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By Brian Davis
Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks, a nifty new online data aggregating tool put together single-handedly by data journalist Chris Persaud, serves two extremely simple functions: mapping the United States by rents and income.
Breaking both rents and income down by census tract, some fascinating insights can emerge. Where are rents low but incomes high? How does the range of rent differ from the range of income, in a certain city? Where are boundaries between high rent and low sharp, versus gradual?
Of course, for every question one can answer with Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks, there are plenty of others that arise. What did the map look like one year ago? Five years ago? Ten? A single snapshot in time does not demonstrate where neighborhoods are heading, only where they are now.
And then there are the measurement units: census tracts. In dense urban areas, census tracts may be quite specific and cover only a handful of blocks, but in many suburban and rural areas, tracts may cover many square miles.
Nor can the tool answer why certain areas have the rents or income that they do. Sometimes there are islands of wealth or apparent poverty standing starkly out on the map, which require deeper digging for explanations. As an amusing example, in Towson, MD (a wealthy suburb of Baltimore), Census Tract 4906.05 pops off the map with poverty-level income (surrounded by high income), but shows the highest rent level listed on the map. A closer examination reveals Towson University, populated with “poor” college students, whose parents (or student loans) pay the high rent.
The map uses data from the American Community Survey, which was taken between 2007-2011, and uses median incomes and median rents, reducing the impact of outliers, such as a few high-rise penthouses in an otherwise average neighborhood, on the data. Some types of income, such as capital gains, were not included however.
While some tracts may not be well represented (e.g. areas where most wealthier people own their homes while poorer citizens rent), in most cases the map offers an insightful window to the geographic distribution of wealth, and the differences between rents and income.
