Los Angeles City Controller Unveils New Economic and Demographic Data Portal
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“[R]esidents, businesses and policymakers all have new tools to separate facts from fiction, and to make better data-driven decisions,” according to Ron Galperin.
In the city of Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest municipality by population, data can tell some pretty interesting stories about the diverse communities that span its roughly 468 square miles.
And a new data portal unveiled Thursday by City Controller Ron Galperin provides a new tool to explore the city via economic and demographic information.
“With the information we’ve put online, residents, businesses and policymakers all have new tools to separate facts from fiction, and to make better data-driven decisions,” Galperin said.
The information available on EconomyPanel LA, which includes data from 2004 to 2015, is broken down by the city’s 15 council districts across six categories: population, gender, income, employment, housing and building permits.
The L.A. city controller’s new portal, which was a cross-sector collaborative project with the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and Beacon Economics, reveals an interesting discovery about the reality of commuting in the City of Angels: There isn’t much variation in the average length of the daily commute across the city’s 15 council districts.
According to Galperin’s announcement:
Residents of CD 15, which includes the harbor area, have the shortest commute: 28 minutes. Meanwhile, residents of CD 8, in South LA, have the longest, at 33 minutes. 30 minutes is the citywide average.
Poking around the site, examining geographic data about average annual wages for 2015 confirms something that Angelenos know well: there are large income disparities that separate certain communities in the city.
In the 5th council district, which includes many neighborhoods on L.A.’s prosperous Westside, the average annual wage is $95,485; in the 11th council district, which also covers large sections of the Westside, the average wage is $67,426.
But in the 8th council district, which includes South Central L.A., the average annual wage is only $22,163.
Looking at population information by race, the 5th and 11th council districts have the largest proportion of white residents while Latinos dominate the 1st, 6th, 7th, 9th, 13th, 14th, and 15th districts.
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
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