The Chicago Hardship Index: An Introduction to Urban Inequity

Figures & data

Table 1 Schramm et al.’s (2018) guidelines can serve as a rubric for assessment of a social justice data table or visualization.

Criteria	Assessment question
(i) Accessible	Is the data presentation understandable to key stakeholders, including policymakers and community leaders?
(ii) Significant	Is the information relevant and accurate, and hence of enduring value to problem solvers and decisionmakers?
(iii) Equitable	Does the data gathered adequately encompass the needs of the vulnerable who are often overlooked?
(iv) Impartial	Is all the data in hand fairly represented, especially outliers which may call into question the status quo?
(v) Transparent	Are the underlying methods sufficiently clear that others can reproduce/confirm the results?

Table 2 Hardship Index data for 7 of the 77 Chicago community areas.

Community area	Hardship Index Score	Percent of crowded housing	Percent of households with income below poverty level	Unemployment rate for population Age 16 and over	Percent Age 25 and older with no high school diploma	Percent under Age 18 or over Age 64	Per capita income
1. Rogers Park	39.4	6.6	22.6	7.7	9.5	26.2	$25,874
25. Austin	53.1	4.4	28.1	15.4	13.6	38.6	$17,586
32. Loop	9.0	2.8	11.3	4.6	1.4	16.7	$77,722
41. Hyde Park	25.3	1.6	23.3	6.7	2.2	26.4	$41,719
42. Woodlawn	50.4	3.5	35.2	16.9	8.2	36.7	$19,117
68. Englewood	70.5	4.0	42.4	34.1	16.1	41.5	$12,777
77. Edgewater	28.9	4.1	15.8	6.2	7.3	25.2	$38,748
min	8.6	0.3	4.3	2.9	1.4	16.7	$9,601
max	84.2	13.6	58.8	35.6	28.8	47.6	$91,948
std	16.5	2.9	10.9	7.9	6.2	6.4	$17,303
mean	43.7	4.1	21.1	12.7	11.2	35.4	$29,016
median	45.7	3.3	20.2	10.8	9.7	37.5	$23,990

NOTE: The hardship index is the mean of the 6 raw indicator estimates (Columns 3–8) after each indicator has been normalized and then scaled from 0 to 100. A higher hardship index value indicates greater hardship. The 6 raw indicator estimates are complicated by time variation over 5-year periods (U.S. Census Bureau 2008) and geographical boundary approximation (Great Cities Institute 2019).

Table 3 Basic knowledge of the history of injustices in urban centers like Chicago should accompany data analysis of current hardship.

Historical injustices
Racism and Forced Migration: Jim Crow Laws (∼ 1865–1968) led to the Great Migration (∼ 1916–1970) of Black American families from the South to urban centers such as Chicago (Wilkerson 2010)
Urban Marginalization: Structural injustice was perpetuated in these urban centers in the form of redlining, blockbusting, slum land-lording, white-flight, disinvestment, restrictive covenants, and gentrification which marginalized many Black American families (Wilson 1987; Walls 2016)

NOTE: Video summaries by the referenced authors are included in the supplemental materials.

Fig. 1 Public domain redlining map from the late 1930s. Green=“Best,” Blue=“Still Desirable,” Yellow=“Definitely Declining,” Red=“Hazardous” (Nelson n.d.).

Fig. 2 A data visualization can effectively communicate the history of injustices in a Chicago community area such as Austin.

Fig. 3 2013-2017 hardship index data visualization for 3 of 77 Chicago community areas (Data source: Great Cities Institute (2019)).

Fig. 4 Geographic plot of Chicago’s 77 community areas with marker color (blue or red) indicating k-means bi-clustering based only on the 6 standardized economic hardship indicators. Affluent community areas such as the Loop (central business district), Near North Side (which includes the “Gold Coast”), and Hyde Park (site of the University of Chicago) appear in blue. Lower-income communities with a history of injustices, including Woodlawn, Englewood, and Austin, appear in red. Marker sizes are proportional to homicide counts, with actual numbers in parentheses following named community areas.

Fig. 5 This visualization is more accessible and transparent than Figure 4. Marker size and labeled values indicate the 2017 homicide count. Homicide-free communities are indicated in blue. The 2013-2017 hardship index is listed next to the name of each community area.

Fig. 6 Homicide count vs. Hardship index.

Schramm, H., Koehlmoos T., and Nestler, S. (2018), “Statistics in Pursuit of Social Justice.” Available at https://csbaonline.org/about/news/statistics-in-pursuit-of-social-justice

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US Census Bureau (2008), “A Compass for Understanding and Using American Community Survey Data: What General Data Users Need to Know.” Available at: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2008/acs/ACSGeneralHandbook.pdf

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Great Cities Institute (2019), “Fact Sheet # 2: Chicago Community Area Economic Hardship Index.” Available at https://greatcities.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/GCI-Hardship-Index-Fact-SheetV2.pdf

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Wilkerson, I. (2010), The Warmth of Other Suns. New York: Random House.

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Wilson, W. (1987), The Truly Disadvantaged The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Walls, A. (2016), Rethinking Affordable Housing [Video]. TedX. Available at https://youtu.be/fZvKY9tb9Kw

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Nelson, R., Winling, L., Marciano, R., Connolly, N. et al. (n.d.), “Mapping Inequality,” in American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers. Available at https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=10/41.944/-88.165&city=chicago-il

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