When we factored race in though, a different picture emerged. Strong minority communities were 25 percent less likely to have a branch than similar white tracts. Bankers were beside themselves to explain. The Press relied on the following databases, many of them purchased from commercial vendors. This allowed us to pinpoint on a mapping program every bank in the state for the last 10 years.
Some locations are inaccurate, making manual cleanup a time-consuming task.
This allowed us to compare the economic strengths of minority and majority tracts. The database is sold under the Conquest name. US Census information on CD-ROM, from Wessex. This puts a whole host of demographic information about each census tract within easy reach of anyone with a database program. FoxPro 2.6 for Windows to refine and prepare the data for analysis.