Portland, OR, is embarrassingly white; it is typically listed at or near the top of “America’s white

Portland, OR, is embarrassingly white; it is typically listed at or near the top of “America’s whitest cities” lists.  About three-quarters of the population is white.  The lack of diversity is disappointing, and it’s probably not going to change anytime soon.  The city is also very segregated, and gentrification is worsening the problem. This effect is easy to see using census data, but I thought I’d try an alternative approach.In these maps, I’ve used data from Portland Maps to look at the geographic distribution of home owners’ last names.  I selected four of the most common last names in the city (Smith, Johnson, Miller, and Anderson), and five common last names among Asian people (Chen, Nguyen, Pham, Tran, and Wong). I mapped the locations of the homes owned by people with these last names, and ran a kernel density estimation for each name. Light yellow means there are no homes in the area owned by people with that last name, and dark purple areas indicate a high concentration of people with that last name owning homes in the region.While the results are not particularly surprising (and don’t account for people who rent their houses), I found one fun fact that caught me by surprise.  While only 7% of Portlanders are Asian, the most common last name of all home owners in the city is Nguyen.  This likely isn’t due to an overwhelmingly large Vietnamese population in Portland, but rather, that a high percentage of people from Vietnam have that name. While it doesn’t fix our diversity problem, it’s pretty cool that there are more folks named Nguyen than Smith!Data: https://www.portlandmaps.com/ -- source link

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