NewerHoods

New York City a city of neighborhoods. These neighborhoods have gone through a lot of changes over the years, but our definitions of neighborhoods have remained mostly the same.

NewerHoods is a RShiny Application that allows you to reimagine New York City neighborhoods using open data and machine learning. This web app lets you select specific characteristics and visualize clusters of these qualities on a map of New York City, find similar neighborhoods, and compare them against existing geographic divisions.

NewerHoods uses multiple open datasets to generate characteristics related to housing, crime, and noise levels to begin with. These characteristics/features are evaluated at the census tract-level, and are then clustered to find pockets of tracts with homogenous characteristics. These are what we call NewerHoods.

Directory Structure

newerhoods/clean_data contains just the cleaned/transformed data sets used directly by the Shiny App.

/src contains all the code to merge and clean the data sets, extract features from it, and cluster the features.

/newerhoods contains the code for the RShiny WebApp.

Running the App

First, the R environment needs to be set up with all the necessary packages.

source("newerhoods/setup.R")

The project uses several APIs from loading data using the APIs developed by NYC Developer Portal and Mapbox for the underlying map visualization in the Shiny App. Getting all of these token are free by signing up here and here. Follow the instructions in the settings.R file which can be found in the newerhoods folder and source the local version of the file to get all the tokens stored in the environment. You would have to source this settings file everytime you start a new session.

Note: If you intend to run only the RShiny App, filling in just the MapBox API Token would suffice.

source("newerhoods/settings_local.R")

Run the App

library(shiny)
runApp("newerhoods")

Data Sources

1. NYC Annualized Property Sales Data (2012-2017)
2. MapPLUTO (18v1)
3. Geoclient API v1.1
4. Property Assessment Roll Archives
5. NYPD Complaint Data Historic
6. 311 Service Requests from 2010 to Present

References

1. ClustGeo: an R package for hierarchical clustering with spatial constraints
2. Making Neighborhoods - Understanding New York City Transitions 2000-2010

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details