Don’t Do the Crime If You Can’t Spend Some Time
County and city level crime data from the FBI is an oddly complicated dataset to process. From ASCII art to a lack of identifiers, there are a number of obstacles that need to be overcome to display the data on a map.
Joining Data to a List of Addresses
If you have a list of addresses, it can be incredibly useful to find underlying geographic data for these addresses. This data might be neighborhood demographic or income conditions, or government eligibility indicators, like NMTC or CRA eligibility. This can be done easily in PolicyMap.
What’s New in Mortgage Lending: An Analysis of 2016 HMDA Data
Data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) provides a deep insight into trends in lending from demographics to loan types to government insurance to down payments. Here are a few insights from looking at the latest data, from 2016.
UPDATED: Announcing the PolicyMap Community Health Report
Place matters when it comes to health. Where someone is born and where they live can be the most significant factors in determining their overall level of well-being. To help users understand the health landscapes of their communities, PolicyMap has created a new Community Health report.
Mapchats Webinar: Guiding Principles for Opportunity Zones
Opportunity Zones are a new tax incentive program that could attract billions in private capital to struggling areas. We talked to Jeremy Nowak, a prominent figure in urban policy and impact investment, about what impact the program is likely to have and what strategies might be used to maximize its effect.
Putting 134 Colors on the Foreign-Born Map
Trying to show the predominant country of birth for every geography in the country seemed simple enough, until we ran into the challenge of coming up with map colors for 134 different countries.
Census and Citizenship: Questions and Answers
The Census Bureau just announced that they will be adding a question to the 2020 Census asking whether the respondent is a U.S. citizen. This question has led to a lot of controversy, so here’s a Q&A on the story, along with other news about the decennial census.
Finding Immigrant Neighborhoods with Foreign-Born Data
The patchwork quilt of American immigrant groups really stands out on a map. The Census ACS has data on foreign-born populations for over a hundred and twenty different countries of birth, as well as for continents and global regions.
FEMA Flood Maps on PolicyMap
FEMA flood maps from the NFHL show the risk of a flood in a given location. It shows the risk of 100-year and 500-year floods. This data can now be accessed by PolicyMap subscribers.