One of the principal findings from my “Revealing Majority-Black Neighborhoods in Metro Atlanta” series was the fact that the median home value metric was the dividing line between fully advantaged and mostly advantaged neighborhoods. Fully advantaged neighborhoods were those that bettered metro level statistics on all four socioeconomic measures. Disadvantaged neighborhoods were those that surpassed the metro area on either none of the metrics or just one. The neighborhoods I can’t shake are the disadvantaged neighborhoods with higher median home values than that found for the metro area.
Without intending to state the obvious, it is deeply oxymoronic for a high median home value neighborhood to also have a relatively high poverty rate, a low median household income, and a low homeownership rate. On its face, it just doesn’t make sense. And as someone who carefully curated the data, I couldn’t simply blame it on bad data. However, by taking a closer look I did begin to notice some patterns in the data that connected to past analyses, and these offer us a few clues.
The table above shows that six of the eight majority-Black neighborhoods were in Fulton County. Of these six, four of the neighborhoods formed a pattern similar to points on a triangle. This triangle contained within it a portion of the City of Atlanta that has attracted much attention in recent years among city leaders and social advocates alike. These particular neighborhoods are shown above the divide line in the table above. Each of them would be considered poor neighborhoods according to US government standards, since their poverty rates were above 20 percent. The other four neighborhoods are much harder to pin down, given the fact that they are geographically scattered and lack an obvious anchor. The only discernable features in this respect is the fact that one of the neighborhoods is close to an airport and another one has a park at its core.
If you would like to know more about these curious neighborhoods, you can tap in below. In the near future, we will widen the lens for these types of neighborhoods using recently refreshed data.