The new mayor of Indianapolis, Joe Hogsett, has promised to build a database of blighted and vacant homes in Indianapolis.
Such an undertaking isn't unheard of: In recent years, Detroit has assembled an astonishingly comprehensive database that includes both photographic and coded data on the condition of every property in the city. See the CityLab article from 2014 for some of the maps that came out of this project.
Wondering what similar maps would look like for Indianapolis, I began looking through the data the city publishes related to vacancies and blight. There's not a lot there. Most of what I've found is related to code violations and complaints about high weeds and grass (which has its own abbreviation, "HWG"). Instead, I decided to just take block-level data from the 2010 decennial census and make a map that highlights areas with high densities of vacant housing units as of 2010.
The result is the dot density map below, where every single housing unit in the entire metro area is represented by its very own gray or orange dot*. Click here to open an interactive version of the map.
According to the census data, nearly 52,000 (12%) of the 418,000 housing units in Marion County were vacant in 2010. Of the 757,000 housing units in the metro area, 77,000 (10%) were found to be vacant.
Some technical notes on how I made this:
I created the files with the coordinates of the dots in R. After matching the block-level data to the census block shapefiles, I used the dotsinpolys function in the maptools package for R to randomly "sprinkle" the dots within the blocks. Then I used these coordinate files with TileMill to create the map tiles. Finally, I built the map itself with theMapbox javascript library (which itself is built on top of the Leaflet library) leaflet javascript library.
* The dots do not represent actual locations of housing units. Rather, they represent the number of housing units within each census block.
Edit (Feb 29, 2016): After this post I learned about Renew Indianapolis, the city's land bank which lists vacant and abandoned homes that have been transferred to Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development for potential buyers. This land bank represents a fraction of vacant homes in the city. Edit (March 13, 2016): Due to the number of views this got, Mapbox wants money to continue hosting my map tiles, so I've stopped using them.
Such an undertaking isn't unheard of: In recent years, Detroit has assembled an astonishingly comprehensive database that includes both photographic and coded data on the condition of every property in the city. See the CityLab article from 2014 for some of the maps that came out of this project.
Wondering what similar maps would look like for Indianapolis, I began looking through the data the city publishes related to vacancies and blight. There's not a lot there. Most of what I've found is related to code violations and complaints about high weeds and grass (which has its own abbreviation, "HWG"). Instead, I decided to just take block-level data from the 2010 decennial census and make a map that highlights areas with high densities of vacant housing units as of 2010.
The result is the dot density map below, where every single housing unit in the entire metro area is represented by its very own gray or orange dot*. Click here to open an interactive version of the map.
According to the census data, nearly 52,000 (12%) of the 418,000 housing units in Marion County were vacant in 2010. Of the 757,000 housing units in the metro area, 77,000 (10%) were found to be vacant.
Some technical notes on how I made this:
I created the files with the coordinates of the dots in R. After matching the block-level data to the census block shapefiles, I used the dotsinpolys function in the maptools package for R to randomly "sprinkle" the dots within the blocks. Then I used these coordinate files with TileMill to create the map tiles. Finally, I built the map itself with the
* The dots do not represent actual locations of housing units. Rather, they represent the number of housing units within each census block.
Edit (Feb 29, 2016): After this post I learned about Renew Indianapolis, the city's land bank which lists vacant and abandoned homes that have been transferred to Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development for potential buyers. This land bank represents a fraction of vacant homes in the city. Edit (March 13, 2016): Due to the number of views this got, Mapbox wants money to continue hosting my map tiles, so I've stopped using them.
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ReplyDeleteWould love to see varied vacant/occupied colors, like green for vacant and red for occupied. I think the contrast might make a bigger statement, vs the grey/yellow that kind of blend together.
ReplyDeleteThis is an amazing project. I wonder, have you thought about doing this for other cities, as well?
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