The Neighborhood Package

An R package with various functions to study neighborhood dynamics.

Install

devtools::install_github("timathomas/neighborhood", ref = "main")

Neighborhood Racial Typologies Function

The Neighborhood Racial Typologies function is a descriptive, categorical tool to help identify racial and ethnic divides within a region (e.g. city, county, state, etc.). Traditional segregation measures, such as the disimilarity index, provide a single measure for a large geographical area. This descripitve function is useful for mapping tract level, small area (e.g. neighborhood level) divisions between ethnic and racial groups.

This function is based off this paper:
Hall, Matthew, Kyle Crowder, and Amy Spring. 2015. “Neighborhood Foreclosures, Racial/Ethnic Transitions, and Residential Segregation.” American Sociological Review 80:526–549.

1. nt: Neighborhood Racial Typologies
2. ntdf: create the dataframe for nt
3. ntcheck: identify counts that can be concatenated

Example

You can view an interactive map using this function here.

Baltimore_nt <- ntdf(state = "MD", county = "Baltimore City", geometry = TRUE)
cal <- ntdf(state = "CA")
ny <- ntdf(state = "NY")
glimpse(Baltimore_nt)

ps_nt <- ntdf(state = "WA", county = c("Snohomish", "King", "Pierce"), geometry = TRUE)


# Check to see if there are duplicate tract assumptions. 
Baltimore_nt %>% 
st_set_geometry(NULL) %>% 
mutate(val = 1) %>%
spread(NeighType, val, fill = 0) %>% 
mutate_at(vars(`All Black`:`White-Shared`), list(as.numeric)) %>% 
select(13:ncol(.)) %>% 
mutate(rowsum = rowSums(.)) %>% 
filter(rowsum > 1) %>% 
glimpse()

Concatenation

After running the above code, look at the counts and consider concatenating and/or reducing outlying (small count) neighborhood types.

ntcheck(Baltimore_nt)
ntcheck(cal)
ntcheck(ny)
ntcheck(ps_nt)

The nt_conc field concatenates the NeighType field automatically and may satisfy most people.