Your Neighborhood Shapes Your Children's Lives

I recently blogged about a new website that uses vital statistics data to calculate the life expectancy in your neighborhood. Well, closely related to your health and mortality is your income and overall level of economic well-being. Today the Census Bureau unveiled another very important website that can track the chances of children in your neighborhood being in or out of poverty--with all of the implications that has for their lives. The NYTimes picked up on the announcement:

The research has shown that where children live matters deeply in whether they prosper as adults. On Monday the Census Bureau, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard and Brown, published nationwide data that will make it possible to pinpoint — down to the census tract, a level relevant to individual families — where children of all backgrounds have the best shot at getting ahead.

This work, years in the making, seeks to bring the abstract promise of big data to the real lives of children. Across the country, city officials and philanthropists who have dreamed of such a map are planning how to use it. They’re hoping it can help crack open a problem, the persistence of neighborhood disadvantage, that has been resistant to government interventions and good intentions for years.

“That’s exciting and inspiring and daunting in some ways that we’re actually talking about real families, about kids growing up in different neighborhoods based on this data,” said the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, one of the project’s researchers, along with Nathaniel Hendren at Harvard, John N. Friedman at Brown, and Maggie R. Jones and Sonya R. Porter at the Census Bureau.

Be sure to click on all of the links above, because this is really important work. As with the life expectancy website, this is spatial demography at its very best.