New York has one of the most competitive real estate markets on the planet.
However, not all areas of the city have experienced the same growth and affluence as others.
This visualization serves to illustrate this by displaying the median residential sales of the various neighborhoods across the city, highlighting the disparity of sales values.
This contrast can be observed by examining the median sales values in neighborhoods such as Williamsburg and Park Slope,
and then comparing them to less affluent areas such as East New York and Canarsie.
Brooklyn as a borough, illustrates this contrast the most, with Manhattan showing less of a contrast.
Another interesting observation made possible by visualizing the data by neighborhood is the decreasing gradient of sale value as distance
increases from Manhattan. With a few exceptions in western Brooklyn and Queens, median sales values plummet steadily as you travel north of
the city from Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, and then Riverdale. To the east this is observed by neighborhoods to the east and south
of Prospect Park.
Process
After acceptance of the project proposal the first thing I did was to tackle acquisition of the Zillow Research data.
Having used this before I was familiar with obtaining it and then used Excel to quickly trim the data down to just what was needed
for the 2015 data by New York City neighborhood. I attempted an automated script early on, but with missing and sporadic data values
I kept getting incomplete sets and found it faster parsing out the incomplete 2015 data manually in order to provide a more complete data
set.
Obtaining a GeoJSON feature file specifically for NYC neighborhoods was next, this proved more difficult than originally anticipated.
I initially tried using Zillow’s neighborhood shapefile with an “ogr2ogr” converter which would transform it into a GeoJSON file compatible
with D3 – this proved unsuccessful. After pounding the pavement some more I found what I needed over at Civic Dashboards.
Data Sources
Data is sourced from primarily two locations: the raw median sales data is sourced from Zillow’s Public research set,
and the GeoJSON map is sourced from catalog.opendata.city.