Smoking causes over a dozen cancers, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and many other diseases; it remains a leading cause of death in New York City (NYC). On average, people who do not smoke live about 10 years longer than people who do.

Additionally, there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. Secondhand smoke causes cancer, heart disease and other illnesses in adults. Children exposed to smoke are more likely to have bronchitis, asthma attacks, ear infections, pneumonia and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

The harms of e-cigarettes

E-cigarettes are devices that heat a liquid, called e-liquid into an aerosol that the user can inhale. Although e-liquids do not contain tobacco, they contain chemicals, usually including flavorings, and often contain nicotine, which is addictive. E-cigarette use (also known as vaping) can be especially harmful for young people because nicotine affects them in different ways than adults. Youth who use e-cigarettes are also more likely to try cigarettes.

E-liquid ingredients are not closely regulated, so the nicotine content, additives and flavorings can vary extensively. The long-term health effects of vaping are unknown, but the aerosol from heated e-liquids can contain other harmful chemicals, such as formaldehyde, benzene, diacetyl and heavy metals. E-cigarettes are not approved by the FDA to help people quit smoking.

Other people nearby can be harmed by breathing in the harmful chemicals in e-cigarette aerosol in the air.

Environmental Exposure to Tobacco and E-cigarette Products

A person’s environment can affect how much they are exposed to tobacco and e-cigarette products and related marketing, as well as secondhand smoke and aerosol.

Higher levels of tobacco retailer density and proximity are associated with higher tobacco use. The tobacco industry’s marketing activities, including incentivizing retailers to display their products and ads, result in increased marketing and accessibility of products in communities with higher poverty. The tobacco industry has a long history of deceptive tactics and marketing to youth, communities of color, and other marginalized communities.

NYC’s Smoke Free Air Act prohibits smoking and vaping in most workplaces and public spaces, including inside restaurants and bars. Under the SFAA, any smoking or vaping is also banned in all indoor common areas of residential buildings with three or more units.

Find Out More

Everyone deserves the opportunity to be free from the harm that commercial tobacco and nicotine products can cause. To learn more about prevention and treatment resources, as well as how you can take action in your community visit these webpages and websites:

• NYC Quits
• E-cigarettes
• Smoke Free Air Laws
• NYC Smoke-Free

There are many schemes of neighborhood boundaries (or geographies) available for different datasets. These include:

• Citywide
• Borough
• United Hospital Fund 42 (UHF42) and United Hospital Fund 34 (UHF34) neighborhoods
• Community Districts (CD), and, related, Community District Tabulation Areas (CDTA)
• Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA)
• Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTA)

We try to make data available at as fine a geographic resolution as we can. Read more about different geographies at this data story.

It would be convenient if each dataset could be made available at the same geography, but this is not always possible. The neighborhood boundaries available depend on the specifics of the underlying dataset.

When we have multiple years of data, we show the data as trend charts.

Trends for individual neighborhoods tend to be very unstable (or "bouncy"), due to small counts for outcomes in individual neighborhoods. To show clearer trends, we usually aggregate up and show trend data by Borough.

Options on some indicators let you compare this indicator to other similar indicators.

We try to make data available as soon as we can.

Many datasets take a long time to reach us — a "lag" of several years, during which data are gathered from different entities to try to create a complete dataset; data are processed (cleaned, deduplicated, etc), and analyzed. It can take several years to prepare a dataset — so a dataset that is several years old is sometimes the most up-to-date information available. Still, this data continues to show us valuable trends and insights.

We also try to display datasets that have been available for many years. Some datasets (like those that are asked on surveys) are not asked every year of the survey, which means that we cannot provide annual data.

For some datasets, we have to aggregate time periods in order to break down data by borough or neighborhood.

Measures are the numeric ways that a dataset (or indicator) are expressed. Examples of different measures might be: number, percent or rate.

A number tells us how much of an outcome is in a certain area. But a rate (usually expressed as, for example, 40 per 100,000) tells us how much of an outcome there is, relative to the population of the area in question. This lets us compare neighborhoods of different sizes.

On this site, we try to show how environmental factors might be connected to health outcomes. One way we do this is with Correlates. We choose potentially-related datasets and display them on a scatterplot so you can see how these two datasets are correlated.

The Disparities view displays neighborhoods by poverty category to show underlying disparities in the data.

Read more about correlation here.