What Moves With What

60 health and socioeconomic measures, 59 community districts

Every district, two measures at a time. The Health Department publishes the same set of health, housing, economic and demographic figures for all 59 community districts. Put any two on the same chart and see whether they move together. Start with life expectancy against poverty, then try it against anything else.

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This is a correlation across districts, not a cause and not a fact about people. If two measures move together it can be because one drives the other, because something else drives both, or because of how the district lines happen to fall. A pattern across 59 areas also says nothing reliable about any individual living in one of them, which statisticians call the ecological fallacy. Treat what follows as a question worth asking, not an answer.

Everything else, ranked

How the number is worked out

The figure is the Pearson correlation coefficient across the districts that have a published value for both measures. It runs from +1, where the two rise together in perfect lockstep, through 0, where they have no linear relationship at all, to −1, where one rises exactly as the other falls.

It only detects straight-line relationships. Two measures can be tightly related in a curve and still score near zero, so the chart matters as much as the number.

Districts with a suppressed or missing value for either measure are dropped from that pair, so the count of districts behind each figure varies. It is shown next to the coefficient.

No significance test is applied and none of these are adjusted for anything else. With 60 measures there are more than 1,700 possible pairs, so some will look striking by chance alone.

Source: NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2026 Community Health Profiles public use dataset. Each measure has its own source, years and method; the years are shown with the measure.
Health by community district · A correction: Mike Racioppo