The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and the National Coalition for the Homeless named Los Angeles the No. 1 “Meanest City” out of 273 nationwide in a recent report. L.A. owes this dubious distinction to the controversial “Safer Cities Initiative” that puts policing over housing, criminalizing thousands of the city’s unfortunates.

The City can place this new negative accolade on its mantel next to earlier awards by academic researchers as the most economically unequal city in the country and the homeless capital of the nation.

Inequality, it seems, is a key condition that makes legislating “meanness” possible because the farther apart people are on the economic ladder, the more difficult it is for those on the top ladder to identify with those on the bottom.

Here is a link to a great NY Times article about this travesty by Barbara Ehrenreich, “Is It a Crime to be Poor?” and another from the L.A. Daily News, “L.A. Criticized as ‘Meanest City’ in America.”

Considerable genius has been applied of late to the business of making facts come alive in maps in ways that allow us to visualize inequality and inspire new ways of thinking about change.

Here are three of Dr. Pop’s favorites:

1. Million Dollar Blocks by the Justice Mapping Center

This amazing effort maps the largely undiscussed fact that our prisons contain people who are from discrete, specific neighborhoods. The maps illustrate the blocks in our cities and neighborhoods where at least a million dollars is spent to incarcerate people. The point, according to Eric Cadora of the Justice Mapping Center,” is to produce the conversations necessary to figure out what it would take to break the cycle of prison at the street level.” For example, what choices could and would neighborhoods make if they were give the millions of dollars that it cost to incarcerate their members? Read More…