red (white) & blue - income vs theater placement in dallas, texas

Theater locations in the Dallas area plotted on an income heat map. 

Yellow dots represent theaters, purple dots are temporarily closed theaters due to COVID-19, each circle represents a ~1 mile radius, red areas are poorer neighborhoods and blue areas are wealthier.

Heat map via Justice Map and 2010 Census data.

Theater data via Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Google Earth.

Looking up "movie theaters in Dallas" in Google Maps produces 19 theaters, 17 of which lie above I-30, the highway running east to west and essentially bisecting Dallas into north and south. The disparity between the north and south sides of the city are visible in much more than the city's distribution of movie theaters; according to the Dallas Morning News, North Dallas holds 86% of jobs, 83% of property values, and 86% of permit values.

For this assignment, I chose to consider a heat map of income levels across the city of Dallas (and its nearby suburbs). Justice Map takes race, ethnicity, and income data from the 2010 Census and plots it as a heat map, which I found to be an incredibly helpful representation for this data to show the city's inequities.

The income distribution is visibly unevenly distributed; the north seems mainly blue (wealthy, income levels of $58,000+) whereas the south appears dark red (income levels $46,000 and less). I plotted the locations of movie theaters I found using Google and Apple Maps (in order to increase my scope to the point where I could plot outside of the immediate Dallas area to suburbs like Denton to the south, Irving to the west, Farmers Branch to the northwest, and Garland to the northeast), noticing that only 8 out of 22 theaters were located in non-blue areas, and only 2 were in red areas with an income of $32,000-42,000. No theaters were in dark red areas of incomes lower than $32,000. 

I didn't come into this project expecting something different. At least I didn't think I did. But after plotting this data and seeing it right in front of me, one yellow dot at a time, I found myself feeling uncomfortable and saddened. It makes sense that low-income areas won't have many entertainment-centered businesses, that businesses like movie theaters seek out wealthier areas that will produce a wealthier customer base. And looking at sites like Roofstock with heat maps of neighborhood ratings as well as the race heat map on Justice map makes even clearer what we already know: lower income neighborhoods are often the same areas as nonwhite (especially mostly Black) neighborhoods in cities across the United States, and these areas lack community and recreational spaces or businesses due to spatial stigma, as Shannon Whitaker examines, that limits the access the people living in these areas have to resources, opportunities, or their general well-being.

Having new movie theaters pop up in red areas is likely not the panacea for this issue. But creating more community spaces might be. I focused on movie theaters because I love the experience of going to the movies, of being transported away from normal life for 90 minutes. I'm fortunate to have the ability to drive to any movie theater on this map if I really wanted to, but that is likely not the case for Dallas residents living in dark red areas where a bus ride to the nearest theater can take close to an hour.

From this map, I can see how these low-income spaces of Southern Dallas are deemed unworthy by movie theaters, by businesses that can function as a sort of recreational refuge. It causes me to consider the question: what other spaces are these red areas lacking, and how does that deficit impact the people who live there?