Most Affluent Kansas Counties

Least Affluent Kansas Counties

Interactive Income Gradient

Maps showing income typically use discrete boundary data like ZIP codes or census tracts to depict variations over an area of interest. But most social phenomena like this are more likely to exhibit a fluid, or continuous, pattern across the landscape.

This interactive map, which is an update to a previous map created by KC Mapping & GIS, is an experiment at creating more realistic models for mapping the social terrain.

The Income Landscape

The look at income variations across Greater Kansas City continues with these five depictions of median household income constructed using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006-2010 American Community Survey.

Map 1: A map of median household income across Greater Kansas City. The area units used for the map are census tracts. Darker shades represent tracts with lower incomes; lighter shades represent tracts with higher incomes.

Map 2: Median household income across Greater KC represented with a raster surface interpolated from the census tract data used in Map 1.

This  map emphasizes  the overall pattern of nine income categories and the transitions between them. Greens are low-income areas; yellows and oranges are middle-income areas; reds and whites are zones of high income.

Map 3: This map uses the same data as the previous, but employs a different application of color to emphasize the relative intensity between high and low income areas. Areas with the lowest median household incomes are assigned the deepest reds; areas with the highest incomes are colored with the deepest greens.

Map 4: A 3-D depiction of income with high-income areas extruded. The green peak near the center of the region is the Plaza-Mission Hills-Brookside area which is connected by a ridge to another high-income peak in the southeastern portion of Johnson County.  The two other major summit areas in this map include northwest Johnson County (which includes portions of Shawnee, west Lenexa, and northwest Olathe), and a portion of KCMO in Clay County just west of the City of Liberty.

Map 5: A 3-D depiction of income with low-income areas extruded. The large summit region in the middle of the map includes downtown KCK and the central to east-central portions of KCMO. A wide ridge of low income follows US Highway-71 south through KCMO out to the Cass county line. A second, and narrower, ridge of relatively low income extends southwest along I-35 between two prominent areas of high income in Johnson County.