Visualizing Residential Vacancy by Length of Vacancy

Abstract

The United States Postal Service (USPS) collects counts of occupied and vacant residential and business addresses across the United States. The counts of vacant addresses are broken down by length of vacancy. This information is useful for researchers, planners, analysts, and others concerned with vacancy issues in making informed decisions to address them. For example, communities affected by recent vacancy may require different approaches and solutions than communities affected by long-term vacancy. I demonstrate how to use a modified box plot with swarm plot, paired with a micromap, to visualize ratios of different lengths of residential vacancy compared with total residential vacancy. I developed visualizations at the census tract level for the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA) on a quarterly basis from the first quarter of 2012 until the first quarter of 2017.