Neighborhood Economic Indicators

[Ryan-Koch]

After meeting with Uptown United I was left with the impression that a significant question they're typically wrestling with is 'how are our local businesses doing?'

To that end, I'd like to start exploring ways we can start to answer that question. Some sub-questions that come to mind are:

• Can we infer foot traffic trends (this is counted manually right now)?
• What variables can we look into in order to assess economic health?
  • Are there data sources available to this end?
  • Can we infer consumer spending/consumption?
• Is there data that Uptown United has that isn't currently part of the open data infrastructure that we can work with them to access?

I'm thinking that these paths eventually lead to some sort of map overlay that we can use to inform Uptown United and other groups interested in this information. Depending on the information being used, perhaps we could design this in a way that's some what geographically portable.

In any event this is just a start. I'd like to brainstorm a bit and see where this goes during project night.

[Ryan-Koch]

Resources I'm finding as I'm googling around:

• The City of Madison has an interesting tool that does something similar: https://madison.apl.wisc.edu/
• Census economic indicator datasets: https://www.census.gov/economic-indicators/
• Statistical Atlas does this type of mapping, also focused on census data: https://statisticalatlas.com/neighborhood/Illinois/Chicago/Uptown/Overview
• Perhaps we can use 311 data in our analysis: http://311api.cityofchicago.org/ | https://data.cityofchicago.org/browse?category=Service+Requests
• Might be possible to FOIA/access small business administration loan data to use as an indicator.
  • Are there other organizations that collect and/or give access to this sort of data