Spatial Measures of Socioeconomic Deprivation: An Application to Four Midwestern Industrial Cities

TL;DR

This study develops and compares four socioeconomic deprivation indices for four Midwestern U.S. cities, analyzing their correlation with income, race, and transportation to better understand urban deprivation patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative approach to measuring deprivation in American cities using different variables and weighting schemes, filling a gap in existing methodologies.

Findings

Deprivation indices correlate strongly with lower income levels.

Higher deprivation is associated with higher nonwhite populations.

Certain index measures show stronger correlations than others.

Abstract

Decades of economic decline have led to areas of increased deprivation in a number of U.S. inner cities, which can be linked to adverse health and other outcomes. Yet the calculation of a single "deprivation" index, which has received wide application in Britain and elsewhere in the world, involves a choice of variables and methods that have not been directly compared in the American context. This study creates four related measures--using two sets of variables and two weighting schemes--to create such indices for block groups in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. After examining the indices' similarities, we then map concentrations of high deprivation in each city and analyze their relationships to income, racial makeup, and transportation usage. Overall, we find certain measures to have higher correlations than others, but that all show deprivation to be linked with lower incomes and a higher nonwhite population.