Fully Gentrified Neighborhood All Cheese Shops “America’s Finest [satirical] News Resource,” the Onion, ran the above caption with this photo last March. Maybe so in the paper’s native Chicago, but in the Boston area, cheese has a lot of catching up to do when compared to Boston’s preferred old school processed consumable: beer. Sources Educational Attainment: http://www.census.gov/acs/www/ Beer: http://beermapping.com/api/ Cheese shop & Yelp ratings: http://www.yelp.com/developers/ Yelp demographics: https://www.quantcast.com/yelp.com#!demo The Onion photo & caption: http://www.theonion.com/articles/ fully-gentrified-neighborhood-all-cheese-shops,35656/
Highly Educated Population
Cheese Shops
Census tracts with outright majorities (deepest red) of persons 25 years or older with Masters or Professional degrees can be found around Harvard, MIT, & BU, as well as in Brookline, Back Bay, & Beacon Hill.
Cheese shops around Boston are too few to be dramatically correlated, but where they do appear is in highly educated areas. The major exception is the North End, where Boston’s Italians no doubt purvey some fine fromage.
Gentrification by Brewpub Gentrification is commonly understood by scholars through shifts in population and housing characteristics. However, popular notions of gentrification are often constructed through its most conspicuous signs: changes in the retail & restaurant character of a neighborhood. This project attempts to interrogate gentrification in the Boston area through that lens. Is there are retail or restaurant presence that correlates with presence of a gentrified population?
Breweries, Brewpubs, & Beer Bars
High Yelp Ratings
Thirsty craft beer aficionados have plenty of choices for brews around Boston. Beercentric businesses can be found largely in highly educated areas, as well as a cluster in gentrifying/-ied Allston-Brighton.
Yelp users, who are more likely than average US web users to have gentrifier demographic characteristics, are scattershot in their preferences, though with some loose clusters in highly educated areas.
High educational attainment is used as a proxy indicator for gentrification writ large. Clustering of two product categories – artisanal cheese and craft beer – is then mapped against that demographic indicator. Finally, restaurants with high ratings on Yelp are mapped. These indicators are far from perfect, both as quality datasets and as proxies for gentrification. That said, retail and restaurant trends likely preexist demographic shifts & datasets.
John McCartin :: Spatial Analysis & Representation :: 13 October 2014