Understanding the Role of Urban Amenities in Growing Neighbourhood Polarization Within 20 Major US Cities Using Housing Transactions Big Data

Keywords: GIS, Big Data, polarization, neighborhoods, urban geography, visualization
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

United States cities have demonstrated a deepening polarization between their neighborhoods resulting in economic segregation and unequal opportunities for people living within them. Most of the discourse on this topic however is focused on demonstrating and defining the issue at hand rather than examining the factors feeding this economic polarization of the urban landscape. This paper examines the factors reinforcing neighborhood polarization by analyzing the effects of urban amenities on the clustering of rich and poor communities across the United States. We examine 20 major US cities from 2004 to 2015 to expose spatial patterns of neighborhood polarization. Using almost two million arms-length housing transaction records, we calculate the neighborhood value of each house’s location using a hedonic model to isolate exogenous and endogenous amenity effects from its structural characteristics. We then generate continuous pricing surfaces using ordinary kriging with an exponential variogram to visualize spatial patterns of neighborhood value. Leveraging raster algebra, we highlight how neighborhood value has changed throughout time. We measure the degree of polarization through the use of Moran’s I. Combining these visualizations and statistical measures, we classify these cities based on common trending in the results and city attributes, such as monocentric vs decentralized vs polycentric, and growing vs declining. This research advances the understanding of the heterogenous way that exogenous and endogenous urban amenities affect neighborhood polarization in cities across the US.