The data for this project all comes from the American Community Survey. The data will be using the 2019 estimates of population spreads to calculate the Theil’s Index for each metro area and then the Mutual Information Index on the tract level. Both indexes have been used to measure income inequality but have been used to measure segregation as well.
There are two purposes for this report:
As the title suggests, to identify Gentrified Metro Areas in the United States.
Showcase new technologies like R and highlight its use cases for social scientists to manipulate and study both tabular and spatial data.
The race/ethnic groups that have been used are White Non-Hispanic, Black, Hispanic and Asian.
Only Urban Areas with a population larger than 75000 is being considered.
For further information on what constitutes as urban areas. Click here to check out the Census Bureau’s criteria.
A tract/urban area having a higher Theil Index means that it is more segregated than its peers and vice versa. Hutchens (2004)
After wrangling the data from the Census Bureau, we can see that we have our Census Tracts, the Urban Area they are associated with and the populations within each tract. We will be using this to calculate the Theil’s Index and then filtering out the top 10 states with the highest score.
Here we have the 10 Urban areas with the highest Theil’s Index Score and their respective populations. We can see that most of these cities are either in the Midwest or the Northeast. Only Memphis and Birmingham are in the South-East of the United States. This is not surprising as the birthplace of Redlining were industrial rust belt cities like Chicago and Philadelphia. Those decades old lines still define much of those cities. Not to mention that many neighborhoods had restrictive deeds on housing where only Caucasians were allowed to buy homes. This was later struck down by the Supreme Court but segregation still persisted with practices like Single Family Zoning or with the Highway Infrastructure Act that gave birth to modern day suburban American and an opportunity for “white Flight” where middle class and affluent White residents left the inner cities for new pastures away from African Americans.
To end this, I’ll be making interactive maps for all of the Urban Areas in the table.
| Top 10 Most Segregated Urban Areas in 2019 | ||||||||
| Urban Area Name | M | p | Theil's Entropy Index | ent_ratio | White Population | Black Population | Asian Population | Hispanic Population |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Detroit | 0.3832628 | 0.06708970 | 0.4185878 | 0.7942950 | 2342366 | 937070 | 184800 | 174596 |
| Milwaukee | 0.3874429 | 0.02535717 | 0.4053729 | 0.8291337 | 872939 | 254942 | 56256 | 163096 |
| Cleveland | 0.3268976 | 0.03299262 | 0.3993746 | 0.7100729 | 1185587 | 387249 | 47674 | 92236 |
| Chicago | 0.4422990 | 0.14145363 | 0.3742364 | 1.0252781 | 4345111 | 1513949 | 604802 | 1994328 |
| St. Louis | 0.2948226 | 0.03933801 | 0.3694705 | 0.6922335 | 1467080 | 490068 | 69165 | 72913 |
| Philadelphia | 0.3801786 | 0.06908255 | 0.3662455 | 0.9005068 | 3314715 | 1189225 | 345472 | 543838 |
| Buffalo | 0.2608182 | 0.03530818 | 0.3576456 | 0.6326400 | 693650 | 128718 | 33321 | 52445 |
| Memphis | 0.3450898 | 0.01620637 | 0.3547144 | 0.8439661 | 407755 | 553950 | 25914 | 66621 |
| New York--Newark | 0.4480013 | 0.43183317 | 0.3503485 | 1.1093043 | 8400679 | 3034423 | 2134839 | 4692448 |
| Birmingham | 0.3010791 | 0.01543290 | 0.3372126 | 0.7745482 | 398736 | 294653 | 13802 | 34758 |
Soruces:
(Massey and Denton 1988; Elbers 2021; Stribley 2017; Massey 1990; Fischer 2003)