Chicago Communities and Pothole Repairs
Is there a link between neighborhood income levels and pothole maintenance?
Chicago has long been known for its overabundance of potholes, and for its lack of expediency in repairing them. Often, in neighborhoods like Logan Square or Lincoln Park, one might see entire sections of road being torn up and repaved to replace a single pothole. And yet, examining geography and income may reveal some interesting information about this process.
According to data from the City of Chicago Data Portal, concentrations of recently repaired potholes seem to be largely centralized in lower income neighborhoods. The graphic below, compiled with Google My Maps using information from the city’s Data Portal shows the concentrations of recent pothole repairs throughout the city.
Closer inspection reveals that neighborhoods on the south side like Auburn Gresham, Chatham, and South Shore have higher concentrations of recent repairs, as do near west neighborhoods like Humboldt Park and Little Village, and northwest neighborhoods like Belmont Cragin, Jefferson Park, and Portage Park.
By contrast, there are few or no recent pothole repairs in neighborhoods like Andersonville/Edgewater, Bucktown/Logan Square, Lincoln Park, Ravenswood, Ukrainian Village, and Wicker Park. So, what’s the correlation?
Based on information compiled by Voorhees Center at UIC, and reported by WBEZ, the city is rapidly becoming divided into high-income and low-income neighborhoods, with the middle class rapidly disappearing. Neighborhoods with the largest concentrations of recent pothole repairs are all considered lower-income neighborhoods. Conversely, those with fewer or no recent pothole repairs tend to be higher-income neighborhoods.
This may be due in part to the process: in the lower income neighborhoods, it is far more common to make small patch-repairs to potholes in between winter storms, effectively putting a band-aid on a wound that will likely open again. In the higher income neighborhoods, it is more common to replace sections of road to entirely eliminate potholes.
If more money was allocated to extensive road repair in low-income neighborhoods, the costs of repeated maintenance would be lowered and, in the long run, the city might actually save money while at the same time maintaining better roads. It may be interesting to examine this process further to determine whether there are better ways to allocate road repair funding in order to see this shift occur.
