Here’s yet another chart from Scott Shaffer’s Twitter feed, which is chock full of tasty bits of data visualization. It shows Saint Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood (pop. 12,519) compared to two rather arbitrary endpoints, the city of Dayton, Ohio (pop. 141,749) and the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (pop. 32,926, where I used to live).

Here you go, according to three key metrics:

Shaffer’s point, which he makes on Twitter, is that Hamline-Midway looks a lot more like Dayton than Williamsburg. He writes that “Hamline Midway in St. Paul (which CURA designates as gentrifying) looks more like a declining rust belt town than a hot urban neighborhood.”

The chart and a must-read lengthy essay by Shaffer’s Seward Redesign colleague Renee Spillum expounding the comparison, were made in reaction to the a study released this month by CURA which offers a qualitative analysis of gentrification in the Twin Cities.

It’s a hot button topic, to be sure, and I could spend hours writing about it without making much progress on understanding what to do about urban inequality. (I’ve done this before.) Let’s just say that gentrification is a concept that holds different meanings to different people.

Still, I like the charts! Check out the report along with Spillum’s response on the CURA website.