To be concrete lets take just one example - the new immigrants.
As you probably know, the ACS [Am. Comm Survey of the Census Bur] says well over *60%* of NYC's *entire* population are foreign born or their dependent children.
1/3 of NYC's *black* population are foreign born. And since the total number of blacks in NYC *declined* (quite a shock in itself), the number of native born blacks must have declined by a lot (but I don't have the numbers). There is a similar decline in native born latinos.
As I said, new immigrants and their dependents have a different health profile (for now) than native born groups (they also have lots of other differences like drug use prevalence and homicide victim rates that feed into life expectancy and other things going on now in NYC). [Sadly, one fears they were "allowed" in partly for this reason.]
For the numbers see (since I don't have the ACS link) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/nyregion/15minority.html?ex=1313294400&en=9ccbc874d5cf0bc4&ei=5090
There has also been quite a bit more churning among the white population than one might think. Working class pushed out, yuppies imported. And as you know, in today's social IMmobility it is no longer the children of the local white working class who are "getting ahead". I don't have the numbers but I recall seeing some produced by people like the researchers exiled from the City Council. Anecdotally think of any white working class neighborhood from the end of the 80's -- even last ditch holdouts like Bay Ridge (Saturday Night Fever), Astoria&Glendale (Archie Bunker) or Woodside (Irish pubs) have only a dwindling minority of whites today.
The departure of the native born working class has also meant that their elderly parents are now more likely to leave NYC (if only for a nursing home nearer their children) which disproportionately reduces the NYC death rate. Their replacements, Yuppies and the foreign born, are less likely to bring their elderly parents to NYC. (One might also add that with their new wealth a greater proportion of the NYC well off elderly also now leave NYC before their death, although I imagine this is a smaller factor.)
>The point of the article is that New Yorkers now live longer than
>other Americans.
To me the point of the article was comparing NYC favorably with other US *cities* (the article said so in the first para). A comparison of NYC to the national average is not of much interest since everyone knows that people in most U.S cities today live much longer than the national average. In fact this was pointed out in the article where it said: " And people are more likely to die young in the sticks: Death rates for 1-to-24-year-old males are 60 per 100,000 in cities, versus 80 in rural areas. Perhaps worst of all for the suburbs, obesity is rising far more rapidly than in cities."
>As of 2005, New York was less white than the rest of
>the U.S. (44% vs. 75%), twice as black (25% vs. 12%), almost twice as
>Latino (28% vs. 15%), and three times as Asian (12% vs. 4%). Our
>poverty rate is half again as high (19% vs. 13%). All those things
>suggest we should live shorter, not longer, lives than the national
>average. We may have swapped pops, but we're still darker and poorer
>than the average.
>
>And we're less white than in the 1990 census - it was 52% then. The
>poverty rate then was 19%, vs. a national of 13% (yeah, the same as
>2005). So given that we're less white and just as poor, why'd we
>surpass the U.S. average?
Again, is this what you want to get at? Isn't the question is whether NYC is "special"? For this I think you want to ask, for example, whether native born African-Americans in NYC live longer than their age/income cohort group in other US cities. Never mind that NYC blacks may compare not so badly to rural whites because blacks from other cities are in same situation.
The less silly parts of the article repeat the line put out each year by the Bloomberg Administration, sadly as a smokescreen, ever since the post 9-11 budget crunch meant that any serious public health funding was shelved. see for example 2003 http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/press_archive03/pr037-0421.shtml
Since no one has screamed about the funding (AIDS and TB are not hot anymore) the Bloomberg people continue to rely on the annual press release taken up by willing reporters, such as this one (plus of course tobacco and transfats which take no money). A shame since public health does not require a lot of money to make a big difference and NYC had built up a cadre of capable public health people, often enlisted by the AIDS challenge in the 90's. The poor handling of the WTC has pushed many to withdraw. This is one area where I thought Bloomberg might make a difference. Truly a missed opportunity, IMO.
Paul