How racial stratification and neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation intersect in Minnesota’s mortality

Researcher: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field (College of Liberal Arts, Department of Sociology, Minnesota Population Center, Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation)

2020 marked a major upheaval in how racial stratification and neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation (e.g., neighborhood poverty rates) intersect in structuring mortality risk in Minnesota. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, racial stratification in mortality aligned strongly with neighborhood deprivation. The early pandemic changed that. But what has happened since and what is happening now? Has Minnesota returned to its pre-pandemic patterns of inequity, has it maintained the new patterns it developed early in the pandemic, or has something wholly new emerged? And in the era in which the dominant Covid-19 variant is Omicron, vaccines are widespread but unevenly adopted, and much of life has seemingly “returned to normal,” how is mortality risk—from Covid-19 but also from many other causes of death—distributed in Minnesota? The results of this research project can offer concrete guidance about how best to target limited health resources within the state.


Edward Goetz

Edward G. Goetz is director of CURA and a faculty member at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs

Ed specializes in housing and local community development planning and policy. His research focuses on issues of race and poverty and how they affect housing policy planning and development. Before coming to the University of Minnesota in 1988, he worked at the mayor's Office of Housing and Economic Development in San Francisco and for several nonprofit community developers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He has served on the board of directors of nonprofit housing agencies in the Twin Cities, and on several regional commissions related to affordable housing and development.

He is the author of The One-Way Street of Integration: Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities (Cornell University Press, 2018), New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy (Cornell University Press, 2013), Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America (2003, Urban Institute Press), Shelter Burden: Local Politics and Progressive Housing Policy (1993, Temple University Press), and co-editor of The New Localism: Comparative Urban Politics in a Global Era (1993, Sage Publications).

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Goetz
Ed Goetz
Director, CURA