Author: Avonlea Fisher
Blog Post: Mapping Black-Owned Businesses with GeoPy and Folium, published in Towards Data Science
The aim of this project is to develop a public, interactive map of Black-owned businesses in and around Boston, Massachusetts. The map is intended for use by Boston residents and visitors seeking to support Black-owned businesses to help narrow the racial wealth gap and strengthen local economies. This project may also serve as a resource for individuals and organizations interested in developing similar maps for other geographic regions.
Business names and addresses included in this project were accessed via a crowd-sourced spreadsheet of Black-owned businesses in and around Boston. The store, restaurant, and services sheets were downloaded as CSV files and read into separate pandas data frames. A restaurant-specific map was previously developed with data from this document, and can be accessed on the restaurant sheet.
The data frames contained either a column with full addresses or a combination of street, city, and zipcode columns whose contents could be concatenated into full addresses. After formatting the full address columns as needed, geographic coordinates were obtained for new columns using GeoPy. Data for the name, address, website, and coordinates of businesses were used with Folium to design the map.
Different businesses have been assigned custom Font Awesome icons on the map that correspond to the services they offer. Currently, only some of the most common business categories have been included in the map. Some businesses offer a variety of services that can not be captured in a single icon. In these cases, the icon will show just one category of services offered at its location. The business categories that have so far been included in the map and their corresponding icons are shown in the table below.
| Restaurants | Stores | Architects | Cleaning and Waste Management |
Computer Software, Programming, Training and Support |
Education, Advocacy, Shelter and Care Nonprofits |
Home Building, Improvement and Demolition |
Health Care Services and Consultants |
Marketing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The interactive map includes both confirmed and unconfirmed Black-owned businesses in the Greater Boston Area from the above spreadsheet. Businesses with missing addresses whose geographic coordinates could not be obtained with GeoPy have not yet been added to the map.
- Further research and outreach is neccessary to verify that every marker on the map corresponds to a Black-owned business, and that each marker appropriately represents the types of services offered by the business.
- Accurate address data should be obtained for every business with a physical location, as businesses with missing address data were excluded in the first stage of this project.
- The data used for the map is non-exhaustive, so efforts to contribute new and/or unlisted Black-owned businesses to the list should continue.
Please feel free to contact me at fisheravonlea@gmail.com or via my LinkedIn profile with any comments, suggestions or inquiries regarding this project.
Black Lives Matter is working to deveop a website, Backing Black Business, that will include Black-owned businesses across the United States. If you are a Black business owner or know someone who is, owners can submit information about their business via this form.