The Grim Reaper has been kind to the Big Apple.
New Yorkers are living 1 ¹/₂ years longer than a decade ago and nearly nine years longer than 25 years ago, city Health Department data show.
City residents’ life expectancy extended to 81.2 years in 2015, the most recent year for which data is available. In 1990, it was just 72.4 years.
City women could expect to live 83.5 years, the data showed, five years longer than men (78.6). With a life expectancy of 82.4 years, city Latinos live on average a year longer than whites (81.3) and five years longer than blacks (77.3). The city did not report the rate for Asians.
In addition to longer life expectancies, the new Summary of Vital Statistics revealed other signs that New Yorkers are living healthier, happier lives.
The mortality rate for city residents decreased by 16 percent from 2006 to 2015. It fell 19 percent for those under age 65 as fewer succumbed to heart disease, cancer and other illnesses.
Teen birth rates plummeted 47 percent since 2006, and the city’s infant-mortality rate plunged 27 percent in the same period.
The marriage rate went up. In 2015, 9.1 out of every 1,000 New Yorkers tied the knot. Nationally, the 2015 rate was 6.9 people per 1,000.
But the chasm between the city’s richest and poorest neighborhoods remains striking.
Manhattan’s wealthiest residents can expect to live a full decade longer than those in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx.
Brownsville has the city’s highest murder rate, and several Bronx neighborhoods lead the city in infant morality.
Lower life expectancies are linked to poverty.
“Money opens doors to education, to better housing, to good jobs, and even to health,” said Wendy Chavkin, a professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “Those with more money do better on most health outcomes than those with less and so we see people in affluent neighborhoods living longer.”
Life expectancy at birth
Rich New Yorkers live longer. Residents of two affluent Manhattan areas — Murray Hill and the Upper East Side — enjoyed an average life expectancy of 85.9 years in 2015. That’s a full decade longer than that of the denizens of Brooklyn’s Brownsville section, which had the city’s lowest life expectancy at 75.1 years. Other areas blessed with longevity included Tribeca and Greenwich Village, both at 85.8 years, and Elmhurst/ Corona, Queens, at 85.6 years. Low life expectancies were seen in Morrisania in The Bronx (76.2 years), Central Harlem (76.2 years), the Rockaways, Queens, (76.5 years) and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, (76.8 years).
Suicide (by age group)
Suicide is the third leading cause of death among New Yorkers age 15 to 24 and the fourth leading cause of death among those 25 to 34 and those 35 to 44. But elderly New Yorkers are more likely to commit suicide than any other age group. People ages 65 to 84 had the highest suicide rate in the city in 2015, at 10.2 deaths per 100,000 people. That’s a 40 percent rise in this age group since 2006. Adults age 45 to 64 had the second-highest suicide rate at 9.7 per 100,000 people. For those 25 to 44 years old, the suicide rate was 6.4 deaths per 100,000 people, the same as in 2006. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among Asians under age 65 and the fourth leading cause of death among whites under age 65.
Crude death rate
As New Yorkers live longer, they’re more likely to be felled by Alzheimer’s, a disease of old age. Alzheimer’s is the fastest rising cause of death in New York City, jumping to eighth place on the city’s 2015 list of things that’ll kill you, up from 19th place in 2006. The city counted 1,079 Alzheimer’s deaths in 2015, a rate of 12.6 per 100,000 people. That was 36 percent more than the previous year, and a startling 306 percent jump from 2006. The city Health Department attributed the rise to “improved reporting” and an aging population.
Infant mortality
Pelham Parkway, a middle-class Bronx neighborhood, had the highest infant-mortality rate in the city from 2013 to 2015, at 8.1 deaths per 1,000 live births. Williamsbridge, another Bronx neighborhood, had the second-highest rate at 7.7 deaths per 1,000 births, followed by Central Harlem at 7.2. The Upper East Side had the lowest rate in that period, at 0.8 deaths per 1,000 births, followed by Greenwich Village and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which both had 0.9. The city’s overall infant-mortality rate in 2015 was 4.3 deaths per 1,000 births, a decline of 27 percent since 2006. The rate for blacks was three times higher than that for whites. The rate for Puerto Ricans was 2.3 times higher than that for whites.
Marriage
Love is in the air. The city’s marriage rate has blossomed over the last 17 years, with 9.1 out of every 1,000 New Yorkers tying the knot in 2015 — up from 6.8 per 1,000 in 1998. The city counted 77,777 weddings in 2015, up 45 percent from the 53,661 marriages recorded in 1998. June and August were the most popular months to say “I do” — an average of 247 weddings were recorded each day during both months. January, which saw 145 marriages per day, was the least popular month for weddings.
Foreign births
China is close to eclipsing the Dominican Republic as the top nation of origin among New York’s foreign-born moms. Women from the Dominican Republic bore 8,039 children in the city in 2015. There were 7,911 births to Chinese women, 4,792 to Mexican women, 2,725 to Ecuadorean women and 2,646 to Bangladeshi women. Since 2010, Chinese births are up 15 percent, and Bangladeshi births are up 50 percent. Women from Uzbekistan, whose numbers were not high enough to be included in 2010 city stats, had 1,244 newborns in 2015.
Crude birth rates
Borough Park women had more babies than anyone else in the city in 2015, with a rate of 27.5 births per 1,000 people, accounting for 5,528 baby boys and girls. Two other Brooklyn neighborhoods followed, with Sunset Park at 20.5 births per 1,000 people, and Williamsburg at 18.8. Bayside, Queens, had the lowest birth rate in the city at 5.9 per 1,000 people, with only 706 born there. The Lower East Side recorded 8.1 births per 1,000 people, followed by Chelsea at 8.4 per 1,000.By borough, Brooklyn had the highest birth rate at 15.5 per 1,000 people, and Manhattan the lowest at 10.8. Two out of three, or 67.8 percent, of moms in Brooklyn’s Park Slope breast-feed their babies exclusively, the highest rate in the city. They’re trailed by moms in Tribeca, 64 percent, and Murray Hill, 63.1 percent. Only 19.6 percent of mothers in The Bronx’s Morrisania neighborhood breast-feed their babies, the lowest rate in the city.
Age-adjusted homicide rate
New Yorkers are most likely to meet a violent end in Brownsville, Brooklyn, which recorded 20.8 deaths per 100,000 people from 2011 to 2015 — the city’s highest homicide rate. That’s nearly double the rate of the next highest neighborhood, Mott Haven in The Bronx, where 12.2 people per 100,000 were killed in the same period. The next most violent neighborhoods were Morrisania in The Bronx, at 12 deaths per 100,000 people, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, at 11.4, and East Flatbush, Brooklyn, at 10.8. The city’s least violent neighborhoods were Tribeca; the Upper East Side; Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; Bayside, Queens; Greenwich Village; Murray Hill; Forest Hills, Queens; and Staten Island’s South Shore.
Leading causes of death
Fatal drug overdoses are surging. They’re the leading killer of young adults in the city and have risen to the second most common cause of death among teens and college students. In 2015, drug abuse took the lives of 203 New Yorkers age 25 to 34 — more than double the number recorded in 2010, when overdoses killed 96 in that age group. Overdoses also ended the lives of 72 people age 15 to 24 in 2015, making it the second leading cause of death in that age group after homicide. The city counted 1,051 deaths among all age groups due to “use of or poisoning by psychoactive substance” in 2015, a 58 percent jump from 2010, when there were 665 drug-related deaths. Drug abuse accounted for 1.9 percent of all deaths in the city in 2015.
Teen births
Bronx neighborhoods led the city in teen pregnancies, but the numbers are declining. East Tremont had the highest percentage of babies born to teenagers in the city, with 8.8 percent of all live births from 2013 to 2015 involving teens. Next was Morrisania at 8.6 percent, Mott Haven at 8.1 percent, and Hunts Point at 8 percent. The overall Bronx average from 2013 to 2015 was 7 percent, down from the 11 percent rate from 2008 to 2011. Battery Park City in Manhattan had the lowest teen birth rate in the city at 0.2 percent, followed by Murray Hill and Greenwich Village at 0.3 percent.