Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 6 - Response to Madison Beall

This week I decided to respond to one of my classmate's posts. I chose a post done by Madison Beall about Laguna Beach.

Here is the link to her original blog http://whatdifferencedoesdifferencemake.blogspot.com/2012/11/blogging-social-difference-week-5.html

A copy of my response:

Madison:

I really enjoyed reading your post about Laguna Beach. Like you, I also consider Orange County to be a part of the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area. Growing up in Hawaii, I would come to visit my dad’s side of the family in Los Angeles.  However, during these trips we would also make visits to Disneyland and Orange County. Therefore, I have always associated Orange County as a part of the Los Angeles area. The entire time that I was reading your post, I found myself curious about the neighborhood wrote about. You did a great job describing what you saw and how you noticed the similar expensive houses and luxury cars. In order to get a bigger picture of the neighborhood I decided to use Simply Map to see if I could glean anything more. In order to narrow down my searches to the area that your cousins live in, I looked up the street you had mentioned and found a zip code associated to that area.

The first variable that I chose was to see how much of the census tracts are composed of a white population. This relates to what we have been talking about in class this past week when we were talking about the different axes of difference, and race is one of theses axes. What I found was that almost all of the census tracts fell into the highest category of 88.83% to 100% of the residents being white.

% White Population, 2012 (Simply Map)

The second variable that I used was Average Household Income in 2010 by census tracts. I found that all of the census tracts in area fall into the highest category of $71,928.01-$320,032.00. This means that these census tracts have high average household incomes, which means this area is very wealthy, like you said.

Average Household Income, 2010 (Simply Map)

 In order to see another dimension of this wealth, I decided to look up a variable related to travel. Since many wealthy families have the means to travel outside of the country, I looked up the percentage of households that had traveled to a foreign country in the last three years. A few census tracts fell into the highest category of 71.55% to 100% of households traveling abroad within the last three years and then a few also fell into the lowest category of 0% to 46.77% of households traveling abroad within the last three years. There were also some census tracts that fell into categories in between those two. However, I did notice that the census tracts that fell into the same categories were also near each other. There seems to be a few communities that travel a lot more than others and then it trickles down to the census tracts that have households that do not travel abroad at all. I was intrigued by how much variation there was because I was expecting for all of the households to fall into the highest category because of the expensive houses and luxury cars.

% of Households that have Traveled Internationally in the Last 3 Years (Simply Map)

            While you already mentioned the Spencer, Olin, and Poster reading in your post, another part of the article that I thought went well with your post was when the authors were talking about how “consumer culture has become increasingly cosmopolitan” (17). This especially relates to all of the Mercedes and BMWs in the area. According to the article, this trend began after the 1960s (Olin 17). The “economic elite”, which are the types of people that live in this area of Laguna Beach, are the ones that choose the “taste trends” that the others in the area will follow (Olin 17). This “economic elite” tends to have “cosmopolitan tastes” in food, cars, and clothing (Olin 17). It seems as though this area around your cousins’ house reflects and supports what Spencer, Olin, and Poster are saying since you do see foreign luxury cars everywhere.

Great Work, Madison!

Requirement: Simply Maps