Mapping race and income in the Twin Cities

Demographers nationwide are probably rejoicing at the recent release of the first five year American Community Survey data. Several news stations in our area have headlines related to it. What's the big deal? For many years, the U.S. Census used two surveys in it's ten year survey. The first was the "short form," which gives basic information on all residents at a given location. The second is the "long form," which provides much more in depth information on things like commuting habits, education levels, employment sectors, household types, and so on. Only a few households got the long form, but the Census folks just did the math to calculate stats for a whole area.

The problem was that after a few years, that ten year data gets a bit stale. Chances are a neighborhood might look much different in 2009 than it did in 2000. And so beginning in 2005, the Census replaced the long form with the American Community Survey (ACS). (The ACS is also cheaper than the long form, but that's neither here nor there.) The ACS is done every year, but at a less intensive scale. So for any given year, we only got stats at a very broad level, like a single major city. But with time comes more precision. This recent data combines five years of data and gets down to the census tract level, about the same as zip code. It's averaged, meaning it's a snapshot over that whole five years. But it's better than the 2000 data, and from now on, it will come out every year, meaning that we'll have a better sense of how areas are changing over time.

I've been playing around with this data a bit and thought it might be helpful to post some maps of it here. Below is a map of the Twin Cities area, including several major racial/ethnic classifications and the median family income. On the left is a snapshot of income, for example.

An interactive version of this map is available here, through the GeoCommons site, where you can click on and off various layers to compare, zoom to specific neighborhoods, or click on tracts to get exact data.

Depending on my time over break, I'll try to post a few more of these maps or possibly some basic analysis (correlation of race with income, for ex.).

Handy visualization guide

I've become increasingly interested in different techniques for data visualization. With increased software sophistication, creating slick looking maps and charts has become more accessible. Scatterplots and choropleth maps (where different spatial units like states are color coded based on some trait such as obesity rate) now look quite nice. But there's also other options: network maps, parallel coordinate plots and stem and leaf plots (oh my!). To sort through them all, I've come across a handy guide by a few folks at Stanford. Here's the link.

Mississippi growing

NewsHour has a good series of reports this week on the Mississippi Delta as a "food desert," a place where healthy, affordable food is hard to fine. The research on these areas is still in development (and hopefully will be for long enough for me to write my dissertation) but however they come to be defined, they are very much socially made phenomena, as the story linked to below points out. There are a lot of incentives encouraging the kind of commodity crop production and resultant highly processed and unhealthy food options mentioned here, from crop subsidies to trade agreements. Local food projects like these are an attempt to strengthen "food sovereignty," local communities' control over their access to healthy food. Three minutes long--worth a look.

In Mississippi, Growing Vegetables in a 'Food Desert'

Going to the dogs

Today I ran across a video on Megan McArdle's blog over at the Atlantic--a swat team raiding a house late at night based on alleged narcotics possession. The search apparently revealed a small amount of pot. In the process, the police shot and killed the family's dogs. The family's young child was in the middle of the living room while all this was playing out. Here's a link. McArdle's take:

After he watched it, my more temperate better half was literally shaking with anger. My anger is mixed with a sort of bleak despair that this sort of thing could happen in America, and worse, that so few people care. You shoot two dogs in front of a seven year old--who could have been killed by a stray round, and at the very least will carry this hideous recollection to the grave. And why? For misdemeanor pot possession?

I have to say I'm with her on this one. One of my most vivid memories of our first house in North Minneapolis is the night a domestic disturbance brought the police to the house next door about 1 am. They ordered everyone in the house outside (from a loudspeaker in the police car no less)--this included a 10 year old, Sterling, who we'd gotten to know during the year we'd already lived there. The police entered the house, and we could see their flashlights searching through the house as we watched from our own window. Then gunshots. Not much else happened. After about a half hour, the cars drove off and the family went back inside.

We found out the next day that the police had shot and killed the family pit bull, Sisco. We were none too fond of the creature, and I can understand police concern about such animals. But the thought that Sterling, who had talked about loving Animal Planet and wanted to be a vet, was now indelibly marked by this experience was deeply disturbing. Watching this video today, I can't imagine what my own reaction would be if the police raided our house at the dead of night and shot our dog with our kids as witnesses. For something as minor in this case as a few ounces of marijuana.

Fighting the French (Fries)

This is a bit of last week's news, but for those who missed it, the army reports that kids are now getting too fat to fight:

National security is threatened by the sharp rise in obesity rates for young people over the last 15 years, the group Mission: Readiness contends. Weight problems are now the leading medical reason that recruits are rejected, the group says, and thus jeopardize the military's ability to fill its ranks.

Such concerns are not news, of course. Institutionalized food production became widespread during the first world war, in part because the army wanted to utilize new nutritionary science (e.g.--"Guess what? Carrots have vitamins!") to keep troops healthy and ready to fight. Victory gardens (and their antecedent in WWI) also were meant to keep the population lean, both economically and physically, to support the fight.

Of the recommendations these army officials bring up, the need for more funding stands out to me. When I talked with a school lunch director in rural Minnesota last semester, she cited the difficulty of providing food at $2 or $2.50 per child, especially when it's at a scale of 4,000 students per day. There's almost no way to produce that much food at that price without relying on the mechanization and efficiency of giant food processors. On site production and shorter supply chains come at a cost. Is it one we're willing to pay? That's a difficult question in times like these, but one worth asking. (Though chicken patties do have their appeal...)

No brother of mine

I caught a part of this radio documentary on MPR during my commute to campus today. While I didn't hear the whole program, what I did hear was fantastic. The documentary follows four sex offenders before and after they leave a correctional facility in Minnesota, chronicling their process of re-entry as a way of examining how our "get tough" sex offender laws play out in reality.

I've blogged elsewhere about how sex offenders are often used as a political tool to rile public emotion and garner votes. It's not that I want to be a Pollyanna who ignores the real harm sex offenders cause their victims, but the hyperstigma surrounding sex offenses, relegating those who commit these crimes to second-class citizenship is alarming - and, I would argue, decreases rather than increases public safety.

What I like about this documentary is that it personalizes the issue. It's hard to listen to the stories of these men and still call them "monsters."

The Other Journal at Mars Hill Graduate School :: Privilege as Blindness: Why North American Christians Need Haiti by Katie Grimes

A piece on Spanish and American involvement in Haiti, and how church officials have responded to poverty based on their backgrounds. It's an interesting (and relatively radical) theological/historical reflection on the importance of our own social position to the way we frame an approach to addressing poverty. This is something I've thought a lot about trying to connect my role as an academic with life in a low-income urban neighborhood. Worth the read, perhaps, though I don't know the history of U.S. involvement well enough to comment.

Here's a sample quote:

Ever since the devastating earthquake of January 12, we have been talking nonstop about Haiti. To hear us speak, it sounds as though we have just discovered that Haiti exists. However, given that Haiti and the United States have been deeply interconnected since their revolutionary inceptions more than two centuries ago, this ignorance is not just regrettable, it is downright strange. Moreover, given that the United States’ relationship to Haiti has been ruthlessly hostile and imperialistic from the start, our collective bewilderment as to “why Haiti is so poor” is frightening.

For North American Christians seeking to follow the way of the crucified Christ who brought good news to the poor, this situation should be especially terrifying. It is not just that we participate in and benefit from the oppression of the Haitian people—itself an impediment to discipleship—but also that our social location makes it almost impossible for us to know that we are oppressors.

The Other Journal at Mars Hill Graduate School :: Privilege as Blindness: Why North American Christians Need Haiti by Katie Grimes