What’s the Life Expectancy in Your Neighborhood?

There’s a great deal of information packed into life expectancy. "Life expectancy reflects a neighborhood’s safety, the quality of its health care, its environment, and the wealth and mental health of the people who live there," Dan Kopf and Daniel Wolfe write for Quartz.

While life expectancy is down in the United States overall, the story varies greatly from one neighborhood to the next. For example, the surge in drug overdoses in the United States is by no means evenly distributed across the country, and there’s a lot of detail that can be pulled out when one gets down to the census tract level.

Still, even with visibility down to the neighborhood level, some nuance is concealed, one person may not be as similar to their neighbor as addresses might suggest and because there’s a lot reflected in the data, there’s plenty of room for interpretation.