Home and money

In the working years an address shows up as a housing cost or as an asset, and either can be set against how long the people who live there live. This part asks how home value, income, lending, work and rent line up with each other and with life expectancy. The chapters describe places, whether ZIP code areas, counties, census tracts or the sites where eviction filings are tracked, and none describes any one household.

Chapter 4.1, Home value, income and redlining begins with home value. It sets life expectancy against the median home value of ZIP code areas and finds that life expectancy is higher where homes are worth more, whether each area counts once or counts in proportion to its population. It then reads income tax returns and compares, across levels of county deprivation, the share of returns that claim the earned income tax credit and the share that report a high income, along with the way the whole distribution of brackets changes shape. Next it sets the grades that the Home Owners' Loan Corporation gave neighborhoods in the 1930s beside life expectancy and other outcomes today, and tracts graded A on those maps have a longer life expectancy than tracts graded D.

Home values, incomes and the old grades are tied to one another and to who lives where. The residents of an area differ from people who move in income, health and age, and the data cannot separate that selection from what an area provides. The grades followed the housing, incomes and populations of the 1930s, so today's pattern combines what the neighborhoods were with what happened to them afterward. A box reports a study of housing outcomes next to the borders of the maps, and that study does not show that the grades explain today's differences in life expectancy.

Chapter 4.2, Mortgage denials reads the home-purchase applications that lenders decided in 2024. Denial rates are level across the least deprived tracts and higher in more deprived ones, and in the tracts with published rates for both groups Black applicants were denied more often than white applicants, by a gap that shows no trend with deprivation or applicant income. The tract file holds no credit scores or debts, so the gaps are not estimates of discrimination. Differences in denial rates across the 1930s grades disappear when tracts are compared within the same city and the same tenth of deprivation. Chapter 4.3, Work, wages and access to jobs keeps residents and workplaces apart. Many residents hold jobs in another county, the jobs that residents hold differ in pay from the jobs located where they live, and the pay that employers in a county report follows the jobs located there more closely than the earnings of residents.

Chapter 4.4, Renting, affordability and eviction turns to renters. It compares the share of households that HUD counts as cost-burdened among renters and among owners, across tracts, counties and income bands, and sets the burden of renters beside the rent standard that HUD publishes for each area. Renters are burdened more often than owners, and the gap is widest among households with low and moderate incomes. Across the country renter burden shows no linear trend with neighborhood deprivation, while within a county it is higher in more deprived tracts. The chapter then follows eviction filings in the cities that the Eviction Lab tracks, with each tract compared with its own level before the pandemic, so the index shows change and not where filings are most common. Filings are not completed evictions, and the tracked sites are not a national sample.