Baltimore City, Maryland Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status

This map was created by using Mapbox. The neighborhood boundary file was obtained from the Mayor's Office of Information Technology (2017) via OpenBaltimore. Decennial demographic census information from 2010 along with the corresponding census tract shapefile were downloaded from the National Historical Geographic Information System.

Census tract data were reallocated to neighborhood boundaries using clip and join operations that assigned proportional values from each tract to their corresponding neighborhood units. Demographic values were then used to create the socioeconomic status of each neighborhood. Neighborhood socioeconomic status, which shows neighborhood distress or deprivation, was calculated using a distress index. Four indicators were used: low educational attainment (proportion of people at least 25 years old that have not graduated from high school), unemployment rate (proportion of unemployed adults aged 16 and over who are eligible to work), lone parenthood (proportion of sole parent families), and poverty (proportion of households with income below the federal poverty level). Distress index scores were calculated for each neighborhood by calculating the z-scores of each indicator and summing them together. The lowest composite score, which refers to the lowest level of socioeconomic distress, was -7.03 and the highest was 7.20.