Northern Virginia is known for having a high quality of life. Arlington, Fairfax, and Loudoun counties, as well as Falls Church, are among the richest counties in the U.S.
But within those counties are what the Northern Virginia Health Foundation calls “islands of disadvantage” — which the organization defines as neighborhoods in our area “with low life expectancy and adverse socioeconomic and environmental conditions that affect health.”
According to the study, your chances of making it to the age of 75 depend on where you live, your race, and your ethnicity, even within an area renowned for its health and wealth.
“Our intention is to zoom in and draw attention to the fact that amid all of that good news, there are pockets of disadvantage that exist throughout the region,” says Dr. Steven Woolf, lead study author
and director emeritus of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center on Society and Health.
“These are clustered census tracts within Northern Virginia, where people generally have low income, and often people of color struggle with very difficult living conditions and have very poor health statistics. And the purpose of this study was to try to document the scale of the problem and specifically to look at the leading causes of death that are responsible for early demise — premature death before age 75, where people are dying in the prime of their lives, sooner than they should be.”
Woolf says one of the first studies showed that there’s a 17-year gap in life expectancy across the region.
“So even in an area as successful as Northern Virginia, with the high quality of life we have, how long a person can expect to live varies by 17 years depending on where you’re located,” he says.
One of the starkest examples found in the report — the first part of which was conducted between 2015 and 2019, before the pandemic — compares Fairfax County’s South Run to Prince William County’s Dumfries areas before the pandemic.
In South Run, premature death rates were as low as 73.1 deaths per 100,000. In Dumfries, that jumps up to 573.3 deaths per 100,000.
Health Care Isn’t the Only Issue
And it isn’t just about health care. Socioeconomic factors play the biggest role. Woolf says that while getting to the doctor is obviously important, “studies show that only accounts for about 10 to 20 percent of health outcomes.”
What matters more are issues like education, wages, income, housing, and transportation.
Many of those issues are baked into racial and ethnic disparities from a history of systemic racism in the U.S.
A 2021 report from the NVHF called “Deeply Rooted” looked into the 400-year history of Northern Virginia and equity. The effects of that displacement and segregation, and where the government was putting its resources, remain.
“In some communities that were historically Black communities, roads didn’t get paved, electricity didn’t happen for years after they happened in affluent white neighborhoods,” says Patricia Mathews, NVHF president and CEO. “Disadvantage persisted even into the ’60s and ’70s.”
Searching for Holistic Solutions
Mathews says some local governments are looking into holistic solutions.
“Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax have pilot programs for guaranteed income. Many of the people who are getting those dollars live in those islands of disadvantage. The question of trying to improve their economic mobility is something that most jurisdictions are working on,” she says.
“It’s small, but it’s the right start, as it’s not just a health issue. I think getting folks to understand that is critical to making change,” she says.
The second part of the study examined what happened during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 to 2021.
“Most of the problems that we documented before the pandemic — not just socioeconomic, but also the racial and ethnic inequities that existed beforehand, the islands of disadvantage that existed beforehand — predicted what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Woolf says.
“We sometimes say that the pandemic poured fuel on the fire. The fire was already there. But obviously, the economic precarity that the pandemic created was even more stress on low-income families that were already struggling to make ends meet.”
Across Northern Virginia, Black residents were 44 percent more likely to die before reaching 75 than white residents during the height of the pandemic. In Arlington and Alexandria, those numbers become 116 percent and 117 percent, respectively.
Death rates in Black and Hispanic populations were much higher than in Asian and white populations.
Mathews says we can’t forget that “many of the folks who lived in the islands of disadvantage were frontline workers who were in grocery stores and doing essential work — low-income, low-wage work, but quote unquote, essential workers.”
Part of the answer lies in getting the word out, while another is using the data to bring change, both Mathews and Woolf say.
Mathews says Fairfax County is using life expectancy data from the NVHF’s earlier reports to look at how it structures both its budget and strategic plan.
Another part of the solution means “looking at how do we shift the thinking and the resources so that we can begin to build up those islands of disadvantage in ways that the community wants, but also in ways that increase the opportunities for people living in those communities,” Mathews says.
Woolf says many Northern Virginia jurisdictions are serious about trying to address the issues.
“Using this kind of granular data can give them some real intel to be more precise about how they allocate resources. So you know, we can target those resources better to the areas that need them the most if we have this kind of data to tell us where those neediest areas are,” he says.
Premature Death by Jurisdiction
Read the full NVHF report on life expectancy online.
For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine’s News newsletter.