A Look at Philadelphia

How Poverty, Education, and Work-force can help understand the health of a Great City, a series.

Philadelphia is a diverse city with 1.59 million inhabitants covering 142.7 square miles. Of these 1.59 million inhabitants, approximately 500,000 of them live in poverty. Today, a quick look at the dynamics of poverty within Philadelphia will be investigated by utilizing R and maps. Poverty will be explored at the zip-code level as per the 2010 Census. Here, several issues will be investigated including Poverty, Education, and Work-force throughout Philadelphia to gain a snap-shot of the city’s health. For all, the investigation will utilize zip-code centric color-coded maps.

Here, raw counts of poverty, per-capita counts of poverty, disparity-counts of poverty, and comparison between the disparity of the Black and Hispanic communities are looked at.

Basic Counts of Poverty

A quick look at the total number of persons in poverty gives us:

Figure 1: Raw counts of Poverty per Zip Code. Note: Zips 19113 and 19112 are industrial and do not contain any residential areas, and thus are not included in analysis.

Here it is evident that the largest population of those in poverty is centered in “North Philadelphia” (zips: 19140, 19133, 19134, 19120, 19111, 19149, 19124) and in the “South West” (zips: 19139, 19143, 19131). Other areas have moderate poverty levels with fewer persons in poverty towards “Center City” (zips: 19102, 19103, 19109, 19107, 19123, 19130).

Although counts are helpful, they are not incredibly insightful without the back-drop of demographics or overall populations within each zip code. First, demographic-level poverty data will be mapped to explore any demographically-specific patterns in poverty.

Poverty of White Persons

Below is the map of the raw counts of poverty per zip code for White Persons:

Figure 2: Raw counts of White Persons in Poverty per Zip Code throughout Philadelphia. Note: Zip Codes19113 and 19112 have too few data points for meaningful interpretation.

It is apparent that as one moves more north-east in Philadelphia, the raw poverty counts of White Persons increases. As well, in “South Philadelphia,” a traditionally Italian-heritage area (zips: 19148, 19147, 19145), there is an increase in White Person poverty counts as well. West, South West, and…