It is interesting that my little home town in northern WI has almost exactly the same score as my current city in southern CA… WI: 45 score with $54.5k income and 19% college grad; CA: 44 score with $57k income and 17% college grad.
Superficially, one would think that the WI town is much worse off, but I assume that is just a matter of spending priorities… edit (especially given the large difference in cost of living between the two: a $100k house in WI would be $500k+ in CA (despite the fact that the WI one comes with 10+ acres))
My problem exactly. Or, in my case, it’s that I live in a big urban area. Our neighborhood is currently a nice mix of lower and upper middle-class folks, but home and rental prices have ballooned in the past 5 years. So our median $54k income does not get you anywhere near what it would get us if we moved to Pittsburgh, to pick a random inexpensive city. Or your parents’ town. This map assumes too many “all things being equal” factors, making it only sort-of useful.
The overall theme, that people are getting richer and poorer and that 'aint good, is pretty clear and I’m completely in agreement.
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Socioeconomic isolation? Ina place where the highest court in the land redistributes schoolchildren using big yellow buses?
Oh - wait. Money means private schools. I mean, net spendable income means private schools. Oh. Right. So much for the redistribution = equality thingie.
Expected. OTOH, recently found out - using the 4-digit extension on my zip code will isolate my address to one of 2 floors in my condo building. That’s just…NSA-ish! It’s…stalker ambrosia! Criminal Caviar! Pervert Perfection! Direct Mail Delish! Our Tax Dollars At Work!
New Public Health Campaign Slogan - Use Five, Stay Alive. Use Nine, Your Ass is Mine.
Ditto, fellow Long Islander. My hometown is a 94. 80% of my high school class went to a 4 year college. And yet, by local standards my area was considered poor, and relatively undesirable. It’s absurd.
Also absurd, the weird geographical and political divisions Long Island uses, where counties, towns, villages, zip codes, school districts, neighborhood names, and so on have almost nothing to do with one another.
My eyes kind of bugged out when I saw Bridgeport as a SuperZip! I realize it’s because it’s the nearest city but I imagine the people in New Canaan are having vapors that their elite cluster is named after one of Connecticut’s least prestigious or affluent cities.
So I went and looked up our town/ZIP and I have to say it may point out flaws in the methodology here – we live in a Connecticut exurbia (outlying suburb, former farm country) that is home to a massive senior community – a fact that totally skews the average income for the town (as those hundred of households are living on retirement savings, etc.) As with any statistics, numbers alone can be very misleading. As was pointed out by bcsizemo, context is crucial.
Also on the Island. My town is a 95 and yes it is actually a pretty damn sweet place. However, my current pay is equal to what I made 15 years ago in the dot com boom in the Baltimore/DC area - only difference is my house cost half as much. Schools are very good here; probably better than what was there. Still the cost of living here is so high, even compared to the DC area which is also a high rent district, that’s I don’t feel much like I’m in a 95 personally. But there are some here who are, for sure.
Some of the things I don’t miss about the 90s… entitlement, corporate restaurants, home owner associations, and yoga wives hopelessly searching magazine racks for fulfillment.
Trying to find the lowest scores, I went to South Dakota and found some scores of 2, but it says the score goes all the way down to zero. Anyone know where zero score zip codes are?
Observations about growing up “middle middle” in a 93 town surrounded by 97s and 99s:
The work that high school kids got was like a setup for a 80s teen movie about class conflict. Landscaping help, working on Great Gatsby style estates. Caddy or dining room staff at country club where ambassadors, deposed dictators and really, really, really rich people hung out. “Helper” for a doddery rich senior.
My sister did the “helper” bit for a while. Part of her job was to keep the husband from drinking. Sister eventually gave it up; they guy was buying lots and lots of bottles of cough syrup.
I had thought maybe some of the more remote parts of Alaska where people go to escape civilization, but their map doesn’t appear to cover Alaska properly. You can look up by zip, but you can’t browse around the area.
Monument Valley in Utah is a 1. Still have not found a 0 though. Cameron, AZ is also a 1. Desert wastelands are generally good places to find economic desolation.
Edit: Found a 0: Church Rock, New Mexico
I did find a 1 in South Dakota, 57772, Porcupine, SD. I also found a 1 in Chicago.
Part of the issue is they only look at zip codes with more than 500 people, I think there would be more 0 and 1s in the Dakotas, Utah, AZ, NM, etc if that wasn’t a requirement.
my zipcode in Boston might be a borderline super zip if it weren’t for the two huge housing projects that contain about 10% of the neighborhood’s population. these extremes are very apparent when you’re in the local grocery store - the person in front of you is paying with food stamps and the person behind you is getting organic locally-sourced milk (that comes in glass bottles and costs $10 a pint) and wheat grass.
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That one’s legit, believe me.
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My town/census-designated place is a 14 while the town/unincorporated community next door is a 95. The high score of the latter seems to be due to the fact that is basically all farm area. One website claims a population of 86 for it, but others claim 600-1000 so I have no idea.
Relative income. Back in college I knew people who were amazed at how much cheaper it is here (yeah, I’m one of those losers who never left) than it was back hone in the Chicago 'burbs. But then we compared incomes.
The map of Southern Illinois is a little baffling to me, but mostly unsurprising. The score for towns surrounding Carbondale is higher than Carbondale. Meanwhile, Edwardsville is super high. The one that made me laugh a little was Makanda being 67. If you went into the actual little town (and SIU-C grads can confirm this) the actual town looks like what would happen if you picked up a town in eastern Kentucky and dropped it in Illinois. The higher-end houses by the golf course really skew the numbers. My old home town of Mt. Vernon shows 28 while Cobden shows 45. That one’s especially weird to me because my wife’s first teaching job was in Cobden, and honestly, despite being lifelong SI residents the same thing can be said about Cobden that I said about Makanda; an old railroad town in the Illinois Ozarks, it looks like Loretta Lynn could have been from there. And in all honestly, the number of parents who couldn’t afford things like coats and shoes for their kids was appalling. Sometimes parents couldn’t attend extra-curricular activities because they were in jail on meth charges.
Sadly, the least surprising one was East St. Louis, in the single digits.
I guess the thing to keep in mind is that it’s probably mostly accurate, but take results with a grain of salt, as with all such things. For example, on this other map on City-Data, they show the highest poverty rates in Carbondale, IL being on the college campus. As in, they show the poverty rate being higher for the SIU-C campus and surrounding area as being higher than East St. Louis. No. Oh, my, no, LOL http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Carbondale-Illinois.html
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Living in a 64, originally from a 39. I guess I’m moving up in the world.
77059 - 98%
Only kinda surprised.
Interesting look at rating how supportive some cities are of LGBT people: http://www.hrc.org/resources/entry/mei-2013-see-your-citys-score
I went back and looked around my old Savannah address. It’s abundantly clear how all the money is concentrated in the Paula Deen white gated communities out on the islands (97%, 6 figure average income), while the rest of the city has about a quarter of that.
I hate Savannah. Even if the historic district is pretty.
