As they live Chicago’s ‘Death Gap,’ a three-generation West Side family fights to end it

Daevon Reynolds grew up in Austin on Chicago’s West Side, where burning off energy at the neighborhood park around people selling drugs wasn’t safe.

His mom would take her two boys to the vast Columbus Park nearby to play. Reynolds and his brother would fight with sticks and make up stories about vampires and wolves in the woods.

Now 27, Reynolds comes to the park to get away from stress — to meditate or do yoga, and write poetry and paint. He exudes warmth; he says he’s intentional about finding moments of joy.

Reynolds lives in West Garfield Park and works nearby. Like a lot of people here, he thinks about his own mortality. This is a community where residents can expect to die earlier than in any other part of Chicago. Reynolds’ great-grandmother died from a heart attack in her 60s.

“It’s been real important for our family to make it past [her] age,” Reynolds says.

Even his mom didn’t think she’d live past 30.

Reynolds’ family planted roots in West Garfield Park more than 50 years ago. He would spend a lot of time at his great-grandmother’s house. It’s still in the family.

He lives just a few blocks away, off historic Madison Street, where businesses used to thrive. Living in a chronic state of stress can shave years off your life, and Reynolds says even taking a walk is stressful.

People who are high slump over on the sidewalk or inside bus shelters. Trash litters the streets. You have to be aware if there’s a gang war going on. If Reynolds walks down the block, he has rules: Plan the route. Eyes forward. Be extremely confident so you look like you belong.

And like a lot of West Siders, Reynolds navigates chronic disease — Crohn’s and sickle cell anemia.

Painful flare-ups interrupt his sleep. Gunshots and police sirens he hears outside don’t help. Sometimes drug addicts argue or scream in the middle of the night as dealers sell on his otherwise quiet street.

“The consistency of it, and not knowing when it’s going to happen or be prepared for that, is also a stressor,” he says.

Reynolds and his family are part of a community effort to improve the conditions in West Garfield Park that can lead to an early grave. His mom, Tosheika Thomas, and his grandmother, Linda Thomas, are beyond frustrated. They remember a time when neighbors looked out for one another, when children could jump rope out front or run free down the block.

Now, even kids know they might not grow old.

“We want to see all that glory come back,” Linda Thomas says.

‘Being poor is stressful. Period.’

There are only about five miles, or seven stops on the Green Line, between West Garfield Park and the Loop. Yet in that space, there’s a 20-year gap between how long people are expected to live — to 67 years on average in West Garfield Park, where most people are Black, to 87 in the Loop, where the majority are white.

This is the widest life expectancy gap in Chicago, and the biggest so-called death gap across neighborhoods of any big city in America, researchers found in 2019. They have not replicated the study.

In a city with a deep history of segregation, Chicago public health officials view the gap through the lens of race. They say four main drivers — heart disease, homicide, opioid overdoses and cancer — fuel shorter lives among Chicagoans who are Black compared to residents of other races. In many cases, these deaths are preventable.

In 2023 alone, Black Chicagoans may have lost at least 15,000 years off their lives for every 100,000 Black residents — three to six times more than any other race, the most recent data shows.

In other words, that’s about 120,000 years of potential life lost for the roughly 800,000 Black residents in Chicago. West Garfield Park trailed only Englewood on the South Side in potentially losing the most years.

“Being poor is stressful. Period. End of story,” says Rev. Marshall Hatch Sr., who has led New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in West Garfield Park for more than 30 years.

WBEZ talked to and surveyed more than 50 people to understand the toll dying prematurely takes on Chicagoans, the families left behind and the fabric of their communities.

Residents want police and politicians to get rid of the drugs and the guns. They want the basics they now must leave their neighborhood to find — fresh food, a safe place to exercise and play, a job.

This won’t be easy. COVID-era funding that flowed across the U.S. to help rebuild is running out, while President Donald Trump makes drastic cuts to programs that support low-income communities like West Garfield Park. Chicago has a more than $1 billion budget shortfall heading into 2026, and property tax bills just went up. West Garfield Park was hit harder than any other community in the city.

But residents and community leaders here, including generations of families such as the Thomases, are not waiting.

Tomatoes and swiss chard sprout up in local gardens. Running groups fan out across parks. There’s a buzz of ideas at community gatherings, and a beacon of hope rises along this stretch of Madison Street, a once-bustling corridor devastated by white flight and the 1968 riots that hasn’t seen big investment in decades.

The grandmother: before drugs and guns arrived

West Garfield Park wasn’t always struggling. Linda Thomas moved here more than 50 years ago, when she was 9. The Thomases are one of the Legacy Families, a group with deep ties to the area who want to make sure residents have a voice in local decisions.

Thomas, Daevon Reynolds’ grandmother, grew up on a quiet block with tall trees and well-kept houses. There was a sense of community.

“We was taught to say ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no ma’am’ and look out for each other,” recalls Linda Thomas, 65. She speaks frankly and quickly.

Boys from the neighborhood played basketball behind her house. Girls played hopscotch and hide ‘n’ seek.

“Your mom was every kid’s mom on the block,” adds Thomas’ friend May Henderson, 59, from another Legacy Family. They sit next to each other inside Pastor Hatch’s historic church, one of their safe spaces, where the sun pours through stained glass windows depicting the trans-Atlantic slave trade and children killed by violence.

During hot summer months, with no air conditioning, Henderson’s family used to sleep with the back door open, just the hook of the screen door latched so the breeze could flow in.

They each raised their children here. Linda’s daughter, Tosheika Thomas, 45, says her childhood was like what she saw on “The Cosby Show” in the 1980s. Tosheika Thomas is the executive director of the Legacy Families group.

As she walks her childhood streets, she points out a yard that used to be a community garden she and her friends would cut through on their bikes. That neighbor would get so mad, Thomas recalls with a laugh. But he’d let them eat fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden, too.

She remembers the neighborhood starting to change when she was around 10 years old. At school, some kids talked about how their parents hadn’t come home in days. They were caught up in the crack cocaine epidemic.

“Children my age are taking care of younger siblings, trying to make sure they get to school early enough to have breakfast in the morning but still looking like their face needs to be washed and their hair needs to be combed,” Tosheika Thomas remembers. “It spread so quickly and so far that it was almost like a devastation.”

Gun violence started to spread too.

The neighborhood has been painfully slow to recover, putting lives at risk.

Hatch sees “walking zombies” of white people drugged out on the streets. The area has been allowed to be a regional drug hub for decades, something you don’t see in white areas on the North Side, he says.

West Garfield Park now has one of the city’s highest death rates from opioid-related overdoses and homicide.

“I want to be able to walk to the store without getting shot,” Linda Thomas says with anger in her voice.

She pulls up an app on her phone. She can look up that someone got killed on the corner or a car got stolen, from the safety of her front room.

“Everybody stays to themselves,” Henderson says. “Everybody is skeptical of everybody.”

She prays before she leaves her house to make the short walk to church, where she helps run food giveaways. Last year when shots rang out as she crossed the street, she hid behind a tree. Then she ran inside her house and collapsed.

A Chicago police spokesperson said no one was available to discuss residents’ frustrations with drugs and gun violence. Ald. Jason Ervin, whose 28th Ward includes West Garfield Park, did not respond for an interview.

What fuels the life expectancy gap

Chronic disease and homicide are the two biggest drivers of the death gap between Black Chicagoans and other races.

Dr. Vincent Freeman, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, pored over data spanning 2010 to 2019. If Black infants survived their first year of life, he found, homicides began to drive the gap when people reached 15 years old. That topped out around age 34.

Then, preventable deaths from heart disease, cancer and other treatable conditions fueled the divide through middle age. The gap persists until people die.

Here’s how this gap plays out in real life in West Garfield Park: The community has among the city’s highest death rates, not just for homicide but also for heart disease and cancer.

Dr. David Ansell has seen for decades how conditions on the West Side make his patients sick and die earlier. These communities are triple-disadvantaged, he says — they’re largely low-income, surrounded by neighborhoods just like them, and people who visit are poor too.

In West Garfield Park, merely living is much harder than in most parts of Chicago, according to a “hardship index” that incorporates unemployment, income and other factors. Around 40% of households make less than $25,000 a year, data shows. The majority of residents are unemployed or stopped looking for a job.

“The lack of wealth translates into the lack of health,” says Ansell, a senior vice president at Rush University Medical Center who wrote “The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills.”

Many of his patients have had health insurance and jobs, but they still didn’t make enough money to take care of themselves.

Hatch sees this among his parishioners: people in survival mode, isolated inside their homes. His church, a fixture in the community, tries to fill the need with everything from housing to life coaching for young adults.

Hatch knows what it’s like to lose someone young. His mother died of a heart attack when she was 46. Hatch was 8 years old.

Even a person who eats well and exercises can age prematurely if they face a constant mountain of stressors — low pay, crowded housing, the risk of getting shot, dirty air, racism — says Dr. Tony Iton, who has researched life expectancy gaps for more than 20 years.

“If I’m walking across the street and there’s a bus sort of barreling towards me, I will have this very sudden surge in cortisol and other stress hormones,” says Iton, CEO of the Health Trust, a health equity foundation in Silicon Valley.

Fight or flight kicks in to survive. But what if it doesn’t end? The wear and tear leads to heart disease, cancer and other chronic diseases, Iton says. It can take 20 to 30 years to see the effects, but the more stress, the earlier it takes hold.

The signs are there in West Garfield Park. The community has among the city’s highest rates of high blood pressure among people as young as 18, according to CAPriCORN, a local research network.

Hypertension is driven by stress, is closely linked to heart failure and is one of the top preventable causes of illness, says Dr. Heather Prendergast, an emergency department physician and vice chair of the department at UI Health near Rush.

“They call it the silent killer for a reason,” Prendergast says. “You can go for years with uncontrolled hypertension and not really understand the damage it’s doing to your heart and to your kidneys.”

The mother: ‘You can clearly see the disparity’

Tosheika Thomas routinely leaves West Garfield Park to stay healthy. She drives to Columbus Park and rents a Divvy bike or takes a walk — if she has time between juggling a busy job as an education disabilities coordinator and a few community meetings a week. She keeps an eye on development happening in the neighborhood, helps coordinate home-buying workshops and advocates for affordable housing.

For fresh food, she drives to suburban Oak Park, about three miles away. During a recent trip, she points out how the quality of the neighborhood dramatically changes the further she gets from home.

“It looks like a place you want to raise your family, as opposed to what’s going on in Garfield,” she says.

Cash registers are down at Jewel, so she heads to Pete’s Fresh Market, where the aisles are clean and lights are bright. She picks out sweet potatoes, spinach and a green juice blend.

She wonders if seniors would navigate this detour to Pete’s on public transit — if they’d feel safe waiting for the bus — or give up and buy snacks at the corner store.

Next stop, Thomas heads back to West Garfield Park to a meat market. She pulls over on a blighted block with boarded-up buildings and overgrown grass. Inside, the odor is intense. She waits a few minutes behind a small crowd. A person can buy enough food here to last a month. She shouts her order for chicken wings, pays and leaves.

“You can clearly see the disparity,” Thomas says. “This is what they’ve been giving us for years, and this is what they’re saying we deserve. … I don’t want our children coming up feeling like this is what they should settle for.”

‘We’re so overdue’

From New York City to Phoenix, cities across the U.S. grapple with death gaps between people of different races. In Chicago, the gap has shrunk, and residents overall are expected to live longer, nearly matching the pre-pandemic average age of about 79.

But this excitement is tempered by money and politics. Dr. Simbo Ige, Chicago’s public health commissioner, says closing the gap is a priority, but she’s facing a proposed cut to her budget of at least 40% heading into 2026.

Ige’s plan: Stretch what dollars she has, collaborate more with hospitals to scale programs like tackling high blood pressure, don’t duplicate other government efforts.

“The city cannot meet all of [the] needs,” Ige says.

In the meantime, community leaders and residents are making plans.

On a warm fall evening, about 50 people gather at the Garfield Park Fieldhouse, an iconic building topped with a golden dome. It feels like a celebration. This is one of their final meetings after years of work to help shape the future of their community.

Tosheika Thomas gives hugs and checks in with neighbors. She joins the crowd heading to a hallway, where everyone from teens to elders puts stickers next to ideas they like on poster boards: Empower youth, teach about predatory lenders, host art shows that celebrate local culture.

Darlene Hall, another member of the Legacy Families, puts a sticker next to enhanced communication between police and the community because “as of now, there is none,” she says.

Reynolds, Thomas’ son who works as a community engagement manager at the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, is excited about the idea of an arts corridor.

A poster board about housing is lit up with stickers. Getting priced out of the area is a big concern as gentrification creeps west.

“People understand now they can get ousted because of the United Center,” Linda Thomas says later.

She’s referring to the 1901 Project, a years-long $7 billion proposal to transform more than 55 acres around the United Center, just a few miles away, with a hotel, housing, retail and more. The city is looking to build on the momentum by having developers buy vacant lots in nearby East Garfield Park.

Meanwhile, residents in West Garfield Park just got their latest property tax bills. The median bill more than doubled — the biggest hike of any community area in Chicago — as the value of office buildings and other commercial property downtown plunged amid vacancies, shifting most of the burden to homeowners, the Cook County Treasurer’s office found.

Funding the ideas floated that night could take years, says Drea Slaughter, executive director of the Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative, a nonprofit co-hosting the meeting. But she’s not deterred.

Slaughter, 44, grew up in Garfield Park. She remembers poring over fantasy novels at Legler Library and roller skating at Hot Wheels, where her parents met.

But as resources dried up, her family moved to Oak Park. Residents there are expected to live on average to 85.

“No one wants the West Side and Garfield Park to win more than me,” Slaughter says, choking up a bit. “We’re so overdue.”

One potential solution to narrowing the death gap is further along. The Sankofa Village Wellness Center, a more than $40 million project, is set to open in the spring along Madison Street.

Plans call for a medical clinic, a gym and walking track, a drop-in day care center and more. The idea is to create a walkable village, with other new investments in the area.

The community asked for these resources, Tosheika Thomas says. She and other Legacy Families members helped survey residents. Now they’re spreading the word.

“I don’t want people to walk by and say, ‘Who is this for?’” she says. “It’s for you.”

Many community leaders and organizations helped create the wellness center, from Hatch’s church to West Side United, an initiative Ansell championed to close the death gap on the West Side.

Launched in 2018, West Side United includes several hospital systems that so far hired more than 7,000 West Siders and spent more than $257 million on area businesses. The idea: A job often gives people not just health insurance but money to boost the economy in their neighborhood.

The initiative has attracted international attention. Ayesha Jaco, West Side United’s executive director, grew up in East Garfield Park. She watched her grandmother die of cancer-related complications before her 67th birthday, two weeks after she was diagnosed.

She says her brother lost close to 25 friends over 10 years. She watched the much-needed Aldi abruptly close.

“This work is me,” Jaco says. “It’s what I feel like I was sent here and born to do.”

Hope, risks and the pull of home

As the Sankofa Village Wellness Center soars outside her kitchen window, Tosheika Thomas shares a fear about what could come of all their efforts.

She sees how money flowing into the area could improve the health of everyone in the community, but at what cost?

“I’m not going to be able to afford to live here,” she says.

Her total tax bill just nearly tripled — to almost $3,200, from about $1,200 the year before.

She fears people who move in will say she doesn’t belong.

But it’s not keeping her from the work. Instead, the fight to ensure that her community benefits from new and healthy change is woven into her mission.

No more vacant lots and abandoned homes. A gym close by. A neighborhood where more young people like her son can feel the pull to stay.

Reynolds could have chosen to live elsewhere, away from the stresses of life in West Garfield Park. In fact, he has lived elsewhere in the Midwest.

But like his mother and grandmother, Reynolds has hope — and unfinished business to make their community vibrant and healthy again.

“I keep coming back,” Reynolds says. “Something here still needs my attention.”

Coming in December: Stories about more on-the-ground solutions from residents and community leaders who are working to eliminate the death gap in West Garfield Park.

This story was produced as part of a fellowship with the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, with support from the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism and National Fellowship Fund.