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Google map your hood. · by David Donald
One of my favorite Google Map hacks (http://65.39.85.13/google/default.htm) mashes up the map with census data.
The site is so unofficial that the collaboration between business analysis company SRC and mapping and data company AnalyGIS apparently didn’t even merit its own real domain.
You can navigate just like Google Maps, but the address finding function doesn’t work as smoothly. Luckily you can bypass both by putting in just a ZIP code. If you don’t know a ZIP code, that’s what another Google Map hack, the ZIP Code Boundary Map, is for. The demographic information is calculated in 1 mile, 3 mile, and 5 mile radii, so you can’t focus as closely as you might like on a given area, but you can get close enough to get a good idea.
If you mess around with this you may make some startling discoveries, especially when applied to well-known hoods. For instance, most of Compton and Inglewood have far-from ghetto median incomes of around $30-40K, while in South-Central the median income drops to the low 20Ks. While violent gang activity is pretty prevalent in much of the LA basin, for truly depressing ghetto, one needs to go to Skid Row on the east side of Downtown, where the median income hovers around $9000. The area has one of the largest concentrations of homeless people in any American city.
In New York, the far southern tip of the South Bronx seems to have the lowest median incomes, which get as low as $15,000 in some areas. Harlem, on the other hand, is mostly on par with South-Central LA.
If you click the drop down menu under the “Report” section, you can switch the census housing report. If you switch back and forth you can see some pretty eye opening patterns in old industrial cities such as Detroit and Flint, MI. Too bad the data is too old to catch current New Orleans.
The 1 mile radius may be too broad a lens with which to look at actual neighborhoods in most cities – it certainly won’t capture an individual housing project. You might be surprised with what you find out about your own hood. Keep in mind it’s using 6 year old census data. Oh yeah, and there is unfortunately no way to directly link to a given map either. But if you play around with this and find anything interesting, mention it here.
Comments for "Google map your hood."
the median incomes show the power of gentrification.
(15K + 15K + 90K)/3 sure looks deceptively ok
thanks for the link to the site….enjoyed.
peace.
— Vik Jun 20, 10:55 PM
Your example is actually a mean income (what you usually think of as “average”) – if you look at the numbers on that map you can see the mean incomes are often a lot higher. Median income with your example population of 15K, 15K, 90K would be 15K, since 15K is the one in the middle.
In Downtown LA the mean income is like $25-30K – this is an even more drastic example of gentrification, because the lofts they are putting in in old buildings down there are only affordable by people making like $100K.
— David Jun 21, 02:48 AM
I’d always heard that Inglewood was a bit suburban so the median income doesn’t really shock me at all.
— DJ Flash Jun 23, 04:42 PM
Holy shit, blog spam – now I’ve seen it all.
— DJ Flash Jun 25, 07:47 PM
Ha, rookie!
Blog spam deleted….
— Rafi Jun 25, 08:13 PM