greenmont, Druid Hill and Westport neighborhoods, where people are not expected to live past 63 years old, the report shows.

Read more at The Afro.

Why do some people get sicker and die sooner than others? The answer involves more than our genes, behaviors and medical care, according to a new study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and the advocacy group Equity Inc. It turns out that where we live is often the strongest predictor of our well-being, and that disparities along racial and class lines in health outcomes and access to care mirror the inequities in every other aspect of people's lives.

The report's findings confirm earlier studies that have shown persistently large gaps in health outcomes between different areas of the country, the state and even parts of the same city. In Baltimore, for example, residents of poor, largely African-American communities are known to suffer far higher rates of infant and child mortality, premature death and chronic illness than those of affluent, largely white neighborhoods elsewhere in the city.

Average life expectancy for affluent, white residents in Roland Park, for example, is nearly 30 years longer than for poor, African-American residents in Upton/Druid Heights. Meanwhile, the infant mortality rate among black women in some city neighborhoods is three or four times the state average. By almost any measure — including hospital visits for chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes and asthma — place matters even more than access to care as the most important determinant of people's health and well-being.

Recognizing the urgency of producing better health outcomes for poor and minority residents, Maryland has encouraged the creation of so-called health enterprise zones in areas around the state where the disparities are greatest. The enterprise zones would offer tax incentives for doctors, hospitals, business groups, churches and community associations to form public-private partnerships that provide additional medical and support services to underserved communities.

Read more at The Baltimore Sun.

Researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University Center on Human Needs have released the last three studies of an eight-part collaborative project with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Health Policy Institute and the Virginia Network for Geospatial Health Research.

These studies assessed population health inequities and related social and economic conditions in urban and rural communities across the United States. Working alongside the project partners were eight “Place Matters” teams consisting of individuals who work and live in each of the communities studied.

The new reports address conditions in Oakland in Alameda County, Calif.; Boston, Mass.; and South Delta, Miss. Previously released reports addressed conditions in San Joaquin Valley, Calif.; Orleans Parish, La.; Cook County, Ill.; Bernalillo County, N.M.; and Baltimore, Md.

Read more at Health Canal.