Drive through Southwest Minneapolis, and you'll notice wide swings in affluence, from multi-million dollar mansions around the lakes to modest mid-century houses in the far south. But just how wide is the disparity between different parts of the city?
Thanks to the efforts of the website Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks, you can now spy on your neighbors' pocketbooks, after a fashion. The site uses data compiled from the 2006-2010 American Community Survey to show median household income by census tract.
As it turns out, the richest part of Southwest Minneapolis is not the lip of Lake Harriet, where the median family makes between $109,300 and $109,500 per year, but the area between 48th Street, 56th Street, Lyndale Ave, and Humboldt Ave. The median family there makes $125,086 per year.
The poorest area of Southwest Minneapolis is a small slice of CARAG and East Harriet around the 36th and Bryant intersection. The average household there makes $34,664, however that number could be skewed downwards by the residents and patients at Walker Methodist Health Center. That census tract excluded, the blocks around 36th Street between Lyndale Ave and Interstate 35-W form the poorest—if you can call it that—part of the area, with a median household income of $52,591.
Minnesota as a whole has a median income range of $49,964 to $60,207.
Amateur geographers can also chart the rents in the metro area's census tracts. Those numbers generally follow house prices—substantially higher to the south and west of the lakes than to the north and east—but there is one potentially unusual data point: the area around the intersection of 50th Street and Bryant Ave has Southwest Minneapolis' highest rent, at $1,211 per month.
Check out the data mapped out for yourself and see how the rest of the Twin Cities stacks up on Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks.
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