If you’re anything like me and enjoy looking at colorful maps which show large amounts of data in an easily digestible format, you’ll probably want to spend a fair amount of time parsing through the information provided in the New York Times’ “Every City, Every Block” feature. The interactive maps utilize five-year results from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which was released yesterday.

The interactivity is pretty much off the charts: there’s just so much information from the ACS that it’s nearly impossible to not become totally immersed. I’ve spent a little bit of time poking around, and found myself focusing on Washington’s incredible income disparity — here’s a quick sampling of highlights (or lowlights, as it is) which I’ve located on the maps so far:

• Just one example of the disparity: Median household income in census tract 15, which encompasses Chevy Chase and other affluent residential neighborhoods in upper Northwest, was $180,536, an increase of 30 percent over 2000. Meanwhile, median income in census tract 9102, which encompasses a large parcel of land between New York Avenue and Rhode Island Avenue in Northeast, was only $23,580 — a decrease of 34 percent.
• In Wards 7 and 8, there isn’t a single census tract in which less than 17 percent of households earn less than $30,000 per year. If you remove Census tract 9901 from consideration, the tract with the lowest percentage of households which earn under $30,000 in those two wards is 7603 — where nearly three of ten households make less than that amount.
• It’s probably just easier for you to look at the map to the above right to consider the percentage of households in any tract which pull in a household income of $200,000 or more. (Darker shades of green, if you haven’t figured it out, represent a higher number of households making that much.)

Obviously, this doesn’t even come close to scratching the surface of the data which is outlined in the maps the Times put together — I haven’t even gotten to the maps involving race, education or housing yet! I highly recommend heading over to the maps and checking it all out for yourself.