Racial Geography

In order to achieve a prosperous community in which all residents can participate fully, high levels of segregation in communities should be reduced. Although complete desegregation is not necessarily a desirable outcome due to the destruction of social capital built from within communities, fostering cultural exchange and horizontal relationships will yield greater economic and social prosperity, and ultimately stronger communities.

While there are many facets of diversity that one could study when considering segregation, race is most commonly associated with the practice of segregation. The present effects of a history of segregation across geographic and racial lines damage a community’s quality of life and stunt the development of community-wide prosperity and cultural exchange.

Peer City Perspective

Louisville currently ranks 8th among its peers in the index of dissimilarity when considering white and non-white residents. The index of dissimilarity can be interpreted as the percentage of residents in a given city that would be required to move to a new census tract in order to achieve the citywide ratio of white to non-white residents in each census tract, creating greater opportunity for cross-cultural exchange and horizontal relationship building. Higher index values indicate higher levels of segregation.

Louisville ranks among the middle of its peer group according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers, cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red are a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.

Where are Minority Residents Concentrated?

Louisville’s minority residents are highly concentrated in the West End and in the Buechel neighborhoods. The percentage of white residents is as low as 0.3% in one tract of Algonquin. The St. Matthews and Southeast Louisville neighborhoods have the highest percentages of white residents.

Scroll over the map to see values for each census tract. Zoom in to see street names that form the boundaries of each tract.

Trends Over Time

The Index of dissimilarity has decreased slowly from 2009 to 2015 in Louisville, suggesting that the city has experienced low-rates of integration since 2009. Louisville has consistently had a lower index score than the average of its peers.

Continue Exploring with Related Data

Food Deserts

Social Associations

Unemployment

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.