Demographics and Data

We can see in these maps how family income has increased along the river and in most of Greater Downtown. Of further interest is the visible north-western march of wealth from Downtown to Midtown. Finally, we can see how Grandmont-Rosedale, despite having regressed dramatically since 2011, still positively stands out from the rest of Detroit as recently as 2016.

Note: The household income values in the 2011 and 2016 maps are judged exclusively on how much they do or do not stand apart from the median household income. The 2016 data has fewer categories, which could give an impression of both lower and higher incomes where they might not necessarily be so. Note that the Cass Park neighborhood in the Arena District (top-left of the 3 arena district census tracts) appears to have stronger household income in 2016 than 2011, but the change map reveals that it has not improved to the extent that the other parts of the Arena District have.

On the whole, there are fewer areas experiencing dramatic shifts in per-capita income than there are for households. What is dramatic is the amount of money pouring into downtown over the past decade. The richest census tract in downtown raced ahead of the other wealthy tracts by 2016. Of further note is how Cass Park has also seen its per capita income increase, despite stagnation in household income over the same timespan.

Note: Once again, the yearly estimates, being based around the mean per capita income of Detroit, are more for finding the areas that stand out.

Income Inequality, or how local wealth is distributed, is a contentious thing to measure, with many competing means of charting how severe the gap is between the rich and the poor. In these maps, the GINI coefficient is used. A value of 0 would mean total equality, where each individual has the same income, and a value of 1 would mean that one person had all the income of a set population.

Interestingly, much of Greater Downtown has seen a narrowing of the haves and the have-nots, except in the Arena District, where some of the worst income inequality is found in Detroit, or even nationwide, can be found.

Cass Park, already quite inequitable in 2011, grew to have a worse divide than any nation's average score worldwide. It is likely that the increase in per-capita income there was from an influx of very wealthy people, and that the poor there saw little, if any relief.

The lack of poverty relief in Cass Park is confirmed when you look at the concentration of poverty in the area. Sociologists of all stripes generally agree that increased concentration of poverty is more or less uniformly-bad, with a host of negative effects that compound on each other as the poverty gets worse.

On that note, there are several areas in Detroit with poverty so widespread that it could reasonably be called extreme. Although the Arena District is full of poverty, and has been for some time, Cass Park is a standout. In 2011, it was one of those areas of soul-crushing, grinding destitution, and it has only gotten worse, one of the few areas of extreme poverty in 2011 to have substantially degraded in the half-decade since then.

On another note, we can see general trends of decreased poverty closer to city center, and increased poverty in much of Western Detroit.

Across the United States, it is not possible to disengage discussions of poverty and economic hardship from its ethnic and racial minorities. Although the black population of Southwestern Detroit had already made way for an influx of Hispanic/Latino populations before 2011, much of the rest of the city, especially outside Greater Downtown, was populated by a supermajority-black population. There are notably census tracts that measure as 100% black, but there are further movements of those people in the city.

One can observe trends of displacement of the black population that tend to intensify as one gets closer to the city center, and increased black percentages in Northeastern and West Detroit. That the black population of Cass Park has remained largely similar over the years may unfortunately be tied to its unabated hardship.

A general increase in the Hispanic/Latino population concentration in Southwestern Detroit has also been observed. While downtown has largely been unaffected either way by these developments, we can see in the poverty indices that the increased concentration of this relatively-new minority has also been correlated with troubling increases in poverty rates.