Check out this cool, drill down map of the United States. Color coded dots indicate the racial makup (based on census data) of any given area, from the country as a whole to a street level view. Clicking the “AddMap Labels” button overlays city names and makes it easy to find your neighborhood. I just started playing with it, but the distributions are interesting.
I searched and didn’t see a previous thread on this, hope I’m not late to the party!
Looking at the map of my area I noticed only one area heavily green. It’s the only area that stands out in green at all. I was trying to figure out what neighborhood that would be when it occurred to me that it’s the county jail.
There’s an area of town near hear that everyone is like “Yeah that whole area is blacks.” And I’ll be damned…it is a perfect square of green, with a little smattering of red. Huh.
I was surprised to see how distinctly 8 mile road shows up as a demographic border here in Detroit. I mean, sure on one hand it’s background knowledge I grew up absorbing, but so clearly delineated, wow.
The dots are placed randomly in each census block.
My census block is really big with a lot of people on the edges and nobody in the middle, so pretty much all of the dots are strewn around empty fields and factories.
Wow, on Long Island, Meadowbrook Parkway being the diving line between Blacks & Whites is striking. I was trying to figure out what one random solid green square was in the blue section when I realized, Oh, that’s the Nassau County Jail.
Yep, west Dayton (Ohio) is predominately black, and east Dayton is white.
Scanning the greater Dayton area, I noticed a small pocket of Asians living just south of Dayton. Looked up the area on Google Maps, and it’s in the same vicinity as the LexisNexis headquarters.
Interesting to see how my old neighborhood in the Bronx, which used to be Irish and Italian, is now almost entirely Hispanic and Asian. (I think I can make out my mother’s house and the Italian guy who lives across the street, almost the only blue dots left on the street.)
I’m also surprised at how much of the borough is now dominated by Hispanics, with the only large concentration of blacks now in the north.
From the explanatory text that goes with that map:
[QUOTE=The explanatory text that goes with that map]
The locations of the dots do not represent actual addresses. The most detailed geographic identifier in Census Bureau data is the census block. Individual dots are randomly located within a particular census block to match aggregate population totals for that block. As a result, dots in some census blocks may be located in the middle of parks, cemeteries, lakes, or other clearly non-residential areas within that census block. No greater geographic resolution for the 2010 Census data is publicly available (and for good reason).
[/quote]