Perform visual investigatation of community investment and de-investment across Chicago communities post-recession, especially in areas predominantly inhabited by Hispanic residents versus predominantly inhabited by Black residents.
Utilize R to analyze and compile data on school spending, business licensing, and democratic participation across Chicago wards. Utilize ggplot2, gganimate, and sf packages to create static visualizations on Chicago investment patterns from 2012 to 2018.
View my analysis on my Chicago Community Investment webpage.
See my follow up D3.js project here. (Github)
In the year and a half I've spent in Chicago, I've heard a lot about how gentrification of neighborhoods and rehabilitation of neighborhood are approached in different ways in communities based on their demographic makeups. Specifically, I've heard that both public and private sector access tend to pause investment in infrastructure and services to a neighborhood comprised of predominantly Black residents in order to drive inhabitants out of a community. Once they have left then re-investment led by developers with an aim to draw new residents that change the socioeconomic demographics of the neighborhood. In contrast, anecdotal accounts of gentrification in other communities of color, (for example, Hispanic communities) characterise the gentrification process as a quieter "ramping up" of investment along the edge(s) of the community, followed by a slow takeover by other cultures and socioeconomic classes, pushing out residents who’ve inhabited the neighborhood for decades.
As Chicago is notably one of the most segregated cities in the United States, I believe it will be an interesting forum for such an analysis, and that the city’s segregated neighborhoods comprise a “natural experiment” of sorts on the myriad effects of systemic disinvestment of communities. I will attempt to determine whether the two patterns of de-investment versus increased investment are visible across communities of different demographics in terms of:
- Business licenses issued, to track businesses' entry into and exit from neighborhoods of different demographics
- Investment in students through public schools with differing majorities of student racial/ ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds
- Voter turnout, used to determine any correlation between democratic participaiton and neighborhood de-investment