Sacramento County babies born in one tract can expect 87.4 years, in another 68.0: a 19.4-year gap

A baby born in census tract 40.11 in Sacramento's Pocket neighborhood can expect to live 87.4 years. A baby born in tract 53.01, about eight miles away near North 12th Street downtown, can expect 68.0. That is 19.4 years between two places in one county, from the CDC's tract-level life tables, built from deaths in 2010 through 2015 (USALEEP file).

Those are the two ends of 300 tracts, and ends are where the estimates are shakiest. The CDC prints a standard error with each figure: 2.1 years for the Pocket tract, 2.9 for the downtown one. Combined, the 19.4-year gap carries a margin of about 3.6 years either way. I placed each tract by its center point; the CDC file gives numbers, not neighborhood names, so the labels are mine.

The gap holds up when you stop looking at the extremes

The middle of the county is a tighter band. The median tract has a life expectancy of 78.8 years; the tract at the 10th percentile is 75.0 and the one at the 90th is 82.7. Average the 30 lowest tracts and you get 73.2 years. Average the 30 highest and you get 84.1. That is a 10.9-year gap between two groups of 30, and averaging 30 tracts smooths out most of the noise in any one. The gap is real. Its exact size at the two ends is not.

What lines up with the years

Money lines up with them first. I matched the CDC tracts to median household income from the Census Bureau's 2019–2023 American Community Survey (table B19013), using the tract number. Across the 251 tracts where the income estimate's margin of error is under 40 percent of the estimate itself, income and life expectancy move together at a correlation of 0.63, where 1.0 would be lockstep. In the group of 30 shortest-lived tracts, the median tract's household income is $60,000. In the group of 30 longest-lived, it is $125,526. Poverty runs 14.0 percent against 6.1 percent. Those two medians come from the 25 tracts in each group that matched across the two maps; the other five in each group dropped out.

The Pocket tract fits the pattern: $138,224 median income, 5.7 percent of people below the poverty line. The downtown tract has a poverty rate of 37.8 percent. Its median income I will not print as a finding. The Census Bureau lists $91,563 with a margin of error of $77,827, which says the survey could not pin it down, probably because the tract mixes very different households.

The CDC's PLACES estimates, which model how adults in each tract answer a national health survey (PLACES, 2023 release), describe what daily life is like in the two tracts. Adults in 53.01 are estimated to have received food stamps at a rate of 34.8 percent, against 7.7 percent in 40.11. Food insecurity is 28.7 against 9.5 percent. Housing insecurity is 24.0 against 8.0. Lack of reliable transportation is 16.1 against 5.6. Current smoking is 20.0 against 7.3, and adult asthma is 12.5 against 8.8. Adults aged 18 to 64 without health insurance: 10.7 percent against 4.7. Fair or poor self-rated health: 31.0 against 16.3.

Care shows up in the same column. In 53.01, 68.9 percent of adults saw a doctor for a routine checkup in the past year, against 75.5 percent in 40.11, and 48.7 against 72.4 percent saw a dentist. Those are modeled estimates, not counts, and each can be off by several points.

What I could not read

Two of the three causes the assignment named I cannot show. Air: I did not find a tract-level air measure I could read. The state's CalEnviroScreen is behind a bot wall at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, and I did not go around it. So I do not know how much of the gap is the air people breathe, and I will not guess. Distance to care: the PLACES file measures who got care, not how far the clinic is. I did not measure that.

Two more limits. The life tables use 2010 tract maps and the income and PLACES tables use 2020 maps. I matched by tract number, and 25 of the 30 shortest-lived and 25 of the 30 longest-lived tracts had a match; I did not check that each matched tract still covers the same ground. And the deaths are from 2010 through 2015, a decade before today. The tract-level pattern may have moved; this file cannot say.

One question I cannot answer from these files: who lives in tract 53.01. A tract that includes people without housing, shelters, or both can pull a life-table figure down in a way a tract of long-term residents would not. The data show the number. They do not say whether the people counted in it stay in the neighborhood.

Where the public can still be heard

I did not find a dated budget hearing or public health plan item on the Board of Supervisors' calendar this week, and I will not name a date I did not read. What is posted is the standing rule. The Board meets on various Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. and Wednesdays at 2:00 p.m. (Board's meeting page). Each speaker gets two minutes on an agenda item and two minutes on any matter not on the agenda. You can also write to [email protected], naming the meeting date and the agenda item, or mail 700 H Street, Suite 2450, Sacramento, CA 95814. Written comments are given to the supervisors and filed in the record.

How sure are we: the 19.4-year gap is the CDC's own table, read directly. It is real to within about 3.6 years at its two ends, and the 10.9-year gap between the lowest and highest 30 tracts is firmer. The links to income and poverty are measured. The links to food, housing, transportation and smoking rest on modeled estimates. What would change this piece: a tract-level air figure that tracks life expectancy better than income does, or a current life table that closes the gap.