PolicyMap News

New for March on PolicyMap!

Look for the following new and updated datasets on PolicyMap!

NEW! Foreclosure Filings for Chicago Metro Area: As a part of our Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) work with Mercy Portfolio Services and the City of Chicago, we license foreclosure filing and auction data on a monthly basis from Record Information Services (RIS). The data is cleaned and processed by the Woodstock Institute, then loaded into PolicyMap for viewing in interactive maps. The data gives Mercy and the City of Chicago an abundance of information about foreclosure filings and auctions taking place in Chicago and Kane County each month. While we are not allowed to make the data available to the public for free, we have been given permission by RIS to share this data with PolicyMap subscribers. If you’d like to consider becoming a subscriber, but want to take a look at this data first, just sign up for our 7-day free trial. If you already have an account and would like to try a 7-day trial, please send your request to info@policymap.com.

You’ll find this data under the Local Foreclosures tab in the Add Sites menu.

This type of data is invaluable to NSP grantees nationwide as they consider where to acquire properties for their program or simply stay on top of an ever-changing housing market. If you are an NSP grantee and have foreclosure or other data you’d like us to similarly load for you, please contact us.

FBI Crime Data for 2008: The latest data released by the FBI has been added to PolicyMap, so you can see crime rates for cities and counties across the nation for 2005 through 2008. Data includes counts and rates of aggravated assaults, burglary, motor vehicle thefts, murder, rape and robbery for cities and counties across the nation. Coverage gets better each year, so check it out. This data is available for free under the Neighborhood Conditions tab.

New Demographic Indicators: PolicyMap subscribers can now access two additional indicators from Claritas, Inc: Population Density and Sex. These indicators can provide you with information about the density of an area’s population and its male/female composition.

You can find these under the Demographics tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

UPDATED! Home Sale Statistics: Home sale statistics from 2001 through Q3 2009 are now available for neighborhoods across the nation from PolicyMap. This data, supplied by Boxwood Means, Inc., is available to subscribers under the Real Estate Data tab. Create thematic maps, trend charts or generate reports analyzing home sale activity over time in the communities you care about.

UPDATED! Building Permits: Annual and monthly building permit data is available dating back to 2000 and updated monthly. This data, from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Residential Construction Branch Data, includes both the number of buildings and units for which building permits were issued, their total dollar value and change over time. Data is available for counties and MSAs around the nation.

You’ll find this data for free in PolicyMap under the Real Estate Conditions tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

Premium Subscriber Data: Remember to check out the datasets available under Premium Subscriber data. As organizations subscribe to PolicyMap and send us their data for upload, some choose to make their data available to the public. You can click on anything under Premium Subscriber Data in the Add Sites menu to see what is available. When you add a set of points, remember that you have the ability to click on a point to see underlying information and filter to see a subset of points. Have questions? Just call us at (866) 923-6277 or send us an email.

UPDATED! Monthly Unemployment from the BLS: Check out the latest December 2009 and January 2010 employment, unemployment, and labor force data for states, counties, metropolitan areas, and many cities, by place of residence. This data is updated monthly on PolicyMap and is available back through the year 2000 under the Jobs and Economy tab. To add a fully interactive map of unemployment across the country, check out our free PolicyMap widget.

NEWS

More free widgets! You can now embed interactive maps of health data into your own website using our free widget. Descriptions of the data available and links to the code for you to embed can be found here. Remember, our widget – the iframe code that allows you to quickly and easily embed interactive maps on your own website – can be customized on your end. You can change the color of the map, change a boundary name and much more. Read our blog posting to learn how.

The beautiful part about these widgets is that as soon as new data is available, PolicyMap updates it for www.policymap.com and the new data is automatically updated in your widget.

Library Licenses: Know of a library that would be interested in a PolicyMap subscription for its students and professors? Just have them contact us.

• Assemble a Region: You can select and save a specific set of geographies, like block groups, census tracts or counties to create a custom region. The geographies can be next to each other to create a specific neighborhood – or across town if your region is not contiguous.
• Create a Radius Region: You can create a radius region by either typing in an address or clicking on the map to specify the center, select the size of the radius and save the radius for future work.

Also new is the ability to layer more than one custom region onto your map!

Go to our custom region tutorial to learn more about how to use these new custom region features or contact our help desk at any time.

NEW! Cars and How People Get to Work: Data on how people get to work, how long it takes them to get there and how many cars the average household owns is now available. Data from 2000 comes from the Census and is available to the public. Current year estimates and 5-year projections are available to subscribers from Claritas, Inc. You can see this data at a national level, but more importantly you can drill down into the neighborhoods you care about to see information at a block group or census tract level.

Find this data in the Commute to Work section under the Neighborhood Conditions tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

NEW! Obesity, Diabetes, and Food Related Assistance: You’ll find some of the health statistics recently made available by the USDA through its Food Environment Atlas, mapped and available in tables on PolicyMap. This data includes statistics on obesity, diabetes and the availability of assistance under the SNAP (formerly Food Stamps) or WIC programs.

You can find this data for free under the Health tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

UPDATED! Monthly Unemployment from the BLS: Check out the latest November and December 2009 employment, unemployment, and labor force data for states, counties, metropolitan areas, and many cities, by place of residence. This data is updated monthly on PolicyMap and is available as far back as 2000…

Find this data for free under the Jobs & Economy tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

Features and Tools

The Widget: Already we’ve improved our widget – the iframe code that allows you to quickly and easily embed interactive maps on your own website – by giving your visitors the ability to search for a location. This new Search feature allows your visitors to take the map to an address, census tract, zip code, city or county, congressional district, school district, MSA or other local political district quickly – and then overlay data onto the map. Our free widget – the national unemployment map – now comes with this search feature. The code to embed on your website is here and can be found, along with more information, on our blog.

<iframe src="http://www.policymap.com/widget.jsp?userid=892&wid=4&height=500&i=9841103&btd=4&nomenus=true&search=true" width="100%" height="635px" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" vspace="0" hspace="0" name="PolicyMap"></iframe>

As soon as new data is available, we update it for www.policymap.com and for all subscribers’ widgets.

"Smart" Polygons: A number of subscribers send us data related to a particular community, not just an address. These can be investments a foundation is making in a neighborhood or areas being targeted for intervention through the NSP. We load these areas in as "polygons" so the area being served is outlined and clickable (just like an address) revealing what the subscriber is undertaking in that community. These polygons are now "smart," meaning a subscriber can generate a report for that area simply by clicking See Report in the info bubble.

Smart Polygons

Library Licenses: We are about to sign on our first University Library as a subscriber to PolicyMap! This subscription gives all authorized library users unlimited access to PolicyMap for their school and research work. If you know of library that might be interested, just have them contact us at pmap@policymap.com.

Home Sale Statistics: PolicyMap now contains home sale statistics through June 2009 (Qtr 2). This home sale data allows you to drill down into neighborhoods across the country and see how many homes sold and the median sales price for every quarter starting in 2007. Annual home sale data is also available as far back as 2000.

This data is only available to subscribers and can be found under the Real Estate Analysis tab on the Add Data Layer menu.

Monthly Unemployment from the BLS: Check out the latest October and November 2009 employment, unemployment, and labor force data for states, counties, metropolitan areas, and many cities, by place of residence. This data is updated monthly on PolicyMap and is available back through the year 2000.

Users can find this data for free under the Jobs and Economy tab in the Add Data Layer menu.

As soon as new data is available, PolicyMap updates it for www.policymap.com and for any widgets subscribers have on their own sites. The most recent updats include:

• 2008 HMDA mortgage origination calculations, initially created for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (under Mortgage Originations)
• Fair Market Rents from HUD for 2010 (under Owners & Renters)
• USPS Residential and Commercial Vacancy Data for the 3rd Quarter of 2009 (under Neighborhood Conditions)
• Food Stamps, just publicly released, for 2007 (under Money & Income)
• Qualified Census Tracts, Designated Development Areas, and GOZones for 2010 (under State & Local)
• Unemployment rates for September and preliminary numbers for October 2009 (under Jobs & Economy). And yes, the free unemployment widget is updated automatically, too!

In addition to data, TRF creates and makes available its data-based analyses. Two recently updated analyses are:

• “Loan to Income Leverage Ratio 2008″: This ratio of originated loan amount to applicant stated income for all mortgage loans reported in HMDA for 2008 is designed to help you understand where new homebuyers may have taken on more mortgage debt than they can afford. You can find this under the Mortgage Originations tab.
• Baltimore MVA 2008: TRF’s Policy Solutions cluster analysis of markets in the City of Baltimore has been updated and is now available in the State and Local tab.

Read more about these datasets in the coming days on our blog! And follow our blog series on Top-10s. You can create your own with PolicyMap’s ranking feature and find the top-10 for anything you’ve wondered about.

Much more new data and updates coming in January. Look for drive-time statistics, population density, election data and religious affiliation statistics.

The Widget! PolicyMap can help you power interactive maps on your own websites.

Library Licenses! University libraries can now take advantage of PolicyMap’s new library site license to offer students, staff and faculty unlimited access. Learn more.