Amazonions in Eastie

If Boston wins the bid for the new Amazon headquarters, there may be a new wave of Amazonions moving to East Boston that have a very different profile of racial diversity.

BY Cherry, Kate, Yan, Yi-Chia

The racial diversity of Amazon’s current employees is very different from the diversity currently found in Eastie, according to Amazon's diversity reporting. Most notably, more than half of Eastie’s population is Hispanic while only 13% of Amazon’s employees are. Despite this large difference in diversity, the number of Amazonions actually moving to Eastie would likely cause only a small shift in the diversity of the neighborhood as a whole.

Here is what it would look like if we used Amazon's current racial diversity to imagine what it would look like if these two groups came together. There are roughly 40,000 people living in East Boston right now and Amazon is likely to bring around 50,000 employees.

●Hispanic
●White
●Black
●Asian
●Other

East Boston has 40,000 residents, according to the Statistical Atlas.
Amazon is expected to invest over $5 billion in construction to grow their second headquarters to include as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs.

If each circle represents 100 people, this is what East Boston and Amazon HQ2 might look like.

Here is a closer look at each population by race.

More than half of East Boston residents are Hispanic and only 34 percent are White.

While 48 percent of Amazon's employees are White and only 15 percent are Hispanic.

If the entire group of new Amazonions came to East Boston, it would dramatically change the diversity of the neighborhood. East Boston would become a predominantly White neighborhood. At least in the daytime.

Of course, not all of the new Amazon employees will choose to in East Boston.

This is what it would look like if of Amazon employees chose to reside in East Boston, as they did in Seattle.

Try other percentages to see different potential outcomes:



Even if 10 percent of Amazon employees decided to live in East Boston, they couldn’t erase the neighborhood’s existing diversity.

But not all of Amazon’s new employees would be external hires, some jobs could be filled by current Eastie residents. The natural question to follow is what does the racial diversity look like within Amazon's job structure? Take a look at the chart below to find the answer.



Visualizing Eastie is a project of the Information Design and Visualization program at Northeastern University. © 2018