Race, Income, Education and Property- In maps

This is the first blog in this series. Just interesting stuff that's too long or detailed or difficult to present on Facebook. I'll try to keep the commentary to a minimum and let the stats speak for themselves. Make your own mind up about what they mean.

After seeing a map that showed racial diversity in the USA and the shocking levels of segregation which still apply to the country, I wanted to see how they matched up with other heat maps, such as income poverty, property prices and college education.

The first one is New York and Philadelphia:

I think you can see some quite clear correlations.
A little explanation of each map:

The map of racial segregation uses colors to show race as reported by the census.

The income map uses blue dots to show incomes above $200,000 and yellow ones to show incomes below $25,000. This is map of extreme poverty and wealth.

The college degree map has been contrast enhanced to better display the extremes where less than 40% of people have college degrees and more than 80% have.

Property prices range from less than $75k to over $1.5m. Rent prices and crime figures are also available, but don't show enough contrast to be very useful (Maps here, scroll around and change the settings to see other demographics). The blue spots showing crime are hardly visible, even with enhanced contrast.

So some more maps. Next up is Richmond:

You can often see where inner city areas feature high levels of poverty and low levels of higher education. The hot spots on these heat maps are where people of color have ended up.

Next is an interesting area, Las Vegas:

Again, the division between rich and poor is obvious. You can also see where low population numbers can heavily influence some heat maps like education because the data is shifted by the small sample size.

Next up, L.A.:

I think Los Angeles shows the most striking correlations of all the maps so far. Maybe it's just because the higher levels of urbanization lead to less of a softening effect. The maps are less blurred.

By the time we get to San Fransisco, and the Bay Area you can see the racial mix is changed. The red dots show Asian families, and here there isn't such a strong relationship between race and poverty. Still, it's the white people with all the money:

Heading back to the east coast, Pittsburgh shows how away from the hot spots of the big cities, up in the rust belt, the effect is still there, but on a smaller scale.

Like many cities in the area, Pittsburgh has seen a 9% drop in population in the last 16 years.

During the same period, Detroit has seen a −29.3% drop in population. Around the great lakes, you can see the same depressing relationship; Racial segregation, concentration of poverty and reduced property value (a big problem when people rely on property as one of their only assets), as well as reduced access to education.

Here there's some overlap though, with poverty that crosses racial divides. The collapse of the North East has hit everyone hard, and even "white privilege" is not much of a defense.

When you look at these maps, and see the correlations, it's shocking. Poverty and race are so entwined, it's hard to separate them.

When I talk to some people on the Right of the political spectrum, they seem sure that race causes poverty. They imagine this is something that racial minorities do to themselves. That's not what I'm seeing here.

It's like someone has taken jigsaw puzzles of two completely different nations and stuck them together randomly in to one. One nation is poor, with low incomes, low access to higher education and low property values. The other is rich, with everything the poor nation lacks. You can see the inhabitants of the two nations by the color of their skin, and sometimes the only thing that separates them is a freeway or a river, or the fence of a gated community.

Some of those cities, you might as well put a wall up right through the middle, and set up passport checks on the border. The division is as stark as that between East and West Germany during the cold war. But as Germany shows, you don't need a wall, because Neo-Liberalism keeps everyone in their place. You can't just go live in a better area, and you can't make your own area better.

Without access to education you can't hope for a high income. And without a high income, you can't move to a better neighborhood, and that limits your access to a good education... People with high incomes won't come and live in the poor areas, and they won't bring their spending money with them. Small businesses are just as segregated as the schools and housing.

Poverty is entrenched along racial divides, and that's never going to change as long as the current system exists