Google recently announced that it will provide internet service–Google Fiber–but many disadvantaged minority communities that would be eligible for it may not get it.  In the article “In One City, Signing Up for Internet Becomes a Civic Cause,” John Eligon writes about digital and socioeconomic divides in Kansas City.  The company requires locals to signup in advance to ensure coverage, but many predominately black areas may go under-served because not enough residents pre-registered.  Eligon cites data and analysis from Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge.

For generations, Kansas City has been riven by racial segregation that can still be seen, with a majority of blacks in the urban core confined to neighborhoods in the east. Troost Avenue has long been considered the dividing line, the result of both overt and secretive efforts to keep blacks out of white schools and housing areas and of historical patterns of population growth and settlement, said Micah Kubic, with the nonprofit Greater Kansas City Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Nearly three in four people living east of Troost in Kansas City’s urban center are black, according to an analysis of 2010 Census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York City.

As recently as 15 to 20 years ago, black residents said, they did not venture west of Troost for fear of harassment from the police. Today, they complain that their schools are failing, crime is rampant and infrastructure is dilapidated…

As of Sunday evening, only about 32 percent of people in the neighborhoods that qualified for Google Fiber were black, while just over 54 percent were white, according to Mr. Beveridge.

Click here to read the full article.

Sunday, September 9th is National Grandparents Day.  First declared a holiday by President Carter in 1978, the occasion celebrates grandparents’ contributions to family life and society.  Using Social Explorer, we can look at the number of grandparents in the US, and their relationships with their grandchildren.  Census and American Community Survey data show the role of grandparents over the past decade.

In 2000, 5,771,671 grandparents lived with their own grandchildren (under 18 years old).  That is 3.6 percent of all adults.

In the New York Times article “A Stubborn Racial Disparity in Who Calls the Upper East Side Home,” Elizabeth Harris discusses the continued lack of diversity on the Upper East Side, and interviews some of the few African Americans living in the neighborhood.  She cites data and analysis from Social Explorer’s Susan Weber-Stoger.

It has been more than 35 years since the television family the Jeffersons moved on up to the East Side. The main character, George Jefferson — played by Sherman Hemsley, who died last month — was a successful black businessman, and he became a significant cultural touchstone. But he apparently didn’t start a trend.

The proportion of non-Hispanic black residents on the Upper East Side has remained exceedingly low for decades, rising from 2.1 percent of the area’s population in 1990 to just 2.7 percent about 20 years later, according to an analysis of census data by Susan Weber-Stoger of the Queens College department of sociology, which defined the Upper East Side as the area between Fifth Avenue and the East River, from 59th to 96th Streets.

The proportion of white residents, meanwhile, has also held fairly stable, dipping to 81 percent from 88.6 percent…

According to recent census data, there were about 450 black households on the Upper East Side with an income of $100,000 or more, and more than 4,600 in Harlem.

For more on racial segregation, living in a homogenous neighborhood, and being mistaken for a nanny, click here to read the rest of the article.

In the New York Times article “Fury Reveals Deep Rifts Near ‘Happiest Place on Earth,’” Jennifer Medina details the historic and growing divides along ethnic and class lines in Anaheim, CA.  The story also features data and maps from Social Explorer.

There have always been divides in this city south of Los Angeles, where Disneyland and professional hockey and baseball teams bring in millions of visitors each year. The money generated by the resort area makes up roughly a third of the city’s annual income. But few visitors ever see the poor neighborhoods just beyond Disneyland Drive.

While most of the city’s population of nearly 350,000 lives on the west side of the bowtie-shaped city, in recent decades a wealthy enclave known as Anaheim Hills has flourished to the east. The hills are about 15 miles away from downtown, more like a separate town than a part of this mostly working-class and largely Latino city. There, household income is roughly twice as much as in the flatlands, as the rest of the city is known…

Like much of northern Orange County, Anaheim has changed drastically in the years since Disneyland opened in 1955. It grew rapidly through the 1990s, and as the Latino population nearly doubled, it became one of the largest cities in the state. Today, the city is more than half Latino…

In those neighborhoods, the mostly Latino residents have grappled with unemployment, poverty, crime and gangs for years. Now, suddenly, those longstanding problems are being thrust into wider view.

Click here for the full article.

Amidst the usual partisan wranglings in congress, a movement has emerged to end the American Community Survey, the annual detailed data collected by the Census Bureau from a sample of households across the nation.

In his latest Demographics column for the Gotham Gazette “The Attempt to Kill the ACS: Its Implications for New York City,” Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge details this proposal and what it could mean for policy makers, researchers, and the public.

Today, the American Community Survey is used across the country by researchers, businesses and policymakers. Almost anything that a person would want to know about the population of the U.S. – from income to disability – can be found from a review of the data.

For New York City or, for that matter, any community across the country, the ACS is a critical tool for understanding demographic change down to the neighborhood level.

Given its importance, then, it might come as a bit of a surprise that the Republican majority in Congress wants to get rid of the ACS – and has even put forward an amendment to do so – arguing that it represents an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.

Beveridge questions the validity of the privacy concerns, discusses the legal mandates behind the survey, and describes a few of its many uses.  He goes on to defend the ACS:

But forget about knowing all that if policymakers do away with the ACS.  Politicians and researchers will know a whole lot less about who resides in the country, how they are faring and how the country is changing.

This may be the way the GOP House Majority would prefer it – so that politicians and commentators can make their appeals based upon opinion with no chance of contradiction or fact-checking.  Of course, they point to cost-saving to tax payers and its supposed impact on privacy.

But the ACS’s demise will deprive the city and the nation of a major source of important information that researchers have relied on for decades.

It would be like asking astronomers to do astronomy without telescopes and physicians and biologists to work without microscopes.

Click here to read the full article.

New York City is more crowded than ever according to newly reported Census data.  In “New York Led Country in Population Growth Since 2010 Census,” Sam Roberts details the big apple’s dominance for the New York Times.

An analysis of the latest reported population changes since the April 2010 census found that New York City grew at twice as fast a rate as the rest of the metropolitan area and faster than the city’s annual growth since 2000, because of higher birthrates among immigrants, a greater influx of newcomers and the recession…

The 15-month population increase in the city amounted to a third of the city’s entire growth from 2000 to 2010, according to the census.

He cites data and analysis from Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge:

“New York metro gained .6 percent, but, digging deeper, New York City’s gain of 0.9 means the city is now growing faster than its surrounding region,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York who analyzed census data.

Read the full article here.

They invade homes every summer, and their numbers are growing.  They are young adults returning home to live with their parents.  In the New York Times article “Offspring Who Cling to the Nest,” Gina Bellafante observes specimens from this species up close, and cites data from Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge.

We are now at the end of the season when college graduates move out of their dorms and on to their new lives. But it seems as if many of them end up back in their old rooms at home. To support that observation, the past week saw the release of new census data pointing to the toll the recession has taken on certain kinds of domestic arrangements. Across the country, from 2007 to 2010, the number of adult children living with their parents increased by 1.2 million. Despite constrictions of space, and despite the sense that the economy has rebounded more successfully here than it has in many other parts of the country, the trend is very much in evidence in New York. According to an analysis of census data by the Queens College sociologist Andrew A. Beveridge last week, 45 percent of the city’s 22- to 24-year-olds live at home. Among those ages 22 to 39, nearly a quarter — 22 percent — do. These numbers have increased since 2000 and went up more during the recession.

With fewer jobs, more unpaid internships, and the expense of living in New York City, the trend continues to rise.  Fortunately, according to a Pew Research Center Study on the Boomerang Generation, most of them get along–with 68 percent of respondents between 18 and 34 who live with their parents are “very satisfied” with their family life.

Beveridge is well versed in this trend, both through data analysis and a very local data point who returned to his own nest for a time.

Click here to read the full article.

Social Explorer and Oxford University Press took a trip through the American West 200 years ago.  See the Oxford University blog post here, also available on Oxford’s website.

On this day in 1804, two Virginian explorers set out on a journey west in what would become the legendary Lewis and Clark Expedition. And in their footsteps, we can follow America’s expansion west.

Back in 1800 before the epic trip, the US population was 5.3 million. Ten years later, it increased to 7.2 million — a 36 percent increase. As shown in the following maps, this growth continued, and started moving west, adding territories and states along the way.

US Growth the First 100 Years After Lewis and Clark Explored

Click for an interactive slideshow.

The population of the northeast region — once the focal point of the US — shrank by 1.1 percent from 2000 to 2010. The Midwest also saw a decline in population (1.2 percent). Meanwhile, the South and the West grew, 1.5 percent and 0.8 percent respectively.

Twenty years after the Rodney King beating and Los Angeles riots, the city demographics have changed significantly.  In the New York Times article “In Years Since the Riots, a Changed Complexion in South Central,” Jennifer Medina examines this shift.  The article and accompanying maps include Social Explorer data.

When racially charged riots blazed here two decades ago, South Central became a national symbol of rage in a poor black neighborhood.

But the population of the area has changed significantly in the time since the acquittal of white police officers in the Rodney King beating inflamed racial tensions across this city.

Today, immigrants from Mexico and Central America live on blocks that generations ago were the only places African-Americans could live. In the former center of black culture in Los Angeles, Spanish is often the only language heard on the streets…

In the 1990s, black residents made up roughly half the population in South Central. Today, Latinos account for about two-thirds of the residents in what is now called South Los Angeles — “Central” was officially scrubbed from the neighborhood’s name by the City Council in 2003. In the 20-some square miles that make up the area, stretching southwest of downtown from the Santa Monica Freeway to the Century Freeway and as far west as Inglewood, there are 80,000 fewer blacks than there were in 1990.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

In the New York Times article “One Hundred Years of Staying Put,” Benjamin Weiser and Noah Rosenberg tell the tale of Lillian Jacobs, a woman who has lived on the same Upper East Side block for over 100 years.  The story cites Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge on the topics of demographics and longtime locals:

Ms. Jacobs is already a demographic rarity: she was one of 2,126 city residents 100 and over recorded in the 2010 census. But even though very few New Yorkers can claim a century spent in essentially one place, the notion of maintaining roots on a street is not entirely uncommon, said Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist.

A decade ago, Professor Beveridge recalled, one of his students interviewed a man of about 100 who had lived his entire life in the same house in Richmond Hill, Queens.

Click here to read the rest of the article.