How Can You Measure Income Inequality? Count The Trees

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

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Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

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June 17, 2012

By Hattie Lee, Colorlines.com

Turns out there’s a direct correlation between the number of trees a neighborhood has and its monetary wealth —

Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood — Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood – 2009 estimated median household income: $22,166

and we can see how this dynamic plays out from space. Environmental journalist Tim De Chant mapped it all out for us on his blog, Per Square Mile, where he worked up a small project called “Income Inequality, As Seen From Space.”

De Chant took satellite images from Google Earth that compared two neighborhoods from selected cities to show income disparities.

Hyde Park is home to the University of Chicago. It has the highest number of Nobel Prize winners per square kilometer of any neighborhood on earth.

Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood – 2009 estimated median household income: $48,568 — Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood – 2009 estimated median household income: $48,568

In the 1950s it experienced “white flight” as a reaction to school desegregation. Today, largely as a result of the University of Chicago’s “urban renewal” (or “removal”) program, it is one of the most economically and social integrated neighborhoods in the US.

Woodlawn neighborhood, just to the south of Hyde Park, is known for its urban blight: high crime, vacant lots, and lack of businesses.

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