Neighborhood Change

Problem Statement

As the population of New York City continues to rise—one forecast by the NYC Department of Planning would have the city reach 9 million residents before 2040—the hundreds of neighborhoods that make up the five boroughs will necessarily change too. An influx of new residents coupled with broader economic changes will mean new businesses and job types, changing income and education levels, and shifts in the ethnic and racial composition of neighborhoods.

The challenge of this project is to use available data to get a better qualitative and quantitative understanding of this process in New York City over the past 5-15 years with particular attention to those neighborhoods that are changing most quickly. How many neighborhoods are undergoing rapid change? Where are they? What kind of businesses are the first to open up or shutter their doors in a gentrifying neighborhood? Does a significant change in number and kinds of retail businesses in a neighborhood follow immediately after a significant increase in income levels or is there a time lag? Are small changes now predictive of larger changes in the future? Answering these sorts of questions with data-driven methods will serve as a first step towards a more detailed understanding of the dynamics of neighborhood change in NYC.

Provided Data

• The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program and in particular the LODES dataset provides Residence Area and Workplace Area Characteristics at the census block level:
  • http://lehd.ces.census.gov/
• The American Community Survey provides information about income, rent, education and many other attributes of people living in the US. Subsets of the data corresponding to NYC can be conveniently downloaded from:
  • http://www.socialexplorer.com/
• NYC Administrative regions (Census Blocks & Tracks)
  • http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/districts_download_metadata.shtml#cbt