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I created this map by ArcGis to show the poverty of Los Angeles County.

 

I created 6 classes in my map, because when I first made 5 classes, it is hard to show the difference between very wealthy and moderate wealthy regions, and the difference between poor and extremely poor region. I used manual classification method but used natural break and quantile methods as reference. Since the data is unevenly distributed, I first used natural break classification to make the map. This method could show the gaps between different classes. However, the colors of the map did not distribute evenly. Most of the map were shown in the colors representing wealthy and moderate wealthy. It is irrational. Then, in order to make the colors on the map distributed evenly, I tried quantile classification method. However, it cannot show the gap between different classes. Thus, I chose some natural break points but also considered the size of each class to make 0 – 2% below poverty as very wealthy census tracts, 2% - 6% as moderate wealthy census tracts, 6% - 10% as middle class census tracts, 10% - 20% as moderate poor census tracts, 20% - 38% as poor census tracts, more than 38% as extremely poor census tracts.

 

For choosing the symbolization if the scheme, I used yellow to brown colors to represent the different level of poverty. First, I took advantage of cultural metaphor – the darker the poorer, and yellow means gold, so yellow represents wealthy region and brown represents to poor region. Also, red is more attractive than yellow. Brown and orange contains more red than yellow, so it is easier to find the poor region. More than that, using two colors, from light to dark, the maps show the differences between wealth regions and poor regions gradually.  

I am pleased about the result, but if I remake this map, I will make the poor region more attractive since this is an LA poverty map. The red to green example map is better to focus on poor regions.

 

In order to describe where the poor and the wealth regions are, I added a base map of LA County (shown below). The poor regions are grouped near Down Town LA. Down Town Los Angeles, from Compton to Pasadena, and Long Beach are the poorest areas, surrounded by many poor census tracts and extremely poor census tracts, except the east part of Vernon. North Hollywood, Van Nuys, Sun Valley, and Angeles National Forest are also poor regions. The northeast of LA County, near Edwards Air Force base, is also poor, but not as poor as Down Town Los Angeles. The wealth regions are Thousand Oaks, the southwest part of LA County, and the mountain area of the middle and eastern part of LA County, except Angeles National Forest.