PolicyMap Around the Web: November 2018

The most rewarding part of working at PolicyMap is seeing how our data and maps are being used out in the world. Here are some of the places PolicyMap has been used or mentioned over the past few months. Have you used PolicyMap, and have a project to share? Let us know!

Storybench

Northeastern University’s digital storytelling publication Storybench just published an interview with PolicyMap founder and President Maggie McCullough. She discusses why PolicyMap was created, the process of creating it, what kind of people use PolicyMap, and what’s to come in PolicyMap’s future.

 

North Carolina Housing Finance Agency

PolicyMap subscriber North Carolina Housing Finance Agency has a new interactive map on their site, showing housing-related data for the state, such as the average age of the housing stock, how many residents are cost burdened, population change, and foreclosure information. The data can be used to understand the need for affordable housing throughout the state.

 

Institute for New Economic Thinking

A new paper by Thomas Ferguson, Benjamin Page, Jacob Rothschild, Arturo Chang, and Jie Chen, “The Economic and Social Roots of Populist Rebellion: Support for Donald Trump in 2016”, looks at voting patterns in the 2016 election using congressional district-level data from PolicyMap and other sources, finding that economic issues had a larger impact in the election than social factors such as race or gender.

 

Urban Institute

In a research report on using housing code enforcement to improve public health, the Urban Institute and PolicyMap subscriber Neighborhood Preservation, Inc., uses PolicyMap to look at rates of asthma, diabetes, and lack of health insurance coverage around Memphis.

 

The Food Trust

In their report, “Closing the Snap Gap: Recommendations to Prevent Hunger and Strengthen SNAP in Houston”, The Food Trust found that in Harris County, Texas, about 315,000 people live in areas without easy access to fresh food retailers, according to Reinvestment Fund’s Limited Supermarket Access Analysis, on PolicyMap.

 

The Divided City

Urban practitioner and scholar Alan Mallach just authored a new book, “The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America”, looking at urban renewal efforts over the past two decades in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore. Using maps and data from PolicyMap, Mallach discusses strategies for creating equality and opportunity while reviving cities.

 

University of Minnesota

In their paper, “Home: A Place Families Can Afford, Workforce Housing Assessment”, researchers at the University of Minnesota looked into how Northfield, Minnesota, might fulfill the need to increase housing stock. The paper uses vacancy and other housing data available at PolicyMap to compare Northfield to other communities in Minnesota.

 

Medical Reference Services Quarterly

Yunting Fu, Information Services Librarian at the College of Allied Health Sciences, East Carolina University, wrote a paper for Medical Reference Services Quarterly, “PolicyMap: Mapping Social Determinants of Health”. In the paper, Fu looks into how PolicyMap can be used to access demographic and health-related data, such as chronic disease incidence, health care provider locations, food access, mass transit, and other social determinants of health.

 

University of Massachusetts Boston

In his course, “Mayor’s Symposium: Housing in a Changing City”, professor Michael P. Johnson Jr. introduces students to “project-based and community-engaged learning through the subject of urban housing policy”. Working the mayor’s office, the students analyze ways to stabilize and revitalize neighborhoods in Boston by increasing access to affordable housing. PolicyMap is a resource listed in the syllabus.

 

University of Michigan

Master of Public Health candidates Brianne Brenneman and Amelia Schmid used maps from PolicyMap to visualize the segregation in Cincinnati housing in their paper, “Food Access in Cincinnati, Ohio”.

 

Pontiac Parks Accessibility Project (Oakland University, Rochester, MI)

For his paper, “Accessible Exercise: Improving Parks and Recreation in the City of Pontiac”, student Corey Rowe used PolicyMap to identify regions of Pontaic, Michigan, where a significant portion of residents reported a disability, and to find areas where residents reported having no vehicles in their household. They created a map with this data to show which parks served disable residents, and see that every city district in Pontiac was served by at least one park.