Each month a new map is presented to the Commission to help explain important trends in the Bay Area, across the nation and around the world. These custom-crafted maps are prepared by MTC’s Data & Visualization team.
Access To Jobs And Opportunity
This map shows Bay Area employment centers, tracts with long-standing poverty (defined as 30% or more of population having income less than 200% of the federal poverty level in 1990, 2000, and 2010), Communities of Concern, Priority Development Areas, and Kirwan Opportunity Index Areas. The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University has done extensive work which examines neighborhood conditions and proximity to opportunities such as high performing education or sustainable employment that have a critical impact on quality of life and self-advancement. The central premise of opportunity mapping is that residents of a metropolitan area are situated within an interconnected web of opportunities that shape their quality of life. Opportunity mapping provides an analytical framework to measure opportunity comprehensively in metropolitan regions and determine who has access to opportunity rich areas.