“Powelton Village has every reason to top the list of Philadelphia’s most desirable neighborhoods. Let’s start with location. As the first residential area west of Center City, it is a brisk 15-minute walk from downtown. It boasts some of the best transit connections in town, a rich stock of Italianate villas and Victorian twins, and postcard views of the skyline. Geographically, it occupies the same urban niche as Georgetown and Cambridge.”

And yet, she writes, it’s not nearly as desirable as Georgetown and Cambridge. The reason, she writes, is that Powelton Village is dominated by renter-occupied housing, mostly transient college students, who don’t maintain the houses or develop the community. A look at PolicyMap shows that she’s absolutely right—the rental rate in Powelton is 91%:


Georgetown shows significantly lower rental rates, ranging from 32% to only as high as 57%:

Saffron writes that the solution to this issue is better zoning. You can read the whole article here.

“Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that’s a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake… I… drink… your… milkshake! I drink it up!”
-There Will Be Blood

However, when it comes to home heating, that oil goes through a straw acroooooooss the country, and it’s the Northeast that drinks the oil:


So to your list of Northeastern stereotypes, you can add something new: Northeasterners use oil or kerosene to heat their homes more than anywhere else in the country.

Here are the top ten oil producers (by employment) and consumers (by household) in the United States:

If you’re interested in replicating any of the maps, below, you simply need to sign in to PolicyMap with your subscriber login, load on the “National Center for Charitable Statistics Nonprofit Locations” from the Nonprofit Locations menu option in the Add Sites menu, and filter it by the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities Group: Civil Rights, Social Action, Advocacy.

Below is a map of the civil rights-related organizations in the San Diego, CA area, as well some of the information available for each nonprofit:

And here is a map of downtown Chicago’s Civil Rights organizations:

And here is a map of downtown Chicago’s Civil Rights organizations:

For more information about these data, please see our Data Directory entry here.

We are ringing in the New Year with new and updated data on PolicyMap and celebrating the innovative ways in which new clients are bringing data rich maps to their own websites!

Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA)

The most recent mortgage data from HMDA is now available for you, for free, on PolicyMap. As one of the first indicators we began providing our users, this update now allows you to explore how markets have changed between 2004 and 2010 – or any time period in between. Data is available down to the census tract giving you a good, on-the-ground picture of the markets in which you work.

HMDA’s definition of “high cost” and “prime” loans, however, changed in 2010 making it inaccurate to compare these two particular indicators to previous time periods. As a result, we give you information for 2004 through 3rd quarter 2009 and then provide you with a separate look at 2010 for these two indicators.

You can check it out by going to PolicyMap and clicking on the Lending Activity tab along the top of the map. Zoom in to your area of interest, click to an area to see its actual values or use the Table feature to make comparative charts. Subscribers can also access an updated Mortgage Report allowing them to draw a custom region and pull out mortgage information for a particular area of interest. Check out this and all reports by signing up for a 7-day free trial.

Area Median Income (AMI) for 2012: HUD’s latest release of AMI data for the nation is now available. You’ll find it for free under the Money and Income tab. The data, released annually by HUD, is available for County Subdivisions across the nation back through 2008.

National Center for Educational Statistics: Check out the Education tab to find a significant amount of new data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), relating to elementary and secondary education in public school districts. All new data is available for school districts and includes:

• Pupil/Teacher Ratio
• Graduation Rate
• Total Revenue from Local, State, and Federal Sources
• Total Expenditures per Pupil

Check out our blog for more information on these datasets and other updates including monthly unemployment and bankruptcy rates.

In the News!

American Public Media’s “MarketPlace” hosts unemployment widgets powered by PolicyMap. The widgets, full of unemployment data for states and metros, are updated monthly bringing their readers the most current unemployment data available. December 2011

Citi Community Development (CCD) launches a new data mapping tool powered by PolicyMap. CCD’s PolicyMap Data Tool provides Citi’s community partners and stakeholders with an interactive map showing demographic data, housing statistics, education trends and information about jobs and the economy. The information is provided in an easily-accessible and user-friendly way. November 2011

The Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), with support from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and in partnership with the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment, the National League of Cities and the New America Foundation, launches a new-and-improved Bank On website and selects PolicyMap as the platform to power its interactive online maps. October 2011

The Florida Public Health Institute and the Community Health Network launches an interactive mapping tool to clearly identify areas that are at risk of poor health due to a lack of access to health care facilities. The new interactive map, powered by PolicyMap, highlights clinics and healthcare facilities by location and cross references them with several demographic and other indicators to tell the “visual” story about the county’s health needs and resources. October 2011

For More Information

Interested in having data rich maps on your own website? Just contact us. Remember, the data warehoused in PolicyMap is accessible to you not just through the www.policymap.com application but can be pushed out to your own website through widgets or the Data API. Already have Google or Bing maps on your website? Need to make them more valuable to your users by adding relevant data? Just give us a call at (866) 924-MAPS or info@policymap.com.

Look for more data and feature updates soon and happy 2012!

One of the more unique features we created last year was requested by a user like yourself. The Report Chooser was created to let users decide what geography a report uses to aggregated data by. We wrote an in-depth description of the feature here (Report Chooser) and now have updated our PolicyMap Primer.

Download the PolicyMap Primer

If you have questions about the new Report Chooser feature or would like to learn more about PolicyMap, contact us at info@policymap.com or join one of our free training sessions.

And finally, looking at government-insured loans, which came to make up more than half of the mortgage lending activity in 2009 due to the collapse of the subprime market, we can see the rise in 2009, accompanied by the fall in 2010.

Though the volume of lending has significantly decreased, the Federal Reserve Bank says that loan denial rates remained approximately the same in 2009. This indicates that demand is indeed down, regardless of approval rates.

With PolicyMap, you can see how these trends are reflected in your area of interest. Users can access HMDA data in the “Lending Activity” tab on PolicyMap.

Stay tuned in the next few weeks for our release of the 2010 Federal Reserve Bank’s customized HMDA calculations that include multifamily loans, home improvement loans, and loans by borrower and tract income.

This month the creative assets mapping team took our project to local stakeholders here in Philadelphia for feedback and discussion. As we begin to coalesce around the tool’s data, design, and features, we decided it was critical to get input early on from the tool’s community of potential users.

Our conversations were dynamic, with ideas ranging from generating Philly neighborhood arts and culture profiles to using the tool to locate new creative firms or target potential cultural audiences. In addition to use cases, we identified many of the datasets that users want to have at their fingertips, and even located sources for much of this information. We are particularly excited about the willingness of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists from the City to make data available to us to share with the public through our creative assets mapping platform.

Altogether we hosted four user-group sessions on November 3rd and 4th, each centered around a distinct type of user: artistic and creative programming, tourism and marketing opportunities through cultural assets, real-estate and economic development applications, and cultural funders and capacity building. Each of the sessions was unique in its focus, but many common themes and ideas permeated all the sessions including: using the tool to facilitate relationship building and data sharing; using it to evaluate the impact of policies and programs over time; and using the tool to help make better decisions either through advocacy or in investment decisions.

Most of all, we are thrilled at the level of anticipation that greeted our presentation of the data we have already and the analytical opportunities afforded by interactive online mapping. As we move now into a more intensive development phase of the tool, we will continue to seek input from these voices as well as Philadelphia’s broader cultural and creative community.

HUD is required by law to set annual income limits for participation in federally assisted housing programs such as Section 8. These income limits are determined by calculating a median family income for areas all across the country, and then adjusting the median based on the number of people in the household. Different federal programs have different requirements, so PolicyMap displays various different income thresholds – ranging from 30% of area median income to 120% of area median income. You can find all this data under the Money & Income tab.

Recent updates to this dataset include:

• In FY2010, HUD announced an end to its “hold harmless” policy. Until recently, income limits values could not be reduced, only increased over time or held steady. Now the income limits are able to increase or decrease up to 5% per year.
• In FY2011, HUD began to calculate income limits based on American Community Survey (ACS) data.
• In FY2012, the change is in the release date. Responding to requests to make this data available earlier, HUD will be releasing Income Limits in December for the following year. Because of the early release, AMI for 2012 is still based ACS 2005-2009 data.

Meanwhile, PolicyMap is gearing up for our analysis and processing of the new ACS 2006-2010 5-year estimates data. We’ll be upgrading to the new 2010 Census boundaries as well. Keep a lookout in the new year!

Feel free to contact us with any questions you may have about these data. We’ve spent a good amount of time learning about how and why the Census took this approach, and we’re happy to discuss it with you.