Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Block by Block

This NYT tool which lets you examine American Community Survey data for every neighborhood is, as Matt Yglesias says, pretty awesome.

It turns out that Hyde Park, for example, is relatively White close to the Midway (the proportion of White residents crashes south of 60th street), then gets progressively more and more integrated as you move north, until the White population basically disappears north of 47th Street.

Meanwhile, the census tract I live in now is nearly 70% White -- but borders a tract which apparently has 0 White residents.

Fascinating.

3 comments:

N. Friedman said...

To quote Mr. Spock: "'Fascinating' is a word I use for the unexpected. In this case, I should think 'interesting' would suffice."

Why are your findings fascinating to you?

David Schraub said...

I don't think Mr. Spock is correct. A "fascination" is simply a particular intense interest (if someone was said to have a fascination with model trains, we're saying he finds model trains particularly engrossing or interesting, not unexpected).

And so it is with seeing how the American population is distributed. I don't think it's all that unexpected that, for example, Bethesda is nearly all-White, or that most of South Side Chicago is overwhelmingly Black. But it's still (very) interesting -- and, to someone with my interests, fascinating.

N. Friedman said...

No, no, no, no, no. Mr. Spock is always correct. As Spock also said, "Live long and prosper." In other words, have a great time on your vacation.