Category: Metro Briefs

An Overview of the Metro Area Birmingham has indeed come a long way in its relatively brief history. Born in the aftermath of the Civil War (1871), the city quickly burgeoned into the iron and steel industry’s “Pittsburgh of the South” by the early 20th Century. The city’s explosive growth in its first forty years [...]

Eric Fischer has posted an extensive array of maps of each American metropolitan area’s racial distribution. As they are germane to my website, I have posted them in all their glory. Each red dot on the map represents Non-Hispanic Whites; each blue dot African-Americans; each gold dot represents Latinos; and,  each green dot represents Asian-Americans. [...]

With good reason, Tucsonians love to sneer at Phoenix: too big, too ugly and with too much out of control growth and the concomitant dreadful traffic problems. (oh yes, and too Conservative too!). However, as the city of Tucson has an estimated 2009 population of 543,910 and the county has just passed the million residents [...]

The racial integration of the Washington DC metro area has many illuminating geographic patterns. This essay will concentrate on African-Americans and Non-Hispanic Whites. That’s not to say that there are not significant and interesting patterns for the ever increasing Latino and Asian communities, however, the long historical relationship between Washington DC and it’s Black citizens [...]

However you look at it, the 2006-8 American Community Survey portrays a watershed year for the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach Metropolitan Statistical Area. There are now 2,099,334 Latinos in the three county metro area versus 2,072,807 Non-Hispanic Whites. Eight years ago, Non-Hispanic Whites were clearly the largest racial group with 44.1%  of the metro population. However [...]

In spite of being built on heavy industry, Milwaukee, like Chicago, did not allow all of its beautiful Lake Michigan lakefront to be surrendered to industrial usage. The Port of Milwaukee and the industrial Menominee River valley are nicely hidden from the central business district and the wealthy lakefront neighborhoods to the north. As Milwaukee’s [...]

The fragmentation of the 80 wealthiest Los Angeles neighborhoods has it’s own unique pattern that is primarily influenced by the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. The core area is generally referred to as “West Los Angeles” and extends from the West Hollywood Hills to Castellammare, located adjacent to Malibu on the western city [...]

I had the good fortune to first move to Chicago in 1972 when the city was on the cusp of its rebirth. It was an exciting time to be a young advertising account executive in one of the world’s great cities that was about to reclaim the attention of the country as a dazzling jewel [...]

There is nothing like a road trip to renew my familiarity with some of Indianapolis’ old neighborhoods and visit the never-ending construction of nouveau riche mansions in Carmel and Clay Township. As of this posting, there are six Higley 1000 neighborhoods with a total of 3,841 households in the Indianapolis Metropolitan Area (SMSA). Indianapolis’ best [...]

For those of you who are interested in looking at how the neighborhoods in your metro area are ranked in the Higley 1000……… CLICK HERE to go directly to the article Neighborhood Summary by Metro Area……. or click on the link to the right in the Navigation box entitled Neighborhood Summary by Metro Area. You [...]