Black & Hispanic Priority

Overview map

All four layers below the legend are toggleable. Hover any tract or marker for details and rank. Open in a new tab for full-screen view.

Lens C — Tract priority

Every census tract in the district was scored under three buckets. Score is driven by absolute Hispanic or Black population added 2018→2023 (a small-base filter — minimum 500 Hispanic and 200 Black residents — keeps noise out of the rankings). Distance to the nearest Hispanic anchor modulates the Hispanic buckets in opposite directions (farther for plants, closer for ministry expansion). The Black bucket has no anchor term — the historic Freedman’s-era footprint of the 11 Black UMCs no longer tracks where the Black population is growing.

Scores are percentile rank within bucket (0–100). They’re sort keys, not magnitudes — “100” means top of that bucket; cross-bucket comparison isn’t meaningful (Hispanic plants and Black plants don’t use the same formula and shouldn’t share a scale).

Bucket 1 — Hispanic plants (25 tracts)

Tracts with substantial Hispanic-population gains, distant from any Hispanic anchor.

Bucket 2 — Hispanic ministry expansion (25 tracts)

Tracts with substantial Hispanic-population gains, near an existing Hispanic anchor — candidates for expanding what's already there, not planting.

Bucket 3 — Black plants (25 tracts)

Tracts gaining Black population, ranked by absolute gain. No anchor term — the legacy footprint of the 11 Black UMCs doesn’t reflect where the Black population is growing today.

Lens D — Hispanic-ministry siting at existing Anglo UMCs

Same demographic substrate, different unit of analysis. For each Anglo North-District UMC, we measure the Hispanic population in a buffer around the church (2 miles inside Austin/San Marcos/Kyle/Buda, 5 miles elsewhere) and score by buffer Hispanic pop × Hispanic added pop ÷ (1 + miles to nearest Hispanic anchor). Manchaca and Bethany are tagged already doing this — they appear in the ranking as exemplars rather than recommendations, and serve as a sanity check on the model.

Method notes

• Source for ethnicity tags: District Superintendent, May 2026. Tagged against the 201-church Rio Texas audit; only North District (69 churches) is in scope here.
• Population data is ACS 5-year estimates (2018→2023). Hispanic counts use Census table B03002 (Hispanic-origin, all races); Black counts use B02001 (Black-or-African-American alone, all ethnicities).
• Tracts that span the 2010→2020 boundary redraw are apportioned via the Census Bureau relationship file before computing growth.
• Distance to nearest anchor is straight-line, computed in EPSG:5070 (NAD83 Conus Albers) for accuracy across the district footprint.
• The minimum-current-population gates (500 Hispanic, 200 Black) suppress small-base growth-rate noise — without them, tracts with 14 Black residents that were 3 in 2018 read as “400,000% growth” and crowd out real signals.