A concern that many of us have is that the rapid gentrification happening in places such as San Francisco is having a negative impact on affordability. Is Boston susceptible? Is it possible that a booming tech industry is contributing to this process? How can we contribute to a policy discussion?

Our approach is to examine neighborhoods that are considered "gentrified" and establish a baseline of data that gives a rich picture for how the neighborhood has changed over time. From there, we can begin to gather qualitative measures regarding factors such as policy decisions and technology development to see if there are any correlations.

Data Sources

• American Community Survey (Census)
• The Boston Foundation/MAPC Data Common
• Maps served by Leaflet
• Map tiles by CartoDB, under CC BY 3.0.
• Data by OpenStreetMap, under ODbL

Who We Are

Part of the Code for America Brigade network, we are a volunteer group of developers, designers, data geeks, and citizen activists who use creative technology to solve civic and social problems. You are welcome to help work on Ungentry or meet with us where you can see any number of other projects.

The data used comes from the 1990 and 2000 US Census and 2008-2012 American Community Survey 5-year estimates for census tracts in Suffolk, Middlesex, and Norfolk counties in Massachusetts.

We accessed the data using Social Explorer. We normalized the 1990 and 2000 Census data to 2010 census tract boundaries using aerial weights interpolation methods provided by the Longitudinal Tract Database. The 2008-2012 data uses the 2010 census tract boundaries.

All dollar values are adjusted to 2013 constant dollars.