Mapping White-Black and Temporal Differences in State Homeownership Rates With Two-Way Comparative Micromaps

Brent D. Mast
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) organize and clarify the patterns of human activities on the Earth’s surface and their interaction with each other. GIS data, in the form of maps, can quickly and powerfully convey relationships to policymakers and the public. This department of Cityscape includes maps that convey important housing or community development policy issues or solutions. If you have made such a map and are willing to share it in a future issue of Cityscape, please contact rwilson@umbc.edu.

Micromaps display multiple maps on the same exhibit, with different geographic units highlighted in each map. A comparative micromap is a type of micromap with a series of indexed maps designed to convey change in a statistic. Mast (2014) previously introduced Cityscape readers to comparative micromaps. A two-way comparative micromap (hereafter, referred to as a TWCM; for examples, see Carr and Pickle, 2010) conveys change in a statistic in two dimensions; one dimension is typically time.