In parts of cities once marked “hazardous” on federal housing maps, an ambulance is still more likely to show up late than in neighborhoods that bankers favored nearly a century ago, according to a national analysis of 236 urban areas. Rutgers researchers found that 7.06 % of residents in historically redlined Grade D tracts (considered “hazardous”) lacked rapid access to emergency medical services, compared with 4.36 % in Grade A tracts, a gap that held across every U.S. region.
The study in JAMA Network Open used modern traffic data, 2020 Census block groups and historic Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps to trace drive times from 42,472 emergency medical service (EMS) stations. The researchers found that 2.2 million of the 41 million people (5.34%) living inside the mapped zones cannot count on an ambulance arriving within five minutes, the National Fire Protection Association’s benchmark for critical calls.
The odds of EMS response times exceeding five minutes were 67% higher in the “redlined” neighborhoods that fell in the lowest of HOLC’s four color-coded rankings nearly a century ago. Lead author Cherisse Berry, a professor of surgery and vice chair of academic surgery at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, said the pattern shows how a New Deal lending program still shapes who survives a stroke or a car crash. To read the full story.