30 United States The EconomistOctober 12th 2019
S
everal passengersin one carriage of
an “L” train, rattling south on the under-
ground line to Chicago metro station, are
unmistakably bourgeois. A grey-haired
woman squints at a book of 501 French
verbs. Opposite, a bespectacled man reads
a study of Arctic peoples. Some seats on, an
artist doodles on his pad.
Many well-heeled occupants get off the
Red line—a rail service running north-
south for 23 miles—at Streeterville, a dis-
trict where signs of prosperity abound. As
an advertising gimmick, a luxury car
adorns the L-station roof. At a farmers’
market, installed beside a contemporary
art museum, shoppers browse for micro-
greens, organic beef and gluten-free tama-
les. A violinist there explains she busks to
save for college. Dollar bills fill her case.
Streeterville has another distinction.
Public-health researchers suggest that a
baby born here can expect to live for an av-
erage of 90 years, the highest life expectan-
cy in Chicago. That is 30 years longer than
an infant born in the most blighted parts of
Englewood, farther south along the Red
line. No city in America has a bigger gap.
Return to the train and much changes
the farther south you ride. Passengers are
younger, less ostentatiously set on self-im-
provement. A guard in a stab-vest, his hand
on a canister of pepper spray, steps in. He
confides that he is tracking a suspect. Re-
ports of crime on the L system doubled
from 2015 to last year; violent cases rose by
89%, to 447. This year is worse, he says, and
“you can’t ask why any more.”
He tells his own story of being assaulted
when off-duty, and says he would deploy “a
guard in every car” if he could. He leaves at
Roosevelt station, and a boisterous group
steps in. A woman accuses another of being
“a crackhead”, provoking shrieks of laugh-
ter. A pair of young men move to let an el-
derly passenger sit down.
Here the Red line runs outside, giving
glimpses of a changing city: brick pagoda-
roofs of Chinatown; high walls of the White
Sox baseball stadium; warehouses and ex-
factories of a former industrial zone. Men
pace the carriages hawking green-and-
white packets of cigarettes. The city grows
noticeably poorer.
In the south passengers step out to ex-
haust fumes and noise. Their stations are
squeezed between a dozen lanes of roaring
motorway traffic. Leave with them and you
can spend an afternoon in depopulatingEnglewood,tracinga loopbetween the 63rd
and 69th stations, seeing a crumbling city
that is strikingly different from the prospe-
rous one 20 minutes to the north.
A few landmark buildings have been
built at City Hall’s behest: a large new cam-
pus for a high school, a newish mall that in-
cludes a Whole Foods and a Starbucks.
Elected officials hope these will spur more
redevelopment, but that has not come yet.
Many streets are notable for empty lots—
where property has been demolished—or
for dilapidated and boarded-up houses.
On a few porches people gather. A main
thoroughfare has a row of closed churches
and open liquor shops where men congre-
gate. Signs on the “Cadillac 4-in-1 Food
Market” announce it has been “black-
owned for 35 years”, but its door is buckled
and the building is empty.
On one corner a resident in a yellow
high-vis vest, Melvin, says he is hired by
the school system to protect children walk-
ing home from “any violence going on, any
drug activity.” He praises most of Engle-
wood’s locals as “great”, and says he has
heard only one gunshot in a year on the job.
Yet he says things change after dark.
Youngsters suffer from “torn-down neigh-
bourhoods, abandoned buildings that are
drug-infested” and from guns.
What does he make of the gap between
life expectancy in Streeterville and here?
“As crazy as it sounds, it is true,” says Mel-
vin. “Children up north are not faced with
what they face here,” he says, meaningshootings. Police have counted 1,600 viol-
ent crimes, including 50 murders, in En-
glewood and West Englewood in the past
year, a far worse rate than most places.
Lorna Thorpe at nyu Langone Health, a
medical centre affiliated with New York
University, helped to create the “City
Health Dashboard”, which produced the
30-year estimate. She has applied public-
health and other data from federal sources
to census tracts inside 500 American cities.
This allows fine-grained comparisons be-
tween the cities and between city neigh-
bourhoods for dozens of factors, including
obesity, binge-drinking, smoking, child-
hood poverty, health insurance and report-
ed rates of mental distress.
Ms Thorpe thinks many of those could
contribute to the three-decade gap. But the
most powerful “strong correlation”, she
says, is between low life-expectancy and
extreme racial segregation. Chicago re-
mains exceptionally divided on racial
lines. African-Americans make up 95% of
the population in parts of Englewood,
compared with just 2% in Streeterville.
Segregation is associated with differences
between neighbourhoods in income, pov-
erty, marriage rates and more.
Rob Paral, a demographer, agrees. The
differences in life expectancy between
rich, white northern districts and black
southern ones are mostly a reminder that
Chicago never broke up its racial “ghet-
toes”, he says. Poor and black residents
were shuffled to the south when the city
demolished public housing in the 1960s
and 1970s. Now black folks are being
squeezed again from places like Engle-
wood—its population is just 25,000, nearly
40% smaller than in 2000—as people flee
violence, poverty and broken housing, of-
ten leaving the city entirely. 7THE RED LINE
Life expectancy varies by 30 years from one end of Chicago’s L train to the otherChicago neighbourhoodsDown the tracks
RedliningSource:CityHealth DashboardChicago
Average life
expectancy at
birth, 2010-15
BycensustractRed line
rail serviceStreetervilleEnglewood60657075808590No data5 kmTwo years between stops