Scotty Ellis from Coalition for a Livable Future gave a brief introduction to the Regional Equity Atlas 2.0 to the Washington County Committee for Citizen Involvement's October 2013 meeting. The Regional Equity Atlas is“a major research and education project to promote widespread opportunity for a stronger, healthier, and more sustainable region.” It includes existing maps and analyses and a web-based mapping tool to “illuminate the region’s geography of opportunity,” including some data at local/neighborhood scales. The Regional Equity Atlas is a “major research and education project to promote widespread opportunity for a stronger, healthier, and more sustainable region.”
Coalition for a Livable Future Regional Equity Atlas 2.0 introduction October 2013
1.
2. What is the Regional Equity Atlas?
A tool to understand how well different
neighborhoods and populations across the region
are able to access essential resources &
opportunities
Housing • Education • Transportation • Health • Food • Clean Air • Nature • Services
27. Other Things You Can Do with the Mapping Tool
• Locate a specific address on the
map
• Create your own composite
heatmap indicators
• Scroll over the maps to find cities,
neighborhoods, and underlying
data
• Export the underlying data to do
your own statistical analysis
• Export the data into a GIS program
to add your own map layers
28. Using Atlas 2.0 to Create Change
The Bus Project
Oregon’s Health CO-OP
29. Thank You to
Regional Equity Atlas 2.0 Funders
Northwest Health Foundation
Kaiser Permanente Community Fund
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Meyer Memorial Trust
Bullitt Foundation
Notas del editor
Open Maps and Analysis Page and the mapping tool in two separate windows.
The Regional Equity Atlas is a project of the Coalition for a Livable Future, which is a partnership of over 90 organizations and thousands of individuals working together to create a more equitable and sustainable Portland metropolitan region.
The Atlas was released to the public on June 12, and we’re excited to be able to share it with our allies and partners across the region.
The Regional Equity Atlas is a tool that enables us to understand how well different neighborhoods and populations across the region are able to access the resources and opportunities necessary for meeting their basic needs and advancing their health and well-being.
Its purpose is to provide a visual depiction of disparities across the region to help inform strategies to promote greater equity through policy, planning, and strategic investments.
The Regional Equity Atlas 2.0 project includes:
(1) A web-based mapping tool where you can create customized maps.
(2) An accompanying website that provides a summary of findings, a gallery of key maps and analysis, and additional background information.
(3) An outreach and education initiative to engage stakeholders across the region in using the Atlas maps and findings to create concrete changes in regional policies and priorities
CLF is partnering with Metro and PSU’s Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies on the Atlas 2.0 project. Metro developed the mapping tool and PSU provided research and methodological support.
Public, non-profit, and community partners from across the four-county metro area are also participating in the project.
The original Regional Equity Atlas, published in 2007, received national attention for its groundbreaking analysis of regional disparities.
By illuminating the region’s geography of opportunity, the Atlas transformed local conversations around equity.
The Atlas’ findings have been used to secure changes in regional planning and investment decisions, and local governments have relied on the Atlas maps to shape their understanding of the region’s needs.
Atlas 2.0 is an update and expansion of the first Atlas.
We spent more than a year on a multi-step process to develop the list of indicators that are available in the Atlas 2.0 mapping tool. The process included extensive research on data sources and best practices as well as a robust stakeholder engagement process that gathered input from hundreds of leaders from non-profits, government agencies, and community organizations across the four-county region.
Based on this input, the mapping tool includes:
- A range of demographic indicators, and
Data on access to resources and opportunities in all of the categories listed here
Some of the most exciting data in Atlas 2.0 relates to health care and health outcomes. Through a partnership with Oregon Health Care Quality Corporation, we were able to map original patient-level medical data mapped by patient address.
You can access the Atlas maps in two ways: The equityatlas.org website includes a Maps and Analysis section that includes more than a hundred key maps organized by theme, along with an explanation of each of the maps and an analysis of findings. The website also includes extensive background information, additional data, and other resources.
The next few slides provide a brief orientation to the Atlas maps.
The Atlas includes data and indicators for the four-county region made up of Clackamas, Washington, Multnomah, and Clark counties.
The Atlas includes two kinds of maps: Heatmaps and Shapes.
[Click] Heatmaps are used for indicators whose source data are at the highest spatial resolution available. Heatmaps display data as raster cells (or pixels) based on units of 264 square feet, which is approximately a square city block. Each cell of the Heatmap is assigned a value ranging from 1 to 5, with 5 representing the highest level of access and 1 representing the lowest level of access to the indicator being mapped. [click]
Heatmaps look like this– This map shows proximity to grocery stores and supermarkets. the darkest brown areas show the highest levels of access and the blue areas show the lowest levels of access.
Shapes are used for indicators that are made up of vector layers, which means the data are displayed in pre-set geographic units rather than raster cells (or pixels). Shape indicators are displayed either as points representing specific addresses – for example, community gardens [CLICK] or as shapes that show data summarized by a specific geographic unit such as census tracts, neighborhoods, or zip codes. For example [Click] this map shows median rental cost by zip code.
For example [CLICK] this map shows median rental cost by zip code.
The Atlas maps highlight significant regional disparities affecting people of color, low-income populations, and other key demographic groups such as youth. But the maps also highlight positive examples where opportunity is more equitably distributed, offering models that could help to guide future planning.
Regional Demographics
The Atlas’ demographic maps demonstrate that some pivotal trends in the region’s demographic patterns that began in the 1980s and 1990s continued during the 2000s:
First, populations of color are an increasingly significant percentage of the region’s population, and they live in communities throughout the metro area.
This map shows the distribution of populations of color across the region. The areas in brown have the highest densities of populations of color.
This map shows the percentage change in populations of color between 2000 and 2010. The areas in blue and green had declines in populations of color, the yellow areas remained the same or had a moderate increase, and the areas in orange and red had more significant increases.
This map shows the census tracts with above the regional average percent of populations of color, in grey.
The census tracts with the highest percentages of populations of color tend to be located in a ring outside of the region’s urban core and extending into its periphery.
The Atlas also shows that income trends that were highlighted in the first Atlas continued over the past decade.
This map shows median income by census tract. The darker the color, the higher the median income. It shows that incomes have continued to rise in many parts of Portland’s inner east side, while poverty continues to extend eastward from Portland, in inner and outer ring neighborhoods on the west side, and along major transportation routes in Vancouver.
This map shows the census tracts with above the regional average percent populations in poverty, in grey. The census tracts with the highest poverty rates extend eastward beyond Portland’s central city and include areas in all four of the region’s counties.
The Atlas’ access maps demonstrate that many of the disparities in access to essential resources and opportunities that were highlighted in the first Atlas continue to exist. In addition to updating the data from the first Atlas, Atlas 2.0 provides insights into disparities in a wide range of additional issue areas.
I will share just a few brief examples of maps showing the distribution of resources and opportunities.
This map shows median home values by census tract based on 2010-2011 sales prices. The light green areas have the lowest values and the dark green areas have the highest values.
Housing became less affordable in the central city over the past decade, leading to the displacement of low-income populations and communities of color from close-in Portland neighborhoods. Lower housing costs in parts of Vancouver, east Multnomah County, and outlying suburbs in Washington and Clackamas counties have attracted increasing numbers of people of color and low-income residents to move into those areas.
Health:
Some of the most provocative new data presented in Atlas 2.0 is in the area of health.
This map is a Healthy Eating Active Living Composite map that includes access to grocery stores and supermarkets, farmers markets and produce stands, transit, walkable neighborhoods, recreation facilities, and parks. The areas in brown have the best access to these resources.
The map can be used to generate a healthy eating active living (or HEAL) score for every block in the region.
This map shows Body Mass Index, a standard measure of obesity. The patterns are striking, with the lowest BMI rates clustered in the region’s central core and getting successively higher moving out from the core towards the periphery. If you compare this map with the HEAL composite map that we just saw, you’ll see they are like mirror images of one another [CLICK]
Here’s the HEAL map again – keep your eye in particular on the area of high access to HEAL factors in the center of the region – the dark brown area [CLICK]
Here’s the Body Mass Index map again – most of the area that was dark brown in the previous map is light brown in this map, indicating that areas with high access to HEAL factors tend to have lower average body mass index rates.
This is a map of diabetes rates. It shows a pretty striking pattern, with the lowest rates of diabetes clustered in a large swath of census tracts in the geographic center and west sides of the region.
This map shows diabetes rates layered with the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch by school, which is used here as a proxy for poverty. The largest pink circles represent the highest poverty schools.
The map shows that most of the census tracts with the lowest diabetes rates are located near low poverty schools, while almost all of the region’s high poverty schools are located in census tracts with diabetes rates that are relatively high.
Open Maps and Analysis Page. Go to Food – open first Map Series – briefly show the page and what’s there and click on a couple of thumbnails. Open one of the maps in the tool.
Then go to tool in a different window
Go to “Add/ Remove Indicators”
Explain indicator menus: heatmap, shapes, analysis units.
Demonstrate tool:
(1) Rasters:
Show menu
Demonstrate single heatmaps and a composite heatmap using parks
Zoom in to a neighborhood
Show data tables and charts
(2) Shapes:
Show menu
Click on two examples in housing (change in median value and minority home ownership rate)
(3) Show how to create a layered map: start with populations of color heatmap and add locations of subsidized housing. Then delete heatmap and replace with population overlay map.
(3) Scenarios
Transit Access to Family Wage Jobs in Relation to Poverty:
Show opacities slider
Show how to right click
Ask group which of the following issues they’d like to demo (offer the following options from scenarios gallery; show scenario then add and remove indicators to show how it was built)
Educational achievement layered with demographics
Access to food layered with demographics
Access to greenspace and recreation layered with demographics
Transit access and walkability layered with seniors
Here are some examples of other things you can do with the mapping tool. (pause for people to read)
CLF can also develop customized maps and analysis using the Atlas data on a contract basis.
The Bus Project plans to compare voting maps, demographic maps, and the locations of voter drop box sites to identify places where additional drop box sites could help to boost voter participation in low-income communities and communities of color where voting rates are low.
Oregon’s Health CO-OP, which is a member-driven nonprofit health insurance plan, will use the Equity Atlas as a training tool with their case management and disease management staff to raise awareness of the impact of the social determinants of health on their members’ health status and to help inform the development of more holistic strategies to improve members’ health.
Discussion questions
(1) Q&A
How can the Atlas data and maps help to inform your work?
How can we use the Atlas to create policy change for a more equitable region?
