Like previous mass shootings, last week’s terrorist attack in Charleston, SC left me–and the rest of the country–heartbroken. What was even worse in my mind is that in the year 2015, even with the apparent progress that this country has made on the race relations front, there are individuals out there that still hate fellow humans […]
This map is old but relevant today, given the debate at City Hall about environmental justice in the Phillips neighborhood. Almost 20 years ago, a few University of Minnesota professors did a GIS-based study (back in the early days of GIS) looking at how different toxic release geographic maps compared poverty and pollution at different […]
You might have read about the recent repeal of the “lurking” and “spitting” ordinances by the Minneapolis City Council last week. Well, about a month ago, the ACLU released Picking Up The Pieces, a polished and hard-hitting report on Minneapolis’ racial disparities in low-level crimes, of which lurking and spitting are only two. Here’s one of […]
People often talk about income inequality, but wealth inequality is its cumulative effect (compounded by things like real estate value and other assets). When you start talking about wealth, race, and real estate, society get problematic really quickly. Here’s a chart: This is via some website called datatools: In 1963, the average wealth of white families was $117,000 […]
August 2, 2014 Lexington-Hamline, Summit-University, Midway, Como 14.5 miles Athletes and sports have played a big part in Saint Paul history. In recent years much of the recognition has gone to those from Cretin-Derham Hall High School. Decades ago, however, several neighborhoods, especially the East Side and the Midway were well-known for their athletes and […]
Two weeks ago, the Atlantic published a short (and facile) post called “the Miracle of Minneapolis” that (as is the way of media circles in insecure places) launched itself right onto the forefront of the Twin Cities social media scene. And, with good reason, the article re-kindled conversations about racial disparities that have been going on for […]
While looking around for some data for another project, I ran into Minneapolis Health Department’s Reports. There’s a lot of great data there, but not all of it is necessarily in amazing condition for people to build off of. One data set, entitled Minneapolis Birth Data, caught my attention. Locked away in mostly tabular PDFs are a […]
There was a fascinating post the other day on Matthew Kahn’s excellent Environmental and Urban Economics blog that detailed some counter-intuitive data about racial inequality in the US. One of the charts seems fitting for this site: This is one of a few charts that Kahn uses to illustrate that, despite everything, the gap in racial equality […]
Thousands of protesters responding to the Ferguson, MO, grand jury decision gathered Tuesday night in south Minneapolis. But the local headline fodder was the story of the pedestrian protester struck and injured by a car at the intersection of Lake and Minnehaha. The car’s driver, presumably used to the traffic norms of four-lane death roads, […]
[Note: this post is best read while listening to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2DFu7oWit0.] An interesting chart from the Strong Towns blog showing biking rates in Memphis, Tennessee classified by ethnicity. Race and bicycling is an interesting topic of conversation that happens too rarely, and brings into focus all kinds of often hidden assumptions about transportation, equity, geography, visibility, […]