How white is your hood?

September 20, 2010 2:53 PM

How segregated is your city? Eric Fischer maps the top 40 US cities by race, using 2000 census data. Each color-coded dot represents 25 people: Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, and Orange is Hispanic. The maps are oddly pretty, and revealing. Compare, for example, Detroit and San Antonio. via

Links to selected large size maps: NYC, LA, Boston, New Orleans, DC, Chicago, SF, Philly.

posted by CunningLinguist (174 comments total)

In related news ...

From today's Boston Globe: Area School Segregation Called Rife -- "Public schools in the Boston and Springfield metropolitan areas are among the most segregated in the US, often isolating black and Latino students in low-performing schools, according to a report released today by Northeastern University."
posted by ericb at 3:01 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

So basically the Upper East Side is the whitest place on earth.
posted by Threeway Handshake at 3:01 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

This is neat. I don't see a way to find a given city except by mousing over and getting lucky. Seattle.
posted by gurple at 3:02 PM on September 20, 2010

So basically the Upper East Side is the whitest place on earth.

Second whitest. Meet Portland, Oregon. I think our new city motto is "Even whiter than Oklahoma City."
posted by dersins at 3:05 PM on September 20, 2010 [11 favorites]

I used the map to find my city.
posted by acheekymonkey at 3:05 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

And Harlem has no Latinos? This needs to be done in finer detail if it is to mean anything.
posted by Maias at 3:05 PM on September 20, 2010

So what color are the mixed people?
posted by raztaj at 3:05 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

So what color are the mixed people?

Most likely whatever ethnicity they indicated on the census.
posted by morganannie at 3:07 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

On the SF Bay Area map, there's a dense cluster of red and blue dots in Marin, at the western footing of the Richmond Bridge; it's by far the densest cluster in the county. That's San Quentin prison.
posted by rtha at 3:07 PM on September 20, 2010 [18 favorites]

OK, freaky. One of these dots is directly on top of my house. Correctly shaded. My Chinese neighbor? Correctly shaded, too.

But it's like only a tenth of the people in my neighborhood even bothered to respond to the survey? WTF neighbors?
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 3:08 PM on September 20, 2010

Seattle.

Jesus. Not too tough to find Capitol Hill--the tight cluster of honkies *waves*--or the CD--we gave you a whole neighborhood, black folks, so do us a favor and stay there, okay?
posted by Skot at 3:09 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

I guessed the general makeup of the San Antonio map - do I win a prize?

But it's like only a tenth of the people in my neighborhood even bothered to respond to the survey? WTF neighbors?

Each dot represents 25 people. You are your neighbors.
posted by muddgirl at 3:09 PM on September 20, 2010

Most likely whatever ethnicity they indicated on the census.

You can check more than just one box.
posted by raztaj at 3:10 PM on September 20, 2010

In Boston the most integrated area seems to be Lynn. I wouldn't have guessed that, huh.

Can't figure out what the Asian cluster in the Somerville/Cambridge/Arlington area is though...
posted by maryr at 3:10 PM on September 20, 2010

I wonder what the Vancouver Metro area looks like. My assumption is that it is not so extreme. I also wonder what colour dot an Asian from Iran living in North Van might have, versus Hong Kong immigrants living in Richmond, versus Sikh farmers living in Abbotsford.
posted by KokuRyu at 3:11 PM on September 20, 2010 [3 favorites]

Seeing Seattle's map makes me really angry about the cuts to the buslines through the southend. The gentrification really doesn't get much more clear than that.

Gargh.
posted by yeloson at 3:11 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

I also should note that I live in a predominantly-Indian apartment complex, which is not represented by any colors. I guess that's why it looks very sparsely populated on the map.
posted by muddgirl at 3:12 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

What's sort of neat is that where the four distinct groups meet in Milwaukee, is more or less exactly where I work.

It's a cool area.
posted by quin at 3:13 PM on September 20, 2010

Hm. I guess we'll have to rename Rock Creek Park as Washington's Semi-Permeable Racial Membrane....

_{(On the other hand, the mermaids of the Potomac seem to be primarily white, while those who dwell in the Anacostia are primarily black. What the hell? Where did they get this data?)}
posted by schmod at 3:14 PM on September 20, 2010

we gave you a whole neighborhood, black folks, so do us a favor and stay there, okay?

Well, until they get that giant push for condos going again that stopped with the economy tumble. Then it'll be time to keep them moving out. (Meanwhile, SPD can keep tasering pregnant women and shooting folks in the back, the long term "relocation incentive" program...)
posted by yeloson at 3:14 PM on September 20, 2010

Neat! You guys wanna see my new neighborhood? Behold its (relative) rainbow-colored glory!
posted by phunniemee at 3:15 PM on September 20, 2010

On the San Francisco map, the Red dots represent the most expensive neighborhoods, the Blue dots represent the most dangerous neighborhoods, the Green dots represent the most boring neighborhoods, and the Orange dots represent the funkiest neighborhoods.
posted by vacapinta at 3:17 PM on September 20, 2010 [8 favorites]

Can't figure out what the Asian cluster in the Somerville/Cambridge/Arlington area is though...

The hole the cluster is next to appears to be Fresh Pond/Alewife/Spy Pond. Seeing as how there's blue mixed in, I'm guessing that it's Ringe Towers in North Cambridge.
posted by Mayor Curley at 3:18 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yeah the green dots are the most boring neighborhoods because the people there are too busy doing math problems, programming computers and doing your drycleaning to be doing anything else.
posted by wuwei at 3:19 PM on September 20, 2010 [10 favorites]

I guess being colorblind really does mean that I don't distinguish between races. Well, at least between Asians and white people.
posted by psp200 at 3:20 PM on September 20, 2010 [13 favorites]

Seconding Maias, it's too bad this isn't more detailed — the full-size version of the Chicago map at Radical Cartography that inspired this one is down right now, but it was much more detailed than these are. It made more apparent the micro-scale segregation within even some of those neighborhoods that appeared integrated when looking at the city as a whole.
posted by enn at 3:20 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

It's a neat visualization, but I'd suggest some changes.

The 25 ppl / dot ratio makes a city like Seattle look sparse and faded out, while NYC (for example) lights up like a solid block. So I might change it slightly to normalize the data, scaling the 25 ppl / dot ratio to match a given city's population.

I'd also make sure that the geographic scale is the same for all pictures, so that clumps in one city are comparable with clusters in any other city.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:21 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

(Meanwhile, SPD can keep tasering pregnant women and shooting folks in the back, the long term "relocation incentive" program...)

Death to whittlers!
posted by Artw at 3:21 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Where did they get this data?

from the link: Data from Census 2000.

i've been looking this over for the last couple of hours and reading some articles about hyper-segregation and white flight. apparently some feel that the trend changed, and things actually looked far less segregated from the 1990 data to the 2000 data - making these maps "good news" over all. i'd be interested to see this updated for 2010.
posted by nadawi at 3:22 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

And Harlem has no Latinos? This needs to be done in finer detail if it is to mean anything.

You see more orange dots in Central Harlem if you click on the original size image, although they're not surprising clustered mostly on the east side.

I'm surprised that Crown Heights has such a big patch of red dots, even given the Hasidic population.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 3:23 PM on September 20, 2010

Can a Detroiter say what the very evident horizontal line between red and blue is?
posted by fritley at 3:26 PM on September 20, 2010

I was curious to see Minneapolis, but it isn't there. On the one hand, it feels very segregated, at least socially--I think everyone I interacted with today was white, for instance. On the other hand, I don't feel like my neighbourhood is particularly segregated, but it may just be a crossing over point. Then again, Chicago is the place I've spent the most time, so I perhaps have no sense of these things.
posted by hoyland at 3:27 PM on September 20, 2010

Dallas is basically how I imagined it, but then again, driving around, it shouldn't be a shocker. I did manage to find the prison, though, which was a weird circular bit in the middle of a business area.
posted by SNWidget at 3:28 PM on September 20, 2010

Death to whittlers!

Soil fertilized with indigenous bones (SLYT)
posted by yeloson at 3:32 PM on September 20, 2010

Can a Detroiter say what the very evident horizontal line between red and blue is?

I'm guessing that's the infamous 8 Mile.
posted by TrialByMedia at 3:34 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm guessing that it's Ringe Towers in North Cambridge.

That is correct, but also represents Jefferson Park and maybe the Walden Square area. Last I heard, the largest Haitian community outside of Dorchester was in North Cambridge. Of personal interest, I'm from North Cambridge, I often assumed that many Haitians had felt easier relocating there because of the French church and francophone residents. I'm not sure that thesis holds water though. One thing of note, I was unaware of a sizable African-American community in West Medford.

Really cool post, btw.
posted by jsavimbi at 3:35 PM on September 20, 2010

" I wonder what the Vancouver Metro area looks like. My assumption is that it is not so extreme. I also wonder what colour dot an Asian from Iran living in North Van might have, versus Hong Kong immigrants living in Richmond, versus Sikh farmers living in Abbotsford."

Yes, I'd love to see a map for Calgary.
posted by Mitheral at 3:36 PM on September 20, 2010

Oh how I wish this could be mashed to Google maps. Also, anyone see anything about any intention to do this with 2010's data?
posted by cmoj at 3:38 PM on September 20, 2010

It's kind of interesting being a white person in San Antonio. Non-hispanic whites (such as myself) only make up about 30% of the city, with the overwhelming majority (60%) of the rest of the city being hispanic.

My first observation is that SA basically puts the lie to Tea Party hysteria about gay Mexicans coming to steal our jerbs and abort our aryan babies or whatever. Crime is relatively low here and the economy is relatively strong. There are no MS-13 members patrolling the streets with RPGs looking for white grannys to rob. Probably the worst thing about SA is the ill-health effects from dining at one of the hundreds of 24-hour taco shops around town.

The other observation is that despite our mostly progressive racial attitudes, segregation does still exist to some extent, although based mostly on class and income rather than race. Wealthy hispanics have as little to do with poor hispanics as wealthy white people have to do with poor black people. Latino friends of mine from the westside, for example, will talk disparagingly about latinos from the southside. "You'd never catch me on that side of town", they usually say.

I wonder: as the US becomes more diverse and traditional boundaries of "race" become muddled, will racial segregation give way to economic? I think in some sense it already has.
posted by Avenger at 3:39 PM on September 20, 2010 [9 favorites]

New Orleans is making me sad. My city is just as segregated as I thought it was.
posted by komara at 3:39 PM on September 20, 2010

I'd be fascinated to see this for major non-US cities too, especially European ones.
posted by Decani at 3:41 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

What with open housing and all, we'd have to describe these cities as self-segregated. Most cities seem to give you the option of living in racially homogenous, or varying degrees of integrated neighborhoods.
posted by Faze at 3:43 PM on September 20, 2010

Another interesting visualization would be to take census data over 100 years and create a ten-frame animation of racial clustering for any city. Which cities have allowed mobility of non-white clusters? Which city's non-white clusters have increased or decreased in size? Etc.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:44 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

Data from Minneapolis....in the 1930s. (Original site down, content pulled from archive.org)
posted by gimonca at 3:45 PM on September 20, 2010

One of the most interesting parts of the New York City map is the big, sort of dispersed circle just north of LaGuardia airport in Queens. When I saw it, I thought, "What are all those people doing out in the middle of the water?" And then I realized it's Rikers Island.
posted by ocherdraco at 3:47 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

this has mainly shown me that i am incapable of figuring out locations in my own city without street names.
posted by sawdustbear at 3:49 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

(Oh, and Minneapolis in 2000, too.)
posted by gimonca at 3:51 PM on September 20, 2010

One of the most interesting parts of the New York City map is the big, sort of dispersed circle just north of LaGuardia airport in Queens. When I saw it, I thought, "What are all those people doing out in the middle of the water?" And then I realized it's Rikers Island.

Off-topic: I just noticed that the Google Car hasn't made it across the Rikers Island Bridge yet.
posted by Mister Fabulous at 3:51 PM on September 20, 2010

This is really cool. My hometown, Milwaukee, is on there. Just by looking at the colored dots, I actually know exactly where everything is. Very nice project.
posted by King Bee at 3:53 PM on September 20, 2010

Is that dramatic, really bright green patch in Cambridge, Mass, MIT?
posted by CunningLinguist at 3:55 PM on September 20, 2010

Can a Detroiter say what the very evident horizontal line between red and blue is?

Heck, I know that I've never even been to Detroit. That there is 8 mile!
posted by Justinian at 3:55 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

I wonder what the Vancouver Metro area looks like. My assumption is that it is not so extreme...
posted by KokuRyu

Vancouver would represent as a uniform cheery brown. If we could convince the cities Hispanic population to group for just the census, there would also be a single orange dot somewhere.
posted by Keith Talent at 3:56 PM on September 20, 2010

On the San Francisco map, the Red dots represent the most expensive neighborhoods, the Blue dots represent the most dangerous neighborhoods, the Green dots represent the most boring neighborhoods, and the Orange dots represent the funkiest neighborhoods.

Union City (across 92 and South of Hayward) must be the boring-funky neighborhood.
posted by benzenedream at 3:57 PM on September 20, 2010

I recognized mentally that de facto segregation persisted in NYC, Boston, etc., but seeing it depicted like this completely floored me.

It's not just that different ethnic groups tend to live in different areas, it's that there are many areas, even in diverse cities, consisting only of one ethnicity-- and if you're a minority in, say, the Boston area, you have a choice of maybe 3 or 4 neighborhoods to live in, or you can be part of a tiny, tiny minority in your town.

And then there's Chicago...
posted by ibmcginty at 4:04 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

CunningLinguist, I think that's actually Chinatown in Boston (the Charles River makes a non-obvious turn which might make that patch seem like it's north of the river). There is, however, a decided green patch around MIT, which is a little to the left of the really bright one.
posted by ocherdraco at 4:04 PM on September 20, 2010

Thanks, CL. This will come in handy when it's time to move.
posted by ferdinand.bardamu at 4:06 PM on September 20, 2010

This is a much better format since it shows the city names.
posted by John Cohen at 4:09 PM on September 20, 2010 [5 favorites]

The part of Albuquerque called the War Zone is quite mixed, but I think it's notable that it's SUPER densely populated, more than almost any other area of the city; The dots tell an interesting story about density as well as race.
posted by NoraReed at 4:09 PM on September 20, 2010

Obviously some dots cover other dots... is this random or is there a method to it? Because I feel like in dense neighbourhoods the minority colour gets covered by the majority colour but this could just be my inability to process large amounts of information in one hit (one of the many reasons I struggle to make decisions in supermarkets).
posted by doublehappy at 4:09 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

> Can a Detroiter say what the very evident horizontal line between red and blue is?

Yeah, like other people have mentioned, it's 8 Mile Road, the northern border of Wayne County (and the City of Detroit).

The owner of the Flickr images has opened notes making, so you can mark the neighborhoods and other geographic notes on his maps. I've been marking up Detrot; some of the other cities can use help too.
posted by ardgedee at 4:11 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Is that dramatic, really bright green patch in Cambridge, Mass, MIT?

Yes, it is. That's the student housing on the Cambridge side. Oddly enough, if you look directly across the river onto Beacon St. where many of the MIT fraternities are, you get solid red.
posted by jsavimbi at 4:11 PM on September 20, 2010

These maps bring to mind the Southern character's retort to busybody Northerners in the final verse of Randy Newman's "Rednecks" (NSFW).
posted by ibmcginty at 4:15 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

I wish they had tried other color schemes - red is a very dominant color compared to the others that are used. The red dots stand out more than the others - if you zoom in to an area on the map, there are more varieties in colors than is often apparent.

It would be an interesting comparison to choose the colors based on the populations in the area - the lightest colors to the largest population, the darkest to the smallest. I bet it would result in an entirely different feeling to some areas.
posted by evilangela at 4:17 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

The red doesn't bother me so much; what I wish they had done was use yellow instead of orange. Red and orange blend together too much.
posted by John Cohen at 4:19 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Interestng, but I wonder why Atlanta is not included.
posted by TedW at 4:19 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

The Philly map shows mostly segregation along color lines and much less along income.

North and West Philly are majority black, Northeast is majority white and both are basically low-income areas (as they have been for decades.) Oddly enough, low-income Hispanics don't seem to want to live amongst low-income whites or low-income blacks and are self(?) segregating themselves in a region between both.

Pity that all white people are lumped in together. South Philly used to be largely Italian, Bridesburg and Fishtown mostly Polish and Irish. Today there are enough Russians in the Philadelphia region to qualify for their own colored dot and it would be interesting to see where (or if) these groups are segregating themselves.

Segregation is not only a bad thing and can be, in fact, quite positive. You can't have a Chinatown or a little Italy without it and certainly the "diverse" neighborhoods of Philly have none of the charm and character of those older, segregated neighborhoods.
posted by three blind mice at 4:20 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Atlanta
posted by CunningLinguist at 4:21 PM on September 20, 2010

TedW: Atlanta.
posted by zsazsa at 4:22 PM on September 20, 2010

Interestng, but I wonder why Atlanta is not included.

It is. Btw, is there some geographic feature that maps to that north/south white/black divide?
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 4:22 PM on September 20, 2010

CunningLinguist asked about the green patch in Boston which turned out to not be MIT.


But if you look at the green patch which is MIT, it's interesting to notice that the density of green seems to be higher on the west side of campus than the east side. At least when I was there, this was roughly how the population in the dorms worked out. (Although there are also people that appear to claim they lived in a section of campus which includes no dorms; what's with that?)

I saw something similar in the SF map (which includes the East Bay): there's a patch with a high density of green just south of the UC Berkeley campus.

More generally, it's kind of striking how sharp the transitions seem to be. If I didn't know better I'd think that the transition from, say, a yellow neighborhood to a purple one (I'm deliberately using colors that the maps don't use) would be gradual - say, because yellow people are richer than purple ones, and so as you go to neighborhoods with better housing stock the yellow people are more likely to live there. But it doesn't work that way. The explanation I've heard is that people don't like to be part of a minority - even a largish minority - and so "mixed" neighborhoods turn out to be somewhat unstable.
posted by madcaptenor at 4:22 PM on September 20, 2010

Second whitest. Meet Portland, Oregon. I think our new city motto is "Even whiter than Oklahoma City."
posted by dersins at 3:05 PM on September 20 [+] [!]

I think you should take a look at the full size map. Portland just appears to be far more integrated than other cities.

I'm pleased to see that the area of Seattle where I live is very well integrated, even if the central Seattle corridor appears to have some Jim Crow era distributions.
posted by Revvy at 4:23 PM on September 20, 2010

If you right click on the image and view original things don't seem nearly as polarized.
posted by Locobot at 4:29 PM on September 20, 2010

Which city is this?
posted by Artw at 4:37 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

Yournotgoingtoflightschoolville.
posted by CunningLinguist at 4:40 PM on September 20, 2010 [5 favorites]

Not segregated enough, there's still too many idiots.
posted by nomadicink at 4:44 PM on September 20, 2010

>Yournotgoingtoflightschoolville.

Pull over the van.
posted by maryr at 4:47 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

New Orleans doesn't look much like that any more, since this data comes from before the Great Big Swirly Thing of 2005. IME the blue areas have thinned out a lot and tinged red due to a lot of people who left never coming back and gentrification.
posted by localroger at 4:48 PM on September 20, 2010

Blazecock Pileon: The 25 ppl / dot ratio makes a city like Seattle look sparse and faded out

To be fair, Seattle is kind of sparse and faded out. Especially compared to NYC.
posted by mhum at 4:48 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

I'd always known Delmar to be the informal racial dividing line of St. Louis, but I had no idea how clearly delineated it was. Just by looking at the ethnic makeup of the city you can tell where Delmar is.
posted by Ndwright at 4:51 PM on September 20, 2010

I wonder what the Vancouver Metro area looks like... Yes, I'd love to see a map for Calgary

Not if the Conservatives have anything to say about it. :)
posted by anthill at 4:55 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

Damn, this confirmed my growing suspicion about segregation in Philly. There's some degree of casual racism in my hood (Upper Darby). I was at the barbers and I made some reference to going to 52nd and Market (yeah, I know there's a lot of drug dealing there, but I'm pretty used to seeing that in NYC, and never got jumped or anything). The reaction of the all-white folks to my statement about going to 52nd was amazing. They were like, never, never, never go there. And I was like, but -- we're on 69th, it's not like 52nd is Siberia or something. One of the barbers said "past 63rd -- it's a different world."
posted by angrycat at 4:59 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh, and this was after a nun in her habit was jumped, beat up, and robbed in Upper Darby. Yet there's seems to be this unspoken thing of, "Oh no, beware the contagion of West Philly!" As opposed to, "Yeah, Upper Darby has crime too."
posted by angrycat at 5:02 PM on September 20, 2010

madcaptenor: I saw something similar in the SF map (which includes the East Bay): there's a patch with a high density of green just south of the UC Berkeley campus.

I don't think that patch of green just south of campus reflects Asian students clumping so much as it reflects students clumping and the students being more Asian than the rest of the Berkeley population. I would just about believe that the first few blocks south of campus are populated entirely by students, which isn't true to the north or west. Most of the dorms are also south of campus, though I can't make them out (or, perhaps more accurately, I can't make out the more isolated dorms, never mind the Units).
posted by hoyland at 5:05 PM on September 20, 2010

Why do so many people live in and around the Oakland Airport?
posted by clorox at 5:06 PM on September 20, 2010

Of course, I'm not thinking too clearly and I'm not sure the demographics of the students compared to the rest of the Berkeley population are really relevant. But I think the still says more about the concentration of students, rather than how the students are arranging themselves. But perhaps not.
posted by hoyland at 5:07 PM on September 20, 2010

Ha. I clicked the first link without reading what the dots meant and saw the NYC metro-area and went "Well I guess white is red and blue is black and green is ...Asian?" and lo, I was right.
posted by The Whelk at 5:13 PM on September 20, 2010

On the SF Bay Area map, there's a dense cluster of red and blue dots in Marin, at the western footing of the Richmond Bridge; it's by far the densest cluster in the county. That's San Quentin prison.
posted by rtha at 3:07 PM on September 20 [6 favorites +] [!]

Good call, rtha! But what is confusing me is just north of there: a huge cluster of mostly Hispanics in Tiburon? Is that even Tiburon, or am I misreading things? (I went to Dominican three decades ago, but I rarely get to Marin these days, so I'm guessing a lot of things have changed.)
posted by trip and a half at 5:14 PM on September 20, 2010

The river is so obvious in the map of Memphis. See that big triangle on the left? That's West Memphis and Marion, across the river in Arkansas delta.

See the thin strip of red near the right bank of the river? That's the resettlement by whites in downtown Memphis, something that hadn't really happened until around 10 years before that survey. You should have seen that area in, say, 1970, after the assassination of King.

See the big blog of red in the middle of the larger blue cluster? That's "Midtown" - the first real expansion of the city from the banks, and stretching to the outer reaches of that area. I would think a current map would be considerably more integrated.

The swathe of red stretching to the right are suburbs of Germantown and Collierville, aka 'White Flight'. To the upper northeast are additional such areas: Arlington, Lakeland. I don't know where that bright blue dot is.

The red, thinly populated portion to the south is Desoto county, Mississippi, one of the fastest growing regions in that state. People fleeing Memphis.

Oh, and yeah. Look carefully near the center and you'll see the tiniest splotch of green. In 2000, the Hispanic population is very difficult to see; I imagine it is much more prominent now.

Thanks for the link.
posted by grimjeer at 5:15 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

If you look at the map for Los Angeles you may notice that there is approximately 50 people living inside of Dodger Stadium.

Not to mention the roughly one thousand or so folks living up on the mountains above Glendale and Burbank.

I wonder how the geographic location of each dot is determined...
posted by Hairy Lobster at 5:15 PM on September 20, 2010

If you want to go behind the colored dots, I'd highly recommend Segregated Seattle. You should start with Seattle's Segregation Story PowerPoint.
posted by soupy at 5:18 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

Yes, it is. That's the student housing on the Cambridge side. Oddly enough, if you look directly across the river onto Beacon St. where many of the MIT fraternities are, you get solid red.

Yup, it looks like Next House through Baker, the dorms on the West side of campus. Although I think it's not solely clumping of ethnic groups; those areas look more Asian than the east side of campus or the frats in part because those are the MIT dorms only, and MIT as a whole has a fairly large Asian population, while the other housing is in areas that are in or that abut non-student-housing. (Plus, the smaller number of students in those areas makes it harder to get useful information at a 25-person-per-dot resolution.) I have no idea who is claiming to live in Building 7 & the rest of the academic buildings, though.

Meanwhile, I'm amazed at how Chicago (except, oddly enough, for my neighborhood and the ones immediately adjacent) manages to make Boston look diverse. I mean, Boston's clearly pretty segregated, but it's nothing like the incredibly clean, straight, absolute divisions in Chicago. Damn. And they're primarily racial divisions; income is much more mixed.
posted by ubersturm at 5:26 PM on September 20, 2010

Astounding. I would not have thought the clustering would be that pronounced. Wow.

I'd love to see these animated over time.
posted by kprincehouse at 5:32 PM on September 20, 2010

I'm amazed at how some of you can pick out where you live, the lines are so faint! I kept wishing this was like google maps so I could turn on labels with satellite.
posted by NoraCharles at 5:32 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

On the Long Beach map, my dad lives in an incredibly diverse area (there's more or less one of each of the dots on what I believe is his block.) This compares with the area around my elementary school, which is still easily 90% Hispanic. On the Columbus map, I was apparently one of the only Census-designated "white" people on my block (I love how my family used to have to pick a non-white category that no longer exists;) it's all blue there. There was actually a documentary about racial & cultural tensions in the area, interestingly enough.

And I cannot believe that all the Hispanics in Columbus picked something else. I think this data ignores highly dispersed minority populations.
posted by SMPA at 5:33 PM on September 20, 2010

>I wonder what the Vancouver Metro area looks like... Yes, I'd love to see a map for Calgary

Not if the Conservatives have anything to say about it. :)

Actually, the (Canadian) Conservative Party makes it a point to target and develop relationships with the immigrant community (as does the other two main political parties).
posted by KokuRyu at 5:35 PM on September 20, 2010

It is heartbreaking to see how well demarcated some of these lines are.
I thought we had evolved a little further than this.
posted by SLC Mom at 5:36 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

I am kind of shocked this is not being favorited more. Not only is this an actually illuminating use of "infographics" it is also a powerful view of race, segregation, and city development. Thanks for pointing this out, even if is depressing.
posted by blahblahblah at 5:40 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this. I checked the Portland map and the first comment was a lady quoting my comedy act. ("so white, even the Black neighborhood's called Albina")
posted by msalt at 5:41 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

As ass-backwards as it is in other ways, I'm kinda proud that Virginia Beach is way less segregated than most of the other cities.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 5:44 PM on September 20, 2010

I would like to see what New Orleans looks like now 5 years after the big K.
posted by govtdrone at 5:44 PM on September 20, 2010

So that's where the white women at!

I'm sorry.
posted by Capt. Renault at 5:45 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

With regard to Berkeley, I didn't mean to imply that Asian students clump together. (they might - I see it among my students - but that would be at the level of individual apartments, which wouldn't be visible here.)
posted by madcaptenor at 5:46 PM on September 20, 2010

"Actually, the (Canadian) Conservative Party makes it a point to target and develop relationships with the immigrant community (as does the other two main political parties)."

It's a comment on the conservatives nerfing the census rather than about their relationship with immigrants.
posted by Mitheral at 6:08 PM on September 20, 2010

I just recently moved to the East side of downtown Charlotte, and the map generally confirms my observations that this is a surprisingly integrated city. Our neighborhood, and most of East Charlotte, has all of the color dots. I wasn't quite expecting to find that in a Southern city, and I grew up in the South.
posted by Slothrop at 6:09 PM on September 20, 2010

So basically the Upper East Side is the whitest place on earth.

Sure didn't need this map to tell me that!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:10 PM on September 20, 2010

I'd always known Delmar to be the informal racial dividing line of St. Louis, but I had no idea how clearly delineated it was. Just by looking at the ethnic makeup of the city you can tell where Delmar is.
posted by Ndwright at 6:51 PM on September 20 [+] [!]

Well, it's Delmar further southeast towards the city and more Olive towards the county. So technically the racial divide line goes northwest to southeast. At least, I gather that big patch of nothing living on it is Forest Park.
posted by lizarrd at 6:11 PM on September 20, 2010

What's fascinating is not just the segration - but the patterns of segregation. In most cities - you can see how white flight from inner city neighbourhoods has created this ring of mostly white suburbs around a mostly black innercity core. The two notable exceptions are SF and NYC - where (my theory) transportation issues still make it much more attractive to live in the city than in the burbs (Canadian cities are mostly like this too).
posted by helmutdog at 6:11 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

But, yeah, Portland. Whitey white white whitey whitey whit white white.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:11 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

This is cool and all, but 10 years is a long time. I want to see the 2010 data.
posted by Defenestrator at 6:13 PM on September 20, 2010

Darn, I'd like to see Pittsburgh's mapping but it's way too small to make this list.
posted by octothorpe at 6:16 PM on September 20, 2010

These maps are neat. I live in New Orleans. Localroger made an excellent point about census data in this city – nobody really knows what the demographics here are right now. I'm hardly an expert on this sort of thing but I've found it very interesting ever since I made this city my home three and a half years ago. If anybody has grounds to correct any of my statements below, please do so.

The 2010 census data for New Orleans is gonna be fascinating. We lost a fair percentage of our original residents after the storm, and while the population is back up near pre-Katrina levels, many of the people who were forced out never returned, having instead been replaced by transplants (such as myself) from elsewhere in the country. As localroger points out, these newcomers are more likely to be white whereas the displaced were more likely to have been black. Also it's my understanding that the hispanic population here (many but by no means all of whom live on the west side of the river in neighboring suburbs) is largely a post-Katrina phenomenon, so look to see more orange dots popping up if the map is updated for the new census.

More personally, I notice that in 2000 my old neighborhood was about 40% white, 60% black. It's definitely flip-flopped in the interim, as the Marigny has been one of the hot zones of colonization by young white kids like me. It's still pretty mixed, but I bet it's gotten a lot younger as well as whiter. Meanwhile, my current neighborhood (less than a mile away) is still about the same (pretty much all white) and there's still a sharp boundary one block away, where a major road (North Rampart St, later St. Claude) separates the French Quarter/Marigny/Bywater from the Treme/St. Claude/St. Roch neighborhoods.

What should I make of all this? I'm not sure. New Orleans has been around for a lot longer than I've been here, and it's looked something like this for most of the time. It's by no means impossible to cross the race line here, but many people don't seem to want to, for any number of reasons. There's obviously a tremendous amount of both overt and institutional racism and classism (which often amount to nearly the same thing, what with race and poverty being so highly correlated) keeping people from being as mobile as they might want to be. There's also the natural tendency for people to tend to group up near other people who seem similar to them – in color of skin, sure, but also in terms of mode of speech, style of dress, interests, age, politics, and any number of other cultural and subcultural factors.

There's also the simple fact that New Orleanians (the natives, anyway) tend not to move around that much. You can still go into the neighborhoods here and meet grown adults who have never crossed the Mississippi river, despite living less than two miles from its banks. This is a city where people know their neighbors, and their neighbors' mothers and grandmothers too. For instance: the black homeownership rate is very high here compared to the rest of the country, even in the poorest neighborhoods – especially before the storm. Many of the families in those houses had been living in that same shotgun for four or five generations. Conversely, if you look at the Garden District (that swath of red that cuts through the lower third of the main U-shaped riverbend on the map) you're looking at an area that was originally colonized by white Americans during a time when the city was still under French rule. Many of the families that built the mansions along St. Charles avenue in that day are still living in those same houses.

In short, my impression is that the geo-racial makeup of New Orleans has in many areas has been fairly static over the centuries, barring major events such as the building of new neighborhoods, major hurricanes, Emancipation, and other such large events. The storm in '05 shook things up quite a bit, in a lot of ways of course but not least demographically. I am awaiting the results of this reshuffling with great interest and not a little trepidation.
posted by Scientist at 6:17 PM on September 20, 2010 [4 favorites]

Others have commented on Seattle, but this just proves that those who make the observation that Seattle is a 'really white' city indeed think that the city ends at I-90. Those of us who live south of that in the Rainier Valley are conveniently forgotten about.
posted by spinifex23 at 6:33 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Why do so many people live in and around the Oakland Airport?

I'm guessing you mean in and around Bay Farm Island? Or do you mean the random dots in the water that are probably artifacts of some slight processing glitch?

At any rate, I'm pleased that I live in one of the very, very mixed up parts of Oakland. And happy that there's a lot of mixy-ness in general in Oakland, compared to some other cities. It could always be better, of course.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:36 PM on September 20, 2010

How white is your hood?

I should probably not make the joke I want to about how I very briefly mis-parsed this question.
posted by grobstein at 6:38 PM on September 20, 2010 [5 favorites]

This map looks accurate for my neighborhood. About 35-35-15-15%, red-orange-blue-green. It is strange to see huge swaths of red and blue in other nearby neighborhoods. Many people like to live in neighborhoods where everybody is ethnically close. I would be interested in seeing more breakdowns like religion, education, income, age, whatnot; that would involve a little more intrusive a census. I don't want the census form asking me about my sex preference.

You might think convenience and affordability would overwhelm something so abstract as ethnic identification when people pick a place to live. Clearly this is wrong.
posted by bukvich at 6:40 PM on September 20, 2010

Combustible Edison Lighthouse, the north-south dividing line in Atlanta is traditionally thought of as Interstate 20. In reality, that's not quite accurate.

In the west it is the rail yards which parallel I-75, and in the east it's Decatur St./DeKalb Ave./E. & W. College Ave and so on out to I-285 (The Perimeter) more or less, whereupon the line climbs north somewhat up to the Stone Mountain Freeway/US-78. The two modest pockets of red below this line in the east represent the gentrifying neighborhoods in the Little Five Points/Kirkwood/Grant Park area, and the City of Decatur. I've tried to center and zoom a Google map to the same approximate scale and location as the center of the original and largest size of the Flikr image.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:42 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

But what is confusing me is just north of there: a huge cluster of mostly Hispanics in Tiburon? Is that even Tiburon, or am I misreading things?

Definitely not Tiburon (which is on the peninsula right next to Angel Island). That little bit looks like a part of San Rafael -- neatly separated from the much whiter, much less dense, and much richer* neighborhoods to the north by the San Rafael Canal. The closest bridge to the north side of the canal? More than a mile away.

*I base this on the fact that the yacht clubs are all on the north side of the canal. Also, this page states that of the 434 students enrolled at Bahia Vista Elementary school (right in the middle of the Hispanic cluster), 99% of the students are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunches, compared to the California average of 57%. I looked at some more of their numbers, and did a few calculations myself (based on San Rafael schools that were exclusively K-5):

-Of the 2676 students enrolled in 8 schools, 45% qualified for free or discount lunch.
-At 2 of the eight schools (Bahia Vista and San Pedro), nearly every student qualified. A total of 8 students did not, while 799 did.
-One school, Laurel Dell, came in at 69% (113 out of 164); another, Coleman, was about even at 52%, or 167 out of 321.
-Of the remaining 4 schools (Dixie, Glenwood, Mary E. Silveira, and Vallecito), only 124 out of 1384 students qualified -- 9%.
-The site also breaks down the student bodies into "ethnicity." Paired with the maps in the post, it's a little startling.
posted by clorox at 6:51 PM on September 20, 2010 [5 favorites]

See that little orange bit near the lower-center of the Detroit map? *waves*
posted by joe lisboa at 7:10 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

Scratch that: see that bit where the orange meets the blue meets the red near the lower-center of the Detroit map? *waves harder*
posted by joe lisboa at 7:14 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Combustible Edison Lighthouse, the Atlanta line is actually Ponce De Leon Avenue. It's not geographic, but social. This was the actual segregation line in the day. All of the North-South roads change name when they cross Ponce, so that one could tell another's race just by the name of the street they lived on.
posted by JoshBerman at 7:17 PM on September 20, 2010

I came to say what clorox did but in much less detail.
posted by ericales at 7:26 PM on September 20, 2010

Thank you, Clorox -- that makes more sense. I guess. Still very different from what I remember from 30 years ago.
posted by trip and a half at 7:38 PM on September 20, 2010

Hey, joe lisboa, I'll be moving down there next week. Another (pink dot/25)!
posted by ofthestrait at 7:41 PM on September 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

I was going to say what clorox said, too, but in a more boring and less informative way.
posted by rtha at 7:44 PM on September 20, 2010

Interesting that they did Fresno, but not America's supposedly most ethnically diverse city, Sacramento.
posted by elsietheeel at 7:53 PM on September 20, 2010

I'm surprised that there isn't a map of Miami. As I look at the comments on the flickr account, apparently Miami is smaller than his original cut off.

As I grew up in Columbus, I am confounded by the realization that Miami is smaller than Columbus. (Also, Columbus is more segregated than I remember, but I don't find that surprising.)

I feel like I live in an integrated area, but that could simply be the perception that comes from being a minority in my neighborhood. (I'm white in a neighborhood that is not.) I'd also be interested to see if religion plays a role in any Miami-area segregation. Though the more interesting aspect would be to pair Miami with Broward County, and see if the residual effects of white flight are still there.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 7:56 PM on September 20, 2010

Good call, rtha! But what is confusing me is just north of there: a huge cluster of mostly Hispanics in Tiburon? Is that even Tiburon, or am I misreading things? (I went to Dominican three decades ago, but I rarely get to Marin these days, so I'm guessing a lot of things have changed.)

That's actually San Rafel, just north and east of where 580 and 101 intersect, lots of apartment complexes.
posted by iamabot at 7:56 PM on September 20, 2010

I would really love to see Birmingham, or any other city in Alabama, actually.
posted by ocherdraco at 8:18 PM on September 20, 2010

If I wanted to make one of these myself, what would I need to do?
posted by ocherdraco at 8:21 PM on September 20, 2010

Living in Philly, I have to agree with threeblindmice, heck I agree with him in general.
Living specifically in Northeast Philly, where the signs on some buildings are in Cyrillic (even the chain drugstore signs flash Cyrillic ads) I would be interested in the Russian demographic data as well.

Interesting note, as the only black person on my block, I have no dot...
posted by djrock3k at 8:52 PM on September 20, 2010

The white man didn't even give djrock3k a motherfuckin' dot.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:16 PM on September 20, 2010 [2 favorites]

I would really love to see Birmingham, or any other city in Alabama, actually.

Native Birminghamian here, seconding that.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:17 PM on September 20, 2010

Thanks, JoshBerman. I've only lived in the Atlanta area for 35 years, and I was unaware of Ponce's historical significance. Still, I stand by my analysis. Looking at the map it appears that much of the area between Ponce and DeKalb Ave., i.e. Candler Park, etc., is majority white now.

Hell, I only found out about the reality of J. B. Stoner's politics when he died. He was washed up by the time I became politically aware.
posted by ob1quixote at 9:27 PM on September 20, 2010

Wow. East Palo Alto really is as anomalous as it feels.
posted by little light-giver at 9:39 PM on September 20, 2010

The island where I live is something ridiculous like 97% white. These are fascinating.
posted by maxwelton at 9:39 PM on September 20, 2010

Looks like he's actively adding cities as I type this. There's quite a lot of Alabama now (Mobile, Birmingham, Montgomery) and Sacramento lives up to its reputation reasonably well. But damn, Newark.
posted by cali at 10:41 PM on September 20, 2010

Can a Detroiter say what the very evident horizontal line between red and blue is?
As mentioned above, that's Eight Mile Road. I believe the small blue cluster to the northwest of Eight Mile represents Oak Park and Southfield. Looking to the far north, the other noticeably dense blue area is Pontiac.
posted by Oriole Adams at 11:11 PM on September 20, 2010

Man I'd love to see the code that they used for this stuff. Anyone have an idea what they used? R and ggplot overlaid on the maps?
posted by stratastar at 12:29 AM on September 21, 2010

The part of Albuquerque called the War Zone is quite mixed, but I think it's notable that it's SUPER densely populated, more than almost any other area of the city

The War Zone has an unusual amount of multifamily housing for Albuquerque. For example, those clumps between Copper and Chico where Domingo Road would be if it ran between Wyoming and Pennsylvania correspond exactly to blocks of cheap apartments right in the middle of a bunch of single-family homes.
posted by Lazlo at 12:31 AM on September 21, 2010

Honolulu (Oahu), I note, has several large pink areas, while the rest of the island is fairly well mixed with some high concentrations of Asians. I'll tell you so you don't have to guess, those pink areas are military bases.
posted by Jimmy Havok at 2:33 AM on September 21, 2010

I'm having difficulty distinguishing the red and orange dots in some heavily populated areas. I'm looking at the Somerville area on the Boston map. There's a big Brazilian population, which is not limited to east Somerville, but it's hard to distinguish how much of the nearly-overlapping dots are orange vs red. (I'm assuming they're casting "Brazilian" as orange.)
posted by rmd1023 at 4:33 AM on September 21, 2010

Scientist, I've lived in the New Orleans my entire life (I'm 46) and what you say about the NOLA's geo-racial mix being somewhat static is only true of some neighborhoods, much of that anchored by those old families you mention. During my life NOLA has been subject to the same white flight / urban rot cycle as any other city; in my childhood that big swath of blue to the east would have been solid red, for example (it's where I grew up), some of the red lining the river would have been blue, and much of the solid blue in mid-city would have been more mixed.

One of the striking features of those mansion-lined streets like St. Charles and Ursulines is how very close they are to people who have been poor for many generations, all of which goes back to a culture which would have looked a lot better on this map but only because people found it convenient to live in proximity to the people who performed services for them and didn't freak out about it. I have the impression that the solid-color polarization seen here started to freeze out in the post-WWII years, as new suburbs were built and the explosion of growth in Metairie and New Orleans East sucked much of the wealth out of the inner city. In the 1980's there was a flurry of redevelopment as the riverbank was opened (in 1970, there was literally not a single place you could go to view the river as a tourist; it was all commercial wharves), the Riverwalk and Spanish Plaza were built, and they started to convert warehouses on the other side of Canal Street into condos so people could live close to the French Quarter without having to actually live in the French Quarter. This is what created the corridor of red linking Audubon Park to the French Quarter.

New Orleans East has turned from solid red to solid blue within the last 20 years or so. The colonization of the Garden District with red dots instead of a blue to blue-red mix is something that started in the 1970's.

Anyway, besides the Katrina diaspora itself another interesting factor is that many of those old family mansions are no longer owned by the families that built them; I know someone who has a family home on Ursulines which was built in 1910, and he is the last original family owner on his block, the rest having been sold to wealthy white immigrants. It's hard to say whether they will maintain the tradition of anchoring a relatively wealthy subpopulation along those drives as the urban cycle churns around them.
posted by localroger at 5:44 AM on September 21, 2010 [2 favorites]

Odd - to me the orange looks almost yellow, and the green is hard to see unless it's in high concentrations.
posted by muddgirl at 5:49 AM on September 21, 2010

I live in NC, so it's nice to see that Charlotte and Raleigh are both not nearly as segregated as I would guessed. But God, it's like the definition of urban sprawl.
posted by Who_Am_I at 6:02 AM on September 21, 2010

Nice link, thank you.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:35 AM on September 21, 2010

Cool, he got to Pittsburgh. Not really surprising, a big sea of red with tiny pockets of blue and not a Hispanic to be found. But you really need to go look at a street view level to see the segregation here, it's often block by block. When I was canvasing in the last presidential election, I walked almost every street on the northside of the city and you literally will have places where there is a white street and then a black street and then another white street all in a row. And they've been that way for generations.
posted by octothorpe at 6:37 AM on September 21, 2010

In some cases these are also maps of poverty, inequality, and urban crime. San Francisco Chronicle maps of homicides in Oakland and San Francsico during 2007-2009 (click the checkboxes for 2007, 2008, 2009).
posted by kirkaracha at 7:43 AM on September 21, 2010

There's a smattering of blue, orange, and green dots at the south end of the Milwaukee map, and I'm thinking, what is that, some hip new neighborhood of which I was unaware? It's a jail. Sigh.

From the Census bureau: "The five most segregated metropolitan areas for Blacks in 2000 were, in order, Milwaukee-Waukesha, Detroit, Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria, St. Louis, and Newark (Milwaukee-Waukesha and Detroit are less than one average rank apart)."
posted by desjardins at 8:03 AM on September 21, 2010

But, yeah, Portland. Whitey white white whitey whitey whit white white.

We've discussed this before, but important to keep in mind:
1) Portland has some of the most ethnically diverse suburbs around; it just reverses the normal pattern of multiracial downtown and white 'burbs. In the European fashion, you could say.
2) This data is 10 years old. Hispanic student population is up 50% in Portland proper during that time, for example.
posted by msalt at 9:32 AM on September 21, 2010

Sort of interesting. It's pretty to look at at least. I'll echo the regretful use of red for the largest race population without speculating on the creators intent.

It would be nice if the data represented the _actual_ cities. For instance, the "Denver" map reaches all the way to Boulder on one side, and Parker on the other. I could be wrong, but I believe that's a bit more area than you would normally call a "metro area".
posted by -t at 9:45 AM on September 21, 2010

Late to the thread, but: this is worth a read:

Schelling continued to write about nuclear weapons but then began to branch out into issues such as euthanasia and organised crime. In 1971, he published a groundbreaking paper that showed how easily severe racial segregation could arise from the accumulated decisions of individuals, even though each person was genuinely happy to live in an integrated neighbourhood.

I’ve always wondered how he came up with that idea. It turns out he started doodling on a long flight, haphazardly drawing pluses and zeros on a piece of paper to try to figure out what happened when one person moved to avoid being racially isolated. “It was hard to do with pencil and paper… you had to do a lot of erasing.”

When he got home he sat down with his 12-year-old son, a chequerboard and the boy’s coin collection, and played around with some simple rules about what the pennies “preferred”. Zinc pennies that found themselves completely surrounded by copper pennies, for example, would move to a blank square with some zinc neighbours. Each move sparked other moves, until the board was divided starkly into two homogenous halves. Schelling had discovered something important: “A very small preference not to have too many people unlike you in the neighbourhood, or even merely a preference for some people like you in the neighbourhood… could lead to such very drastic equilibrium results that looked very much like extreme separation."

I've pontificated on this point before (specifically, in the discussion about OKCupid's interracial dating data) - quiet prejudices (racial, gender, age - you name it) spread out over a population is more than enough to kick off this phenomenon, and because no one person is responsible, nobody feels they have to do anything to change, and nobody feels it's their personal responsibility to contribute to a solution.
posted by NoRelationToLea at 10:01 AM on September 21, 2010 [11 favorites]

The thing that struck me about PDX the first time I went there was how not-Asian it was, at least compared to San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver BC. I'd just kind of assumed that it would be similar, and it's not.
posted by rtha at 10:01 AM on September 21, 2010

Interesting. Despite that the thumbnails aren't labeled, I was easily able to pick Cleveland out of the line-up on page one by the shape of the coastline and a first approximation of what I'd expected to see (red to the west, blue to the east and then red again further east).

The map looks just about like any Clevelander would have pictured it. You can clearly identify the east / west divide; the two small black enclaves on the west side and a more prosperous one to the southeast; the greater population density of the Gold Coast apartment buildings; and so on.

It even accurately predicts majority black and white neighborhoods within Cleveland Heights, a suburb of 50,000 (the area of somewhat greater mixing on the east side), with the much whiter (redder) and wealthier Shaker Heights just south, and University Circle up in the NW corner of the red area. Most of Cleveland's old money is in this red zone surrounded by the C-shaped blue zone. I believe that darker red spot might represent the higher density apartment complexes around John Carroll University.

I also see that someone named Sciurus has correctly called out the small majority Hispanic and Asian communities within the city to the west and east respectively.

Here, received wisdom aligns very well with statistics. Nice work.
posted by Herodios at 10:52 AM on September 21, 2010

(...) it's by far the densest cluster in the county. That's San Quentin prison.

Come together... behind bars.
posted by WalkingAround at 11:30 AM on September 21, 2010

Which city is this?
posted by Artw at 4:37 PM on September 20 [2 favorites +] [!]

Oh that's bizarre. Is there such a thing as partial colorblindness? Would they say "71" instead of "74"?
posted by thesmophoron at 11:53 AM on September 21, 2010

Oregon is white. It has bastions of liberalism (Eugene, Ashland (my home town) and Portland (where I went to undergrad). There are some Oregonians who believe that Portland is more diverse than it is, because being known as honkytown isn't that appealing. And anything East of I-5, if you are black, watch the fuck out.
posted by angrycat at 11:58 AM on September 21, 2010

> All of the North-South roads change name when they cross Ponce

Where on earth did you get that?

Starting at Ponce de Leon Avenue's beginning on Spring St. in downtown Atlanta and following it all the way out to where it leaves Atlanta, goes into Decatur, and ceases to be Ponce De Leon (splitting into Scott Blvd. and West Ponce de Leon Ave.) here are the roads that cross Ponce north to south:

does not change - West Peachtree St. both sides
does not change - Peachtree St. both sides
does not change - Juniper St. both sides
does not change - Piedmont Ave. both sides
does not change - Myrtle St. both sides
does not change - Penn Ave. both sides
does not change - Argonne Ave. both sides
changes - Charles Allen Dr. on north side becomes Parkway Dr. on south side
changes - Monroe Dr. on north side becomes Boulevard on south side
does not change - Bonaventure Ave. both sides
does not change - Barnett St. both sides
does not change - North Highland Ave. both sides
changes - Briarcliff Rd. on north side becomes Moreland Ave. on south side
does not change - Springdale Rd. both sides
does not change - Oakdale Rd. both sides
changes - Lullwater Rd. on north side becomes Fairview Rd. on south side
does not change - Clifton Rd. both sides

Four out of eighteen.
posted by jfuller at 12:41 PM on September 21, 2010

Sorry - Spring St. counts too, since Ponce starts as a little dead-end nub on the east side of Spring St. and Spring then crossed it north to south (and doesn't change.)
posted by jfuller at 12:43 PM on September 21, 2010

The thing that struck me about PDX the first time I went there was how not-Asian it was, at least compared to San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver BC. I'd just kind of assumed that it would be similar, and it's not.

82nd Avenue and the section of northeast from roughly 48th to 100th is distinctly Asian. Beaverton, a close suburb and the 4th largest city in Oregon, is 12.6% Asian as of 2007, up from 9.65% in 2000.

But these are not places that a visitor or college student would likely go to.
posted by msalt at 1:49 PM on September 21, 2010

Yep, they've got Houston down. Main St. divides most of the blacks in Third Ward from the whites in West University, and then 45 also splits the blacks and the Hispanics in Wayside. I'm curious as to what that asian-ish place up in the northwest is, around 249, though.
posted by ralenys at 1:59 PM on September 21, 2010

The thing that struck me about PDX the first time I went there was how not-Asian it was, at least compared to San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver BC. I'd just kind of assumed that it would be similar, and it's not.


I have no idea if this is a factor or not, given how badly Chinese immigrants were generally treated in the 19th century, but in Oregon Governor Pennoyer (perhaps late 19th cent? or earlier) was an unabashed bigot. He got elected mostly by virtue of his anti-immigrant populism.
posted by angrycat at 2:37 PM on September 21, 2010

I mean, Gov. Pennoyer targeted the Chinese population in Oregon at that time, specifically.
posted by angrycat at 2:37 PM on September 21, 2010

What I find interesting is that despite the (obvious?) segregation (or perhaps is legacy), Blacks, Asians, Latinos together still only make up 30-40% percent of the population. My town, Seattle has about 8% black population, yet the 98118 zip code in SE Seattle is considered the most diverse in the country.
posted by black8 at 2:42 PM on September 21, 2010

Interesting, didn't know that. Oregon does not have a good history -- the KKK was active in the 1920s (anti-Catholic mostly, due to the inconvenient lack of minorities), and miscegenation was against the law until around 1960. Redlining was common in Portland well into the 1980s.

Looks like you're spot on, angrycat. I found this about the 1880s:

angry Oregonians frequently took the law into their own hands, with mobs driving the Chinese out of Oregon City, east Portland, Salem, and Yamhill. Efforts to expel the Chinese from Portland failed, but their numbers dropped substantially thereafter. Anti–Chinese sentiment culminated in 1887 when thirty-four Chinese miners were murdered by horse thieves northeast of Enterprise along the Snake River. The alleged perpetrators were subsequently acquitted...
posted by msalt at 2:52 PM on September 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

yeah. Oregonians were royal dicks to the Chinese. My great-great grandmother was Gov. Pennoyer's personal secretary (and maybe more) after my great-great grandfather was killed while riding for the Pony Express. My mom remembers my great-great grandmother expressing tremendous hostility towards the Chinese.

I figured this out when I was in law school and we read Pennoyer v. Neff in Civ Pro. I told my section, "hey, I have this historical connection to Pennoyer." My Civ Pro prof delighted in telling us all about weird history related to cases (stuff that wasn't in the textbook). It was then that I found out that Pennoyer was like Tea Party, 19th Century style.

I was horrified and slid waaaaay down in my seat.
posted by angrycat at 3:03 PM on September 21, 2010 [1 favorite]

Well, that's one way to show where the Berkeley and Oakland hills are...
posted by Zed at 3:08 PM on September 21, 2010

“A very small preference not to have too many people unlike you in the neighbourhood, or even merely a preference for some people like you in the neighbourhood… could lead to such very drastic equilibrium results that looked very much like extreme separation."

I have exactly the opposite tendency. When I lived on the continental US, I felt very strange and uncomfortable if there were only Europeans around. I guess it's from growing up in such a multi-ethnic environment.
posted by Jimmy Havok at 5:33 PM on September 21, 2010

I wonder: as the US becomes more diverse and traditional boundaries of "race" become muddled, will racial segregation give way to economic? I think in some sense it already has.

As the esteemed Joseph F. Bruce said:

"Fuck skin color, everybody's blue, then what would all these bigots do? Instead of your tone, they'd hate your size; that's why I must poke out all of their eyes."
posted by Evilspork at 8:28 PM on September 21, 2010

For someone recently relocated to Oakland from San Francisco and now moving to South Berkeley, it's interesting info, and supports my contention that the east bay is the most (highly qualified "most") integrated part of the Bay Area (though I'm a *little* surprised by how few black people live on the peninsula).

The division lines for Berkeley seem to be University Ave for north/south, and Shattuck Ave for east/west. We'll be over by the south library (tools!), so it's look like we'll be right in the mix.

Can a Detroiter say what the very evident horizontal line between red and blue is?

I'm guessing that's the infamous 8 Mile.

It seems like the radius of 8 Mile Rd. (which I grew up 2 blocks from) keeps getting bigger and bigger: the last time I saw my cousin, she was moving to a place 3 hours away from Detroit because the place they were living 2 hours away from Detroit was starting to get too many black kids at their school. :(

What with open housing and all, we'd have to describe these cities as self-segregated. Most cities seem to give you the option of living in racially homogenous, or varying degrees of integrated neighborhoods.

Well, there's a pretty big difference between what the law allows you to do, and what the people in any neighborhood allow you to do.
posted by mrgrimm at 11:02 AM on September 22, 2010

Minneapolis
posted by cthuljew at 11:21 AM on September 22, 2010

The division lines for Berkeley seem to be University Ave for north/south, and Shattuck Ave for east/west.

Back in the day, Berkeley had de facto color boundaries -- people of color were restricted to south of Dwight and west of Sacramento Ave (and could be visisted by a mob if they tried pushing the border even half a block.) The echo of this remains distressingly clear (with the exception, as noted above, of the pronounced Asian population south of campus. But, hey, they're working on that one -- after years of responding to criticisms of minority underrepresentation on campus by saying their hands were tied by the no-affirmative-action ballot proposition of years ago, as whites have become a smaller minority on campus, Cal suddenly got creative with a new admissions policy that all analysts agree will mean more whites and fewer Asians.)
posted by Zed at 11:39 AM on September 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

It's striking how dramatically the Black population of San Francisco is falling - down 50% by 2000, to only 7% (pretty close to Portland of all places.) And that was 10 years ago, the trend has undoubtedly continued.
posted by msalt at 8:17 PM on September 22, 2010

My town, Seattle has about 8% black population, yet the 98118 zip code in SE Seattle is considered the most diverse in the country.

The Southend has pretty much everyone... and really until about 10 years ago, white folks were very, very rare down there, so I'm not surprised to hear it being the most diverse place. Having grown up on Beacon Hill and most of my friends down in the valley, we really did kick it with everyone.

It was a big culture shock for me to go to California and see how much segregation there was in simple social circles.
posted by yeloson at 12:18 AM on September 23, 2010

The echo of this remains distressingly clear...

From 2008-2009 there was a massive fight as people tried to shut down the Berkeley Thai Buddhist Temple. The "reason" was that the Temple was requesting a building permit to raise their altar up 40 feet, which wouldn't have impacted anyone's view or property values, but the response was to try to shut down their Sunday Donation Brunches, which are basically the primary income for the Temple.

Statements made included:
- "They're putting drugs in the food!"
- "They're making too much money!" (Strangely, these arguments were not made about other local churches which brought in more money... not what "too much money" would have to do with it...)

..and upset locals called the police ON the monks more than once for having the audacity to be on Temple grounds (!?!).

Berkeley- "We love your music and your food, but you people can go back to where you came from."
posted by yeloson at 12:25 AM on September 23, 2010 [1 favorite]