Blog 2 - Preliminary Results; San Antonio, Texas Demographic & Socio-Economic Profile (2020)

Author

B.A. Flores

Intro

For my research project in this class I want to observe “The Westside” of San Antonio, Texas and compare that region to the rest of the city. The reason for looking at this region of the city and making comparisons is because of the long persisted poverty that has existed in that area. The Westside of San Antonio as mentioned in “Westside Rising” a book that observes the flooding of the Westside of San Antonio due to various systemic oppression that has occurred. Poor reinvestment into the community and continued deterioration of the infrastructure in that area as violent crime persists over the years; the Westside as been a very marginalized area of the US.

As documented in 1968 in a series of Hunger in America it exposed the poverty that existed in the Westside at that time with realities of extremely high infant mortality rates as well as widespread hunger being observed as one of the most impoverished areas in the entire country. Yet with all of these systematic oppressions throughout the decades large political movements and cultural arts movements have stemmed from the Westside area being recognized historically with other areas in the US such as east LA, Spanish Harlem, and Pilsen in Chicago.

In this preliminary analysis we observe population distributions for home ownership, Latinos, those with a bachelors, PhD, professional certification, median income, family poverty, and those who are in the workforce with health insurance. To conduct these preliminary results, we take descriptive statistics of each variable to observe the five number summary as well as a histogram of data distribution for that variable.

Next, we will observe these same variables but spatially across Bexar County census tracts to observe any possible clustering of populations or hotspots throughout San Antonio.

The American Community Survey observing 5 year estimates for the years 2016-2020 will be analyzed for Bexar County, San Antonio Texas.

Code 
census_api_key("dd56a542275f67cee8e5d857403b04819a405ad6")
To install your API key for use in future sessions, run this function with `install = TRUE`.

Variables Used

Code 
sa_acs<-get_acs(geography = "tract",
                state="TX",
                county = c("Bexar"),
                year = 2020,
                variables=c( "B07013_002E", #Estimate!!Total:!!Householder lived in owner-occupied housing units
                             "B07013_001E", 
#summary_var Estimate!!Total:GEOGRAPHICAL MOBILITY IN THE PAST YEAR BY TENURE FOR CURRENT RESIDENCE IN THE UNITED STATES 

                             "B06011_001E",
#Median Income in past 12 months

"B01003_001",
#Total Population

"B01001I_001",
#Total Hispanics/Latinos

"B17013_002E",
#Estimate!!Total:!!Income in the past 12 months below poverty level: (Families) 

"B17013_001E",
#summary_var Estimate!!Total:POVERTY STATUS IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS OF FAMILIES BY HOUSEHOLD TYPE BY NUMBER OF PERSONS IN FAMILY


"B15003_022E",
#Estimate!!Total:!!Bachelor's degree 

"B15003_025E",
#Estimate!!Total:!!Doctorate degree

"B15003_024E",
#Estimate!!Total:!!Professional school degree

"B15003_001E", 
#summary_var Estimate!!Total:EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT FOR THE POPULATION 25 YEARS AND OVER


"B05002_013E",
#Estimate!!Total:!!Foreign born

"B05002_001E", 
#summary_var Estimate!!Total:PLACE OF BIRTH BY NATIVITY AND CITIZENSHIP STATUS

"B27011_004E",
#Estimate!!Total:!!In labor force:!!Employed:!!With health insurance coverage

"B27011_003E"),
#summary_var Estimate!!Total:!!In labor force:!!Employed:

                geometry = T, output = "wide")
Getting data from the 2016-2020 5-year ACS
Downloading feature geometry from the Census website.  To cache shapefiles for use in future sessions, set `options(tigris_use_cache = TRUE)`.
Code 
#create a county FIPS code - 5 digit
sa_acs$county<-substr(sa_acs$GEOID, 1, 5)

Variables Recoded

Code 
#rename variables and filter missing cases
sa_acs2<-sa_acs%>%
  mutate(
homeown= (B07013_002E/B07013_001E)*100,
#Percentage of those who are homeowners in Bexar County per census tract

Latinos=(B01001I_001E/B01003_001E)*100,
#Percentage of Latinos in Bexar County per census tract

homeown2absolute= B07013_002E,
#Absolute Value of the number of homeowners throughout Bexar County per census tract

bachelors= (B15003_022E/B15003_001E)*100,
#Percentage of bachelors degrees in Bexar County per census tract

PhD= (B15003_025E/B15003_001E)*100,
#Percentage of PhD degrees in Bexar County per census tract

ProCer= (B15003_024E/B15003_001E)*100, 
#Percentage of Professional Certificates in Bexar County per census tract

medincome=B06011_001E, 
#Median income in Bexar County per census tract

fampov=(B17013_002E/B17013_001E)*100, 
#Percentage of family poverty in Bexar County per census tract

foreignb=(B05002_013E/B05002_001E)*100, 
#Percentage of those who are foreign born in Bexar County per census tract

workinsure=(B27011_004E/B27011_003E)*100) %>%
#Percentage of those in the workforce who have health insurance in Bexar County per census tract
  na.omit()

Results

Descriptive Statistics

Code 
library(skimr)
Warning: package 'skimr' was built under R version 4.2.3
Code 
skim(sa_acs3)
Warning: Couldn't find skimmers for class: sfc_MULTIPOLYGON, sfc; No
user-defined `sfl` provided. Falling back to `character`.
Data summary
Name sa_acs3
Number of rows 371
Number of columns 11
_______________________
Column type frequency:
character 1
numeric 10
________________________
Group variables None

Variable type: character

skim_variable n_missing complete_rate min max empty n_unique whitespace
geometry 0 1 262 3705 0 371 0

Variable type: numeric

skim_variable n_missing complete_rate mean sd p0 p25 p50 p75 p100 hist
homeown 0 1 61.51 22.20 0.00 48.84 65.35 76.51 98.60 ▁▂▅▇▅
Latinos 0 1 61.04 22.51 11.71 42.51 58.88 82.24 99.67 ▂▇▇▆▇
homeown2absolute 0 1 3265.84 1966.43 0.00 1917.00 2981.00 4240.00 15215.00 ▇▆▁▁▁
bachelors 0 1 17.15 11.19 0.02 7.22 15.12 26.04 52.16 ▇▆▅▂▁
PhD 0 1 1.10 1.51 0.00 0.00 0.58 1.47 8.05 ▇▂▁▁▁
ProCer 0 1 1.94 3.06 0.00 0.00 0.78 2.42 21.82 ▇▁▁▁▁
medincome 0 1 30766.34 12392.80 8580.00 21842.00 28250.00 37220.50 101338.00 ▇▇▂▁▁
fampov 0 1 13.25 10.98 0.00 4.25 10.92 20.65 67.38 ▇▃▁▁▁
foreignb 0 1 13.13 6.12 1.43 8.59 12.15 16.63 36.65 ▅▇▃▁▁
workinsure 0 1 79.64 11.75 44.90 71.23 81.51 88.76 100.00 ▁▃▆▇▆

From the descriptive statistics shown San Antonio, Texas is majority Latino with a about more than half of the population being home owners. Over 17% of the city’s population has atleast a bachelors degree or some type of professional certification. The median income for the city of San Antonio is about $28,000 with family poverty at about 10%. The foreign born population in San Antonio is about 12% and about 80% of those who are in the workforce have some sort of health insurance.

Spatial Observations

Code 
library(tmap)
library(tmaptools)

tm_shape(sa_acs3)+
  tm_polygons("homeown", title="Percentage of owner-occupied homes per census tract", palette="Blues", style="pretty", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="San Antonio Homeownership; Percentage of Owner-Occupied Homes", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

When observing the percentage of owner-occupied homes, we can see the Westside, southwest side, southside, and parts of the east side in central San Antonio. Owner-occupied homes do not go up in proportion again until you reach the areas past 1604.

Code 
tm_shape(sa_acs2)+
  tm_polygons("homeown2absolute", title="Absolute value of owner-occupied homes per census tract", palette="Blues", style="quantile", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="San Antonio Homeownership; absolute values of owner-occupied homes", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

These re the absolute numbers for the owner occupied homes. These are given to help provide context so that you can see whole numbers rather than percentages. Here we observe the majority of homeownership can be found on the northwest side of San Antonio outside of 1604. The Westside, southwest, and southside still have high absolute values as they did in having higher proportions of owner-occupied homes in these areas. As with other parts of the city shown a much lighter blue in this 2nd map compared to the 1st map. This being although some of those census tracts have a high proportion of owner-occupied homes; those tracts themselves do not have a large amount of owner-occupied homes in general compared to those other spaces of the central downtown area and northwest 1604 as previously mentioned.

Code 
tm_shape(sa_acs2)+
  tm_polygons("bachelors", title="Percentage with a Bachelors Degree per census tract", palette="Blues", style="quantile", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="San Antonio Educational Attainment; Percentage with a Bachelors Degree", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

Here we observe a large concentration of those with a bachelors degree inthe far north parts of San Antonio. With somewhat of a corridor of color coming in from the north east side of San Antonio into the downtown area. All other parts of the city have little to no residents with a bachelors degree.

Code 
tm_shape(sa_acs2)+
  tm_polygons("PhD", title="Percentage with a PhD per census tract", palette="Blues", style="quantile", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="San Antonio Educational Attainment; Percentage with a PhD", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

When observing the population for those who earned a PhD, it again shows similiar trends at those who earned a bachelors degree spatially. Rather this time that same colored corridor is found coming in from the north east part of the city but much more deeper of a color as compared to the previous map.

Code 
tm_shape(sa_acs2)+
  tm_polygons("ProCer", title="Percentage with Professsional Certificates per census tract", palette="Blues", style="quantile", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="San Antonio Educatinal Attainment; Percentage with Professional Certificates", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

With those with a professional certificate, it is again very similiar patterns we found for those with a PhD.

Code 
tm_shape(sa_acs2)+
  tm_polygons("medincome", title="Median Income per census tract", palette="Blues", style="quantile", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="San Antonio Median Income", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

When observing median income it is severely segregated across San Antonio with the majority of the wealth being held by the far northside residents. With only residents from that same previously mentioned corridor going into downtown again being shown. The majority of the city with the exception for the far northside lives in extreme poverty especially those census tracts found in the Westside, Southside, southwest side, and east side.

Code 
tm_shape(sa_acs2)+
  tm_polygons("fampov", title="Percentage of family Poverty per census tract", palette="Blues", style="quantile", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="San Antonio, TX percentage of families living in poverty", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

When observing the percentage of those families living in poverty, the majority of poverty is concentrated in the southside and southwest side with extreme poverty being found in the historic neighborhoods of the Westside and Eastside of San Antonio, TX. There is little to no family poverty found in the north/far north side of San Antonio.

Code 
tm_shape(sa_acs2)+
  tm_polygons("Latinos", title="Percentage of Latinos per census tract", palette="Blues", style="quantile", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="Percentage of Latinos in San Antonio, TX", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

When observing the distribution of Latinos in San Antonio, TX we find that the majority of Latinos are concentrated in the Westside, southwest side, and southside of San Antonio.

Code 
tm_shape(sa_acs2)+
  tm_polygons("foreignb", title="Percentage of those foreign born per census tract", palette="Blues", style="quantile", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="Percentage of those who are foreign born in San Antonio, TX", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

For the foreign born population in San Antonio, TX, although a concentration can be found in the Westside of San Antonio it is much more dispersed of a variables as opposed to the other variables observed thus far. Other concentrations of foreign born populations that are not as big as the Westside would parts of the northwest side, far southside, and far northside both being outside of 1604. There are little to no foreign born residents living on the eastern parts of San Antonio.

Code 
tm_shape(sa_acs2)+
  tm_polygons("workinsure", title="Percentage of workers with health insurance per census tract", palette="Blues", style="quantile", n=5 )+
  tm_format("World", title="Percentage of workers with health insurance in San Antonio, TX", legend.outside=T)+
  tm_scale_bar()+
  tm_credits("5-Year (2016-2020) American Community Survey \nCalculations by B.A. Flores (M.S.) \nthe University of Texas at San Antonio", size = 0.5, position=c("LEFT"))+
  tm_compass()

The map showing the percentage of those in the workforce with health insurance in San Antonio is somewhat similar to the map for median income. The majority of those who have health insurance that is within the workforce live outside of 1604 on the far westside, far north west side, and northside. The majority of those who live in San Antonio within the workforce do not have health insurance especially in areas such as the Westside, southwest side, southside, and eastside.

Discussion

When observing San Antonio, Texas using the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-yeaer estimates for the year 2016 - 2020 we can observe that the majority of wealth and educational attainment is concentrated in the northern northwestern parts of the city whereas the areas of low health insurance for workers, high poverty rates, low educational attainment, and lower median incomes are the areas traditionally that have always been in poverty in San Antonio especially the Westside, Southside, and Eastside areas central in the city. Those same areas of extreme poverty are also where the majority of the Latino population resides. San Antonio, Texas when observing these 5 year estimates is still highly segregated economically with a true emphasis being shown for the northern parts of San Antonio and the downtown area. When observing owner-occupied homes it is the Westside as well as parts of the southside and eastside that have high percentages of homeownership. No other parts of the city exhibit these levels of homeownership except for some spurious concentrations of owner-occupied homes in the far northside of San Antonio.