A year ago, filled with the feverish resolve that accompanies the blank pages of a new calendar, I told you I had a plan. A grand plan. Or at least a good one. In either case, I did not succeed in following it. That is the nature of fevers. They pass.
I was going to grid the city. Take a map and reduce the metro area to squares. Every month or so, I’d pick a square, see what or who is there and write about it. It was to be a more organized way to bring to you our neighbors and neighborhoods. One problem with this plan: I am not organized. I warned this last year. I believe my exact words were: “I am spectacularly disorganized.”
What I lack, however, in efficiency, I make up for in what I call perseverance and my husband calls stubbornness. So, I will make another go at it. I need places to start and with that in mind, I’ll repeat last year’s rather unwieldy question:
“Who are the people, where are the places, when are the gatherings, what are the triumphs and setbacks that tell us something about our shared community, that illuminate its many faces?”
What I ended up doing last year is spending a lot of time in a single neighborhood — Sun Valley, the neighborhood of housing projects and high hopes. The latest census numbers tell us Sun Valley still has Colorado’s highest overall poverty rate and its lowest household median income at $8,352 a year.
I started digging around in the census info as prelude to mapping the metro area on a grid. A thousand stories lie within the American Community Survey data, though its accuracy varies. In some cases, the margins of error are so high the new information is meaningless. Nevertheless, the New York Times’ interactive census maps offer a fascinating first look.
You could play for hours here, toggling between census tract-level detail on education, race and ethnicity, income and housing and families. The Globeville neighborhood, for example, shows a whopping 43 percent decline in median household income since 2000, with half its households earning below $23,711 year.
The maps are color-coded, which makes that first look not necessarily surprising, but nonetheless startling.
Take the education map at projects . Within Denver city limits, the Country Club and Hilltop neighborhoods have the highest percentage of residents with master’s degrees. This, not surprisingly, correlates with income. Hilltop has the highest percentage of households earning more than $200,000 a year, at 38 percent.
My friend and former colleague Burt Hubbard, now at I-News, did his own bit of digging and tells me the state’s most educated neighborhood — Hilltop — and its least educated — Westwood — are just 7 miles apart in Denver. In Westwood, his analysis found, only 36 percent of adults have high school diplomas.
Numbers, of course, tell only part of the story. Sun Valley reaffirmed that. The statistics there only scratch the surface of this neighborhood born of many-tentacled public policies and their often unforeseen and, at times, plain tragic, consequences.
To take just one of those consequences, which today we well understand: Segregate a neighborhood by income, by race and ethnicity, and you segregate a school. Segregate a school by income and you open a chasm between opportunity and deprivation. Risk then, a school becoming not an instrument with which to shatter generational poverty, but an abettor in its perpetuation. You will find no greater awareness of the enormity of this responsibility, this challenge, than within the school itself.
Numbers are a start. What they cannot reveal is how a single place holds many universes. Some of these worlds hold reminders of how resilient the human spirit is. Some hold reminders of how fragile it can be. And many hold both.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
