Purely geographical maps don’t tell the full story of cities. While they might lay out street grids, label boulevards and avenues, and demarcate buildings, they don’t expose the deeper currents that undergird the way cities function–particularly when it comes to income.
A new data visualization from the mapping company Esri overlays maps of five cities with income data from the American Community Survey, exposing a snapshot of income inequality across the nation.
“In cities, income inequality is written all over the map,” says Allen Carroll, a cartographer who runs Esri’s program dedicated to telling stories using maps. “If you look at any major American city, you can see some pretty stark divides between wealthy areas and non-wealthy areas.”
No big revelations there. But a second set of maps that examines income diversity within wealthy and poor areas has a more surprising insight: There’s far more diversity when it comes to the amount of money people make in affluent neighborhoods than in poor neighborhoods. That means that the residents of low-income neighborhoods are all likely to be very low-income, while residents of wealthy neighborhoods have much more variable income levels.
The final map of the project is a nationwide interactive that shows income distribution across the country. When you’re entirely zoomed out, the cities look like beacons of affluence, with rural areas, particularly in the South, standing out as impoverished. There’s talk of the urban-rural divide when it comes to politics, but the map shows how much that divide is tied to money and economic prosperity.
