The Yuppie Map of San Francisco

Town Me, a community website for San Francisco, takes the always fascinating project of demographic sub-group cartography (and you may take it as a mark on my character, for good or bad, that that was a non-ironic use of the word 'fascinating') and cleverizes it. Here, for instance, is the Yuppie map of San Francisco:



What they've done here is take an arcane sociodemographic category and translated it into a more sensible terms. In this case, "Yuppies" represent "young professionals (ages 25-35) who make $100,000 or more." They've given a similar treatment to several other categories, which they describe as follows:

Cougars - Single or divorced women ages 35-50
Sugar Daddies - Single or divorced men ages 45-60
Starving Students - People ages 18-34 currently enrolled in college
Baby Momma - Female householder, no husband present, with children aged 18 or under
Baby Daddy - Male householder, no wife present, with children aged 18 or under
People Overextending Themselves on Rent - People who spend a lot on rent

The only thing I might change here would be that rather unmellifluous last category; maybe they could change it to "Housing Crises"? Or the "Upwardly Immobile"? Regardless, as a fan of the English language, I always glory to see arcane and abstruse semiotic formulations reconstituted as more quotidian, but invariably more vividly delineative, linguistic signifiers.

Killer Circles Invade New York City

The Digital Atlas of New York City, put together by William A. Bowen of California State University, Northridge, has a bunch of interesting maps of the Big Whatsit. This, for instance, is from the map showing the distribution of the black population in NYC:



(By the way, does that pattern look familiar?) The atlas also has maps showing income, education, and ancestry - you can see which parts of the city Dutch or Dominicans have settled in, for instance. The only drawback is that it's a bit dated. It's a problem for demographic maps for the US in 2009: the decennial census is a year away, so everything's based on data that's 9 years old.

Ah, and just now I notice that Bowen has similar atlases of Seattle, DC, Boston, Chicago, Honolulu, LA, San Francisco, San Diego, and Sacramento, as well. And also a bunch of other maps. So there you go.