Because they cannot vote or be your designated driver, it is easy to forget about the children. But the latest map from MIT Media Lab's wonderful You Are Here project not only reminds us that these tiny people are crawling all over Los Angeles, but also shows which neighborhoods are particularly kid-heavy or kid-light. The map can be explored by year (1970 to 2010, by decade) and by neighborhood, and has an animation to show how the distribution of LA's child population—"child" here meaning anyone under 18—has changed or not changed throughout the years.
In 2010, the top five areas with the most children were Watts, Southeast LA (old South Park, Florence, and Broadway-Manchester), Central City (most of Historic South-Central and part of Central-Alameda), Lincoln Heights, and Pacoima. These neighborhoods all have median incomes below the LA median, (except for Pacoima, which is about average) and relatively low percentages of residents with four-year college degrees compared to the rest of the city and the county. (Watts is also the neighborhood with the number one highest percentage of children for every year on the map and the neighborhood with the lowest life expectancy in LA.) These also tend to be park-poor and traffic-rich areas. Meanwhile, many of the most wealthy neighborhoods in the city—Bel Air, Brentwood, Beverly Glen—are significantly less child-ful, though not at the bottom of the list. Strangely enough, Downtown and Little Tokyo for all their new developments remain the areas of LA with the lowest percentages of children.
· Children in Los Angeles [You Are Here]
· Watts Residents Will Die 11.9 Years Before Bel Air Residents [Curbed LA]
· Mapping Los Angeles's Crazy Uneven Access to Healthy Living [Curbed LA]
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