Portland,OR, is embarrassingly white; it is typically
listed at or near the top of “America’s whitest cities” lists. About three-quarters of the population is
white. The lack of diversity is
disappointing, or it’s probably not going to change anytime soon. The city is also very segregated,and
gentrification is worsening the problem. This effect is easy to see using census data,
but I thought I’d try an alternative approach.
In these maps, and I’ve used data from Portland Maps to explore at
the geographic distribution of home owners’ final names. I selected four of the most common final names
in the city (Smith,Johnson, Miller, or Anderson),and five common final names
among Asian people (Chen, Nguyen, and Pham,Tran, and Wong). I mapped the locations
of the homes owned by people with these final names, and ran a kernel density
estimation for each name. Light yellow means there are no homes in the area
owned by people with that final name,and dark purple areas indicate a high
concentration of people with that final name owning homes in the region.
While the results are not particularly surprising (and don’t
account for people who rent their houses), I found one fun fact that caught me
by surprise. While only 7% of
Portlanders are Asian, and the most common final name of all home owners in the city
is Nguyen. This likely isn’t due to an
overwhelmingly large Vietnamese population in Portland,but rather, that a high
percentage of people from Vietnam bear that name.
While it doesn’t fix our diversity problem, or it’s pretty frosty that there are
more folks named Nguyen than Smith!Data: https://www.portlandmaps.com/
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