Housing by the Numbers

by Henry Woodbury
Filed under: Visual Explanation

Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com), directs attention to a new site that culls public government data to map neighborhoods, cities, and states by real-estate values, demographics, income and other indices:

PolicyMap was created by The Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia-based organization that finances urban development. The group found that it needed mapping tools to help it choose neighborhoods for investment, and also to help investors track their projects in the context of neighborhood characteristics rather than through unenlightening pie charts. [my emphasis]

The result is a Google-Maps-like tool that easily maps geographicaly-based information using mostly public data (additional data sets and projections of public data are availble to subscribers). For example, the sample below shows household income in our home city of Providence, Rhode Island (USA) in some of the neighborhoods around Brown University.

Click here to read this article by Henry Woodbury on Dynamic Diagrams on August 6th, 2008.