ABSTRACT
Sixty-one percent of the black poor in the Washington, DC metropolitan area live inside the District of Columbia; while 85 percent of the region’s non-black poor live outside the District in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Twenty-six percent of the region’s poor blacks live in a high-poverty (poverty rate > 30 percent), inner-city neighborhood, compared with only 2 percent of the nonblack poor (Turner, 1997). Are these racial segregation and poverty concentration patterns related to the twenty-year racial disparity in life expectancy in DC? Public health research increasingly suggests that they are, thus making it imperative to look for solutions to health disparities beyond individual risk factors.
