New York City Equitable Zoning

This dataset gives NYC Equitable Zoning (NYCEZ), which is a zoning system of NYC derived from census tracts and ACS data with 574 zones.

The zoning system considers data reliability of 3 minority population groups: population below poverty level, seniors above 67, and long commuters (>1 hour). Underserved groups of interest include the population above 67 years old (seniors), the population under the poverty level, the population with a commute time above one hour, and the population with one or more disabilities. Only the former three groups are considered in zoning, since populations disabilities are already highly correlated with the others.

The 2168 census tracts in NYC are aggregated to improve the data reliability of the 3 minority groups. Average margin of error (MOE) percentages at census tract level of population above 67, population below poverty level, and population with a commute time above 1 hour are 15.22%, 50.07%, and 18.23%, respectively. After aggregation to the NYC Equitable Zones, MOE percentages become 8.02%, 12.33%, and 9.88%, respectively. Equitable Zones shown in Figure 5 simultaneously reduces the average MOE percentage of demographic data by 48% for seniors, 75% for low-income population, and 46% for long commuters.

Files include:

NYC census tracts shapefile with mapping to NYCEZ (“zoning” column)

equitable_zoning_new_dissol.cpg

equitable_zoning_new_dissol.dbf

equitable_zoning_new_dissol.prj

equitable_zoning_new_dissol.sbn

equitable_zoning_new_dissol.sbx

equitable_zoning_new_dissol.shp

equitable_zoning_new_dissol.shx

NYCEZ shapefile

equitable_zoning_new.cpg

equitable_zoning_new.dbf

equitable_zoning_new.prj

equitable_zoning_new.shp

equitable_zoning_new.shx

Data used for NYCEZ generation (from American Community Survey (ACS))

Number of seniors in each census tract (with 80 variance replicate estimates)

data_elderly.csv

Number of disabled in each census tract (with 80 variance replicate estimates)

data_disabled.csv

Number of long commuters in each census tract (with 80 variance replicate estimates)

data_commute>1h.csv

Number of low incomers in each census tract (with 80 variance replicate estimates)

data_below_poverty.csv

Variance replicate estimates from ACS are used to MOE aggregation. Information can be found here: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/variance-tables.html