Segregation in the USA

Last week the New York Times looked at residential segregation in New York City. In a story, entitled Segregation Issues Complicates de Blasio's Housing Push, the Times reports on the number of New York neighborhoods where a particular ethnic group makes up more than 75% of the population.

The newspaper used four static maps to illustrate the story. The four maps show New York neighborhoods where Whites, Blacks, Hispanic or Asian citizens make up 75% or more of the local population.

This CartoDB interactive map uses a similar methodology to that used by the NYT to look at racial diversity in every census tract in the USA. The Diversity Map uses data from the US census to visualize the probability that two people picked at random in a tract will be of the same ethnicity.

The lighter colors on the map show tracts with the highest probability that two people would be of the same ethnicity and the darker colors indicate that there is less of a probability. Therefore the darker colored areas on the map show where there is the most ethnic diversity.