Class-Divided Cities: Chicago Edition

This is the third post in a series exploring the class divides across America's largest cities and metros. It examines the residential locations of today's three major classes: the shrinking middle of blue-collar workers; the rising ranks of the knowledge, professional, and creative class; and the even larger and faster-growing ranks of lower-paid, service workers, using detailed data from the American Community Survey. For a detailed description of methodology, see the first post in the series, on New York.

The map above charts the geography of class for the entire metro area of Chicago. The creative class lives in the areas that are shaded in purple, the red areas are primarily service class, and the blue are working class. The areas with the darkest shades have the highest concentrations of that class. Each colored space on the map is a Census tract, a small area within city or county that can be even smaller than a neighborhood.