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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> Most American cities have a stark racial divide. In Seattle, the divide runs north to south: North Seattle is largely white; South Seattle is largely not.

Wouldn't this mean the divide runs east to west?

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I know what you mean, but it’s more of a gradient than a divide. Here’s a regional ethnicity map:

https://www.psrc.org/sites/default/files/race16.jpg

Wow. I have trouble seeing how that could possibly be called a "stark racial divide".

The entire map is the metro Seattle area. Zoom into Seattle where the northmost dotted line is and the divide is pretty evident.

So, if you restrict yourself to downtown Seattle, it looks like a clear divide, but if you go to the Seattle city limits, it doesn't, and if you go to the Seattle metro area, it looks even less like that?

What's the problem supposed to be? And why is "North Seattle" being used to refer to the northern half of downtown, rather than the northern part of Seattle?

This is exactly why local/micro-level expertise is so important. It's common in the US now for areas just on the city limits of bigger cities to be more mixed racially and socioeconomically than ever before; this is a temporal as well as spatial phenomenon driven by the change from "white flight" to the suburbs to instead lots of folks moving to the suburbs because they're cheaper than the downtowns, and the suburbs mixing racially because they've removed their sundown laws and racial covenants. Now many downtown areas are coveted instead of abandoned, with luxury condos instead of skid row.

I don't know anything about Seattle. If you look at the area of the clear divide, what differentiates the houses on one side from the houses on the other side? In Minneapolis-St Paul, there are pretty clear differences in amenities between many racially separated areas: more trees and walking paths in some areas; fewer trees, worse streets, and highway noise in others.

What are you asking when you ask, "What's the problem supposed to be?" I don't quite get it.

Do you see how Southeast, Dunwamish, and Delridge are a rainbow of colors with barely any specks of blue while the north neighborhoods are all blue with specks of green?

That's the racial divide. Not just downtown.

That map is for the entire metropolitan area, and then some. Consider [0], the neighborhoods of Seattle itself, and then look at the island of blue color in the middle of downtown and the affluent neighborhoods of Magnolia, Ballard, and Queen Anne.

Across from Seattle, across Lake Washington, you can also see the majority-blue suburb of Bellevue.

[0] https://northwesturbanist.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/seattl...

This map might make it easier to see.

http://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/

The is an amazing map, but like so many such maps as you zoom out you loose the dynamic range to capture the difference between populated countryside and city.

I think they mixed “divide” and “division”. Or they misplaced the “runs”. A divide runs perpendicular to what it divides. The North American continental divide runs north south, but divides east and west hydrologies.

The divide is east-west, but the division is north/south.

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