Making the Chicago Case for 15-minute Cities

The West and South sides of Chicago are home to some of the city’s most marginalized families, but also to some of the most deeply rooted communities, rich in culture and history.

But lack of investment in those neighborhoods means residents spend a large part of their daily life on a bus, bike or in a car shopping, paying bills and picking up their kids from care—all of it far from home. What might take a middle-class family with two cars an hour to run a few errands takes a low-income family four.

The costs are more than just lost time. It is expensive to be poor. When there are no affordable banking services in the neighborhood, families resort to costlier options such as check-cashing services. When there are no full-service grocery stores, they must pay more for less nutritious foods. When there’s no access to health clinics, residents end up using the emergency room for primary care.

That’s one reason the 15-Minute City movement is taking root. A healthy city, urban planners contend, is one where residents can find everything they need within a 15-minute walk from home. However, new data analysis from the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth indicates that residents on Chicago’s South and West sides are far from a 15-minute neighborhood.

In August 2020, over 30 volunteers came together for a Datathon at the Mastercard Chicago office to bring Mastercard’s unique data insights to the Invest South West communities in Chicago.

Using a combination of Mastercard’s data expertise and aggregated, anonymized transactional data, Mastercard’s Center for Inclusive Growth worked together with Data Fellow, Michelle Thompson and New America to develop data insights that would be impactful to disadvantaged communities in the City of Chicago. This article from the Mastercard blog shares insights from the 2020 Mastercard datathon about how family spending patterns on the West and South sides can help inform the development of 15-minute neighborhoods.