The US Census Bureau thread

[ChiSoxRox]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Hmm. My gut says that a lot of counties in the Great Lakes should score better than Maricopa, AZ? Wayne County, MI, Hennepin, MN, Cuyahoga, OH, and Milwaukee?

Wayne: 9.41 billion
Hennepin: 7.54
Milwaukee: 7.03
Cuyahoga: 6.16

"Intensity" may be a bad name. I wanted something shorter than the true name of "sum of census tract population-density products." This value is the numerator for the weighted density ratio. I.e. it's weighted density times the population again.

Maricopa has a very similar weighted density to that group, so its huge population takes over. Maricopa and say Wayne are a good example of different density curves (the tighter bunch of Maricopa tracts and the hard cut off to desert against the lower density suburban tail of Wayne) giving very similar weighted density values.

Weighted densities:
Milwaukee: 7,483 ppsm
Hennepin: 5,882
Wayne: 5,244
Maricopa: 5,050
Cuyahoga: 4,870

I may be a level too deep into the math here. Weighted density itself is a better picture, but I find it remarkable just how far ahead the numerator for NYC is.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by ChiSoxRox

Wayne: 9.41 billion
Hennepin: 7.54
Milwaukee: 7.03
Cuyahoga: 6.16

"Intensity" may be a bad name. I wanted something shorter than the true name of "sum of census tract population-density products." This value is the numerator for the weighted density ratio. I.e. it's weighted density times the population again.

Maricopa has a very similar weighted density to that group, so its huge population takes over. Maricopa and say Wayne are a good example of different density curves (the tighter bunch of Maricopa tracts and the hard cut off to desert against the lower density suburban tail of Wayne) giving very similar weighted density values.

Weighted densities:
Milwaukee: 7,483 ppsm
Hennepin: 5,882
Wayne: 5,244
Maricopa: 5,050
Cuyahoga: 4,870

Got it.

[ChiSoxRox]

Ah, I see the physical significance of my value. It's the share of the national weighted density that is attributable to each county.

Manhattan: 9.5%
Brooklyn: 8.6%
Los Angeles: 6.9%
Queens: 5.8%
Bronx: 5.6%
Cook, IL: 3.8%
Philadelphia: 1.83%
Miami-Dade: 1.67%
San Francisco: 1.53%

So if you wanted to gather 1000 Americans but have them experience the same average density as the full country - 95 from Manhattan, 15 from San Francisco, and so on.

Yeah, weighted density is both easier to understand and probably more relevant overall.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by ChiSoxRox

So if you wanted to gather 1000 Americans but have them experience the same average density as the full country - 95 from Manhattan, 15 from San Francisco, and so on.

wow, so nearly 300 of those 1,000 americans would be new yorkers!

alas, i remain unconvinced that NYC is a density outlier within the nation, is there a way to reprocess the data another half dozen times so that i can hopefully understand.




just messing with you, your stats/data analysis contributions to this thread are always extremely appreciated.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by ChiSoxRox

Maricopa has a very similar weighted density to that group, so its huge population takes over. Maricopa and say Wayne are a good example of different density curves (the tighter bunch of Maricopa tracts and the hard cut off to desert against the lower density suburban tail of Wayne) giving very similar weighted density values.

I think to measure intensity you can either use a cutoff (as we have been), measure density percentiles (e.g. 25, 50, 75) or weight by density squared.

[ChiSoxRox]

I've broken down Wayne County, Michigan by the weighted density of its divisions akin to the Cook County post.

Wayne County is intriguing for a couple of reasons:

1) As this thread has discussed before, the major density node is not the central city, but rather Hamtramck, nearly tripling Detroit's weighted density. Detroit seems to be unique in the country for having a suburb be more than twice the weighted density of the core city.

2) The southwest corner of the county remains truly rural. Sumpter Township still has open farm fields, in a county anchoring a 4M+ metro.



Hamtramck...........16,904.7 ppsm (!)
Dearborn...........8,164.0
Lincoln Park...........7,062.8
Harper Woods...........6,518.2
Detroit...........6,213.4
Dearborn Heights...........5,843.3
River Rouge...........5,652.4
Grosse Pointe Woods...........5,631.1
Grosse Pointe Park...........5,589.9
Wyandotte...........5,575.5
Grosse Pointe...........5,425.5
Ecorse...........5,415.6
Allen Park...........5,185.4
Melvindale...........5,109.7
Southgate...........4,905.8
Garden City...........4,794.7
Redford Twp...........4,720.5
Westland...........4,660.0
Grosse Pointe Farms...........4,445.4
Inkster...........4,392.4
Plymouth...........4,376.9
Taylor...........3,915.2
Highland Park...........3,868.7
Wayne...........3,779.9
Trenton...........3,680.8
Woodhaven...........3,632.2
Belleville...........3,539.8
Canton Twp...........3,521.0
Livonia...........3,453.2
Riverview...........3,348.8
Northville (part)...........2,683.7
Grosse Pointe Shores...........2,670.3
Northville Twp...........2,291.3
Brownstown Twp...........2,155.8
Plymouth Twp...........2,152.7
Flat Rock...........2,111.6
Van Buren Twp...........1,639.2
Gibraltar...........1,355.4
Grosse Isle Twp...........1,303.9
Rockwood...........1,284.8
Romulus...........1,191.3
Huron Twp............557.9
Sumpter Twp...........165.4

[iheartthed]

^I wouldn't call Hamtramck a suburb. Also, I'm not sure that Detroit is an outlier there, since other metros with denser places than the core city (even NYC).

[Crawford]

Hamtramck is really a working class Detroit neighborhood that was never vacated due to political boundaries and a legacy of enclavism/racism.

[subterranean]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Hamtramck is really a working class Detroit neighborhood that was never vacated due to political boundaries and a legacy of enclavism/racism.

Source

[ChiSoxRox]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

^I wouldn't call Hamtramck a suburb. Also, I'm not sure that Detroit is an outlier there, since other metros with denser places than the core city (even NYC).

Yeah, I was using suburb as short hand for "not the core city limits," although Hamtramck was definitely one of the most urban parts of Metro Detroit even before the post-war spiral.


Although my second point seems to stand, since I am using weighted population density to find the peaks, not simple density. By WPD, NYC is 65k ppsm, and none of the Hudson County municipalities surpass that WPD.

The runner-up in WPD gap seems to be Cleveland (6,524 ppsm), where the weighted densest municipality is Lakewood (10,621), but that's a much smaller gap than Hamtramck-Detroit.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Hamtramck is really a working class Detroit neighborhood that was never vacated due to political boundaries and a legacy of enclavism/racism.

Right, Hamtramck is really just a city neighborhood that somehow managed to avoid annexation into Detroit. And it's ability to resist being absorbed into the city probably played a pretty big role in it staying much more intact than surrounding neighborhoods.

It's really more akin to a Community Area in Chicago than what we typically think of as burbs in this country. In fact a place like Hamtramck lines up fairly closely to a place like Avondale in Chicago. they're both around 2 square miles and roughly 4 - 6 miles out from downtown, and they both were once heavily polish back in the day.

Speaking of which, does Detroit have officially designated community areas with hard and fixed boundaries that break the city up into discreet units that can be tracked through time like chicago's? I've looked for Detroit neighborhood maps, but everything I've found seems to have fairly loose and/or inconsistent neighborhood boundaries and designations.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by subterranean

Source

Source what?

Hamtramck is essentially the only remaining intact pre-white flight working class neighborhood. It survived due to racism/enclavism, walled in by freeways and railroad tracks, and by eviscerating the one black neighborhood.

If you want to know what Detroit physically looked like pre-1970, just visit Hamtramck.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Right, Hamtramck is really just a city neighborhood that somehow managed to avoid annexation into Detroit. And it's ability to resist being absorbed into the city probably played a pretty big role in it staying much more intact than surrounding neighborhoods.

It's really more akin to a Community Area in Chicago than what we typically think of as burbs in this country. In fact a place like Hamtramck lines up fairly closely to a place like Avondale in Chicago. they're both around 2 square miles and roughly 4 - 6 miles out from downtown, and they both were once heavily polish back in the day.

Speaking of which, does Detroit have officially designated community areas with hard and fixed boundaries that break the city up into discreet units that can be tracked through time like chicago's? I've looked for Detroit neighborhood maps, but everything I've found seems to have fairly loose and/or inconsistent neighborhood boundaries and designations.

No, not really. AFAIK, Detroit never really developed such a granular level of organization. The most granular level of political representation that Detroit gets to are its city council districts, which are fairly large in area and typically cover many distinct neighborhoods.

[Steely Dan]

^ Do Detroit's city council districts have fixed boundaries, or are they redrawn after each census as population shifts?

Because Hamtramck has always been its own separate deal, it's very easy to go back and track changes over time there. I was curious to know if Detroit had similar such official sub units in the 1 - 4 square mile range for the city that would also make it fairly straightforward to track changes through time at a level not quite as granular as census tracts.

In chicago's case, the 77 officially designated Community Areas don't really serve in a political capacity (other than for local chamber of commerce and other community group purposes). Political power comes from the 50 city aldermen and the 50 city wards (way too many, but that's another issue altogether), which are completely divorced from the community area boundaries and are entirely based on having roughly equal population sizes, and thus they have to get redrawn after every census as population shifts around. Many of them are gerrymandered to hell and back and they are mostly useless as a designation to divide the city up into discreet and consistent sub-areas.

With only a handful of exceptions, the community area boundaries have been more or less set in stone for over a century now, so they're actually a really good tool to have at a more granular level to track neighborhood changes over time.

[subterranean]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Source what?

Hamtramck is essentially the only remaining intact pre-white flight working class neighborhood. It survived due to racism/enclavism, walled in by freeways and railroad tracks, and by eviscerating the one black neighborhood.

If you want to know what Detroit physically looked like pre-1970, just visit Hamtramck.

I’m from the area and don’t think this. It’s always been more of an ethnic enclave, albeit always changing, which has not been the case with most neighborhoods in Detroit pre-1970s. You are generalizing heavily about a racist past that largely didn’t exist. What Hamtramck really represents well are the inherently weak annexation powers in Michigan.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

^ Do Detroit's city council districts have fixed boundaries, or are they redrawn after each census as population shifts?

Because Hamtramck has always been its own separate deal, it's very easy to go back and track changes over time there. I was curious to know if Detroit had similar such official sub units in the 1 - 4 square mile range for the city that would also make it fairly straightforward to track changes through time at a level not quite as granular as census tracts.

In chicago's case, the 77 officially designated Community Areas don't really serve in a political capacity (other than for local chamber of commerce and other community group purposes). Political power comes from the 50 city aldermen and the 50 city wards (way too many, but that's another issue altogether), which are completely divorced from the community area boundaries and are entirely based on having roughly equal population sizes, and thus they have to get redrawn after every census as population shifts around. Many of them are gerrymandered to hell and back and they are mostly useless as a designation to divide the city up into discreet and consistent sub-areas.

With only a handful of exceptions, the community area boundaries have been more or less set in stone for over a century now, so they're actually a really good tool to have at a more granular level to track neighborhood changes over time.

The district lines have changed recently, so they aren't the same as in they were pre-1970s.

[subterranean]

This is an excellent paper on Hamtramck’s history:

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitst...E50?sequence=4

Although it is disingenuous to say racism didn’t exist (all cities during this time exhibited racist laws and activities--it's engrained in American history), it didn’t exist more in Hamtramck than anywhere else in the county, and it’s certainly not enough to explain how Hamtramck and Highland Park diverged so dramatically in their histories especially given how dramatically anti-black HP was. Much more importantly were the strong ethnic Polish ties, centered around Catholicism, and the parochial school system.

This discussion of Hamtramck’s history and development up to this point has been framed in, admittedly, misleading terms. Hamtramck’s divergence has been compared to Detroit using categories of race: Black and white. The reality is that Hamtramck diverged from its surrounding city long before the White Flight of the postwar era. Hamtramck was from its very formation a Polish immigrant community, a characteristic associated with the city to this day. Around the time of incorporation, Hamtramck was one third foreign born Polish immigrants.8 Ten years later, Polish foreign stock (the foreign born and their native born children) in the city comprised two thirds of the population.9 By 1940, 81% of Hamtramck’s population identified themselves as having Polish ancestry.10 This legacy of Polish descent would have important ramifications for the postwar development of the city.
...
Detroit’s population lacked this ubiquitous ethnic component. While there was a significant immigrant population and even some immigrant communities in Detroit, this was by no means the defining characteristic that it was in Hamtramck. Detroit’s 1920 population was 29% foreign born white, but only 5.7% of the city’s population was a foreign born Polish immigrant.11 It seems apparent that in Detroit many individual communities had identities particularly defined by race rather than ethnicity. The prolonged battles surrounding integration illustrate that residents in these neighborhoods were generally less cognizant of ethnic ties. Instead they saw ‘whiteness’ as the distinguishing factor and reacted defensively to those who contradicted this identity. Ultimately, it would seem that the attachments to these communities were somehow weaker than what existed in Hamtramck.
...
While the example of Detroit communities provide a comparison point with Hamtramck, the city of Highland Park is even more useful in this respect. Highland Park is a second separately incorporated city within Detroit approximately the same size as Hamtramck. At the time of Hamtramck’s incorporation in 1921 and thereafter, the two cities were comparable in almost all economic and social aspects. The only significant difference between the two cities is that Hamtramck contained the aforementioned preponderance of Polish residents whereas Highland Park lacked any significant presence of this or any other white ethnic demographic.12 Consequently, as Figure 2 illustrates below, Highland Park’s postwar development mirrored the trends observed in Detroit.
...
Any attempt at assessing Hamtramck’s postwar divergence from Detroit also requires a thorough evaluation of the history of Blacks in Hamtramck. Two tales emerge from the narrative of Hamtramck’s Black population. One is the general assertion made by Hamtramckans both Black and white that racial harmony had characterized the city from its beginning. The other story arises from the substantial body of evidence, not the least of which is the federal court conviction, that there had been much discrimination and segregation throughout Hamtramck’s history. As with the court decision, the subject of Hamtramck’s postwar race relations comes to a stalemate with two contradictory positions emerging. This situation is even more perplexing because there are multiple instances of Black residents touting Hamtramck’s racial unity when they were the very ones alleged to be the victims of the city’s discrimination.
...
When Hamtramck residents said that Blacks have always had a place in Hamtramck, they were speaking the truth. The Michigan State Census of 1904 shows a village population of 1,559, with 24 of these being “Negro.”193 Although this was by no means an impressive percentage of the population, these numbers show that there was a Black population in Hamtramck from the very beginning. Even though they were a smaller fraction of the population, Black residents were by no means insignificant in everyday Hamtramck life. There were several Black policemen to serve the village in these years.194 The first Black church was established in 1907, the existence of which attracted other Black families to the city who wished to belong to such a place of worship.195
...
Hamtramck’s Black residents were also politically involved in the early formative years of the city. One Black resident, Walter Thompson, was elected constable in 1920 and another, Ordine Tolliver, served on the village council just prior to incorporation.196 When it came time to elect the first City Council in 1922, Blacks and Poles joined forces to form a political bloc for their mutual benefit. In the early years of Hamtramck Village and Township, other ethnic groups traditionally dominated politics, primarily Germans but also Irish and Jewish residents. Poles and Blacks banded together and Dr. James L. Henderson, a Black Hamtramckan, was elected to this first Council.197 Though this bloc had largely disbanded by the 1924 election (Polish immigrants were rapidly becoming an overwhelming majority in the city while the old power holders were moving out), there were a couple of Black candidates for city council in the 1930s and a few Black constables in these early years.198
...
In light of this political involvement, there does seem to have been relative racial harmony in Hamtramck in the pre-World War II era. Anecdotes abound of how African American residents rented out space in their homes to Polish immigrants and how there were many Black residents who were fluent in Polish.199 William Brooks recalled his experience as a Black youth in Hamtramck in an oral history, telling of a time he got in trouble with his mother for using the Polish phrase for ‘go to Hell.’200 He also spoke of the great leveling effect that the Great Depression had on Hamtramck residents, saying that in 1932 at the peak of the Depression “you couldn’t tell the difference [between Blacks and whites] as far as living” because everyone was poor. One enabling factor that allowed this perceived equality in status to exist in the city was the lack of segregation in Hamtramck for the most part, especially for this period in American history. As Hamtramck historian Greg Kowalski observed, “[Polish and Black residents] shared space at a time when most of the rest of the country was segregated. Black and white children played together and went to school together.”201
...
Not only did Hamtramck lack the racial tensions of the South, it did not experience the racial problems of the city that surrounds it. When Detroit erupted in riots that were primarily racial in motivation in 1943, Hamtramck residents of both races lived in peace and the city itself saw no incidents.203 As we saw in Chapter 3, the same can be said (and was repeatedly said) about the race riots of 1967. Further evidence for the equal status enjoyed by Hamtramck Blacks is that “there was civil rights apathy in Hamtramck because blacks already had what others were fighting for.”204 Apparently Black residents were not compelled to fight for civil rights to the degree that other African Americans who were faced with more consistent discrimination were.

[iheartthed]

^Highland Park was in better shape than Hamtramck into the 1990s. Hamtramck was saved by an influx of immigration from the Middle East in the 1990s. Otherwise, it was on the same path as HP, and probably even a few years ahead of it.

[Steely Dan]

population in 1930 (peak for both):

Highland Park: 52,959
Hamtramck: 56,268


population in 1990: (Hamtramck's low)

Highland Park: 20,121 (-62.0%)
Hamtramck: 18,372 (-67.3%)


population in 2020:

Highland Park: 8,977 (-55.4%)
Hamtramck: 28,433 (+54.8%)


The radical divergence of their two fortunes over the past 3 decade astounds me.

[Crawford]

Highland Park was much wealthier than Hamtramck. You still see it in the housing/building stock today. It was an upper middle class town.

Highland Park was WASP and Jewish managerial class prior to white flight, and unlike Hamtramck, didn't really fight the racial changes. It had a progressive reputation, like heavily Jewish neighboring Detroit neighborhoods like Bagley and Dexter Davison. In 2021 nomenclature, 1960-era Highland Park was full of metropolitan elites, while 1960-era Hamtramck was full of working class white ethnics. Hamtramck was Canarsie to Highland Park's Forest Hills.

Hamtramck, as well as nearby East Side Detroit neighborhoods, were known as extremely hostile to any black presence. Black bus riders even avoided routes through town. The SW corner of Hamtramck was a black neighborhood, and the city used postwar urban renewal money to level the neighborhood. There were more blacks at Hamtramck High in 1940 than in 1980.

To be fair, it was easier to be socially progressive when you could afford to move to the suburbs. Highland Park families and institutions just relocated to Oakland County. Hamtramck was (and is) lower working class and the residents probably felt they had no choice but to fight to preserve their world.