The maps below visualize the changing residential patterns of Black, Latino and White households across the 7 Illinois counties in the greater Chicagoland area from 1980 to 2010. I obtained the data used in each map from the Brown Longitudinal Tract Database which normalizes US Census data from 1980 through 2010 using 2010 Census tract definitions. To prepare this regional comparison, I intersected Illinois census tracts with a boundary shapefile of 7 counties in northeast Illinois: Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry and Will counties. All maps are projected on NAD83/UTM Zone 16 specifications.
Each pair of maps below compares percentage of a specific racial group between 1980 and 2010. As can be seen visually, black households have remained highly concentrated in the southside of Chicago and extended further south in southern Cook County, latino households have grown in more dispersed concentrations across the region, and the percentage share of white households per census tract appears to have generally decreased since 1980 throughout much of the region.
Percent Black population (1980 vs 2010)
Percent Latino population (1980 vs 2010)
Percent White population (1980 vs 2010)
