By Jared Brey.
Though their economies tend to be high-performing, the counties in the San Francisco Bay Area have some of the worst racial disparities in the entire state of California.
In the city of San Francisco, life expectancy for Asian residents is 14 years longer than for black residents. The median income of white households is more than three times that of black households. When it comes to access to quality housing, the crisis is increasingly well documented. But what often goes unsaid is that racial disparities in housing are greater in San Francisco than in any other county in California, with white renters typically keeping around $57,000 in income after housing costs, as opposed to less than $30,000 for Asian and Latino renters.
These figures and thousands more are collected on a new interactive website called Race Counts, a wide-ranging data-gathering initiative from the civil rights organization Advancement Project California. Launched in November, Race Counts provides data on dozens of disparity indicators across seven categories: economic opportunity, healthcare access, education, housing, democracy, crime and justice, and a healthy built environment.
The data is broken down by county, and used to compare places on both their performance in key areas and the racial disparity in the same areas. (San Francisco, for instance, is a high performance/high disparity county.) The goal of the initiative is to equip organizers and advocacy groups with as much data as they need to win battles in the war against racial disparity in California.
[divider] [/divider]