The Atlantic Cities is taking a look at how class and geography intersect in American Cities using data from the
U.S. Census American Community Survey. This week, they tackled Philadelphia, finding a creative class concentration in Center City, huge swaths of service class-dominated space and a shrinking working class population. Check out the interactive map for an eye-opening look at our city.
Strikingly absent from the map (with the one exception of Juniata Park) are significant working class concentrations, identified on the map in blue. This is startling in a city that was an early manufacturing powerhouse, a center for ship-building, railroad manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, not to mention manufacturing capabilities in beer, candy, and even brooms. One historically blue collar enclave is Fishtown, to the northeast of Center City. The area is rapidly gentrifying, as the economist and blogger Adam Ozimek reminded me, but it still retains much of the Irish working class character that led Charles Murray to use it as the blue collar foil for creative class Belmont, Massachusetts, in his book Coming Apart.
Original source: The Atlantic Cities
Read the full story and check out the map here.