A Nation of Neighborhoods: A Quantitative Understanding of US Neighborhoods and Metropolitan Areas

Author/Creator

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2020-01-01

Department

Geography and Environmental Systems

Program

Geography and Environmental Systems

Citation of Original Publication

Rights

Access limited to the UMBC community. Item may possibly be obtained via Interlibrary Loan through a local library, pending author/copyright holder's permission.
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu

Abstract

While pedestrian-oriented urban places have been identified as beneficial in a number of fields, including public health and climate change, there is a shortage of quantitative studies of such places covering large geographic areas. This study characterizes neighborhoods in US metropolitan areas based on built environment and density variables derived from the American Community Survey, Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Origin-Destination Employment Statistics, National Land Cover Database, and OpenStreetMaps datasets. Neighborhoods and metropolitan areas as a whole are typologized based on this data using k-means analysis. The resulting neighborhood and metro area types are analyzed in connection with metro area history, the distributions of residents by race and jobs by income, and qualitative perceptions of density. Finally, the implications of these results for public transportation are discussed, and it is shown that transit commute share in US metro areas is strongly correlated with the number of jobs in dense central business districts.