Analysis

Using our data, three economic indicators were calculated in order to help better describe the state of the properties in a given community area, and also the state of the community area more generally.

The first of these indicators measures the affordability of the area. The affordability metric uses the median price of properties in the community area and the median income of people who live there to calculate the percentage of people who can afford to live in that neighborhood.

Another indicator measures the housing stability of the community area, or the amount of housing turnover in the neighborhood, since an area with a large number of transactions indicates that the neighborhood may be unstable. The housing stability indicator takes the overall number of transactions in the area and the the number of low value transactions (any property that sells for less than $20,000) to create a scale from 0-100 that represents the stability of the area, with 100 being completely stable.

The indicator for vacancy looks at both sources of vacancy data, one from the USPS and one from 311 data, to determine the number of vacant properties in a community area. Both of these data sources have some issues with how they are collected The 311 data only covers Chicago and is biased towards neighborhoods with a population that frequently reports issues through the 311 system and high crime areas since the Chicago Police Department report any vacant buildings that are the site of a crime. The vacancy data from the USPS of higher quality, but it is only collected quarterly and we could only obtain the number of vacancies at the census tract level. Taken together, both sources give a good idea of the number of vacancies within Chicago.