Another core part of our research focused on determining how the economic racial disparities of Chicago compare to other cities of similar size and ethnic diversity. Our goal was to identify which cities had significantly lower levels of inequality than Chicago, and then ideally isolate which unique policies they had adopted to successfully increase equity across their communities. 

The three cities we compared to Chicago were New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle, as they were all large, diverse urban areas with relatively liberal political climates. For each city, we examined the distribution of unemployment rates across zip codes that were majority white and contrasted them with zip codes that were majority black (the threshold for ‘majority’ being over 50% of that zip code’s population). 

The data showed that Chicago had the largest disparities between majority Black and White zip codes by far - the mean unemployment rate for majority Black zip codes was over 18.17%, while majority white zip codes was just over 6%, and the city mean was 9.4%. Comparatively, the next largest mean difference was in New York, with a 12.4% mean unemployment rate for majority Black zip codes and a 6.6% mean unemployment rate for majority White zip codes. It’s important to note that not only did Chicago have the largest mean unemployment rate for majority Black zip codes out of the all the cities we looked, but it also had the largest difference between majority black and majority White zip codes by a margin of almost 100%. The most surprising result was Seattle, which didn't’ have any zip codes that had a Black population over 50%, suggesting that they have done a better job at mitigating the lingering effects of segregation given their large Black population. Regardless, the data suggests that Chicago could use any of these three cities to model their policies on inequality reduction.